Overall Learnings

One of the goals of the TLC³ project was to share knowledge and learnings. What follows is a summary the project learnings based on final reports and on discussions among representatives of the sites, the Lawson Foundation, the National Advisory Committee, and the HDI team.

Balancing accountability and creativity

This project started with a commitment of stable, multi-year funding from the Lawson Foundation. It was "stable" funding in that the sites did not have to worry about losing financial support while they worked through implementation challenges. The funding was given on the basis of a site project proposal that had to fit within the criteria and goals of TLC³. But within those parameters, the sites were allowed to change implementation plans if they were not working well. It was assumed that the sites would evolve, and learning was considered a valuable part of the process.

Accountability was maintained through annual reporting, site visits, and attendance at the annual symposia. The funders chose not to impose rigid accountability mechanisms that would limit creativity. For example, some funders require projects to follow original proposals to the letter (whether or not plans are working out as expected) and to demonstrate that interim objectives have been met. Failure to comply on either count can be grounds for reduction or withdrawal of funding.

There was general consensus among TLC³ participants about the importance of stable, multi-year funding in allowing the local projects to blossom. Site projects were allowed to take risks, even to make mistakes, knowing they had time to recover and still make a success of their project.

Another positive factor that was identified was the level of personal interest shown by representatives of the Lawson Foundation. They avoided micro-managing the project, but made a point of getting to know the people involved at the sites and the national advisors personally. They made themselves available to the HDI management team for consultation at any time. This involvement gave them a deeper appreciation of the strengths and challenges of the project than they might otherwise have gained, had they chosen to exercise more remote control.

Connie Gardiner, who was President of the Board of the Foundation throughout the TLC³ period, said the experience with this project affirmed the wisdom of balancing "accountability with trust" and acting as a "supportive rather than an adversarial" partner with grant recipients. She said the Foundation learned that grant recipients can feel isolated and that it is a good idea to spend time getting to know and understand them.

Nurturing Site Projects

There was general agreement among the sites that the freedom to be creative and take risks allowed TLC³ to "take off" at the community level. They attributed that freedom and flexibility not only to the Foundation's approach to funding, but also to the management style of the HDI team.

The HDI team framed its management style as being consistent with good parenting. The same factors that make for good parenting of young children - appropriate stimulation, supportive structures, and a secure, reflective, non-intrusive but reliably present relationship - also make for good management of competent and creative people and organizations. "I don't think we expressed our approach in quite those terms in the beginning of this project," said Dr. Cohen. "But I think it is an appropriate way to describe what we were aiming for - a nurturing of the optimal development of community site projects."

Some of the structure created by the HDI team included: clear criteria for participation in TLC³ and a set of realistic goals, reasonable requirements for reporting on programs and budgets, and the necessity of evaluation. Appropriate stimulation was an important purpose of the annual symposia, which included the sites, the national advisors and the Lawson Foundation. Important concepts were explored at these events, including what sustainability meant for the TLC³ sites. The symposia also afforded opportunities for relationship-building among participants from different disciplines and different parts of the country.

The annual site visits provided another form of stimulation. Dr. Cohen saw the visits as opportunities for the sites to reflect on what they were doing and talk about problems in a non-threatening atmosphere of inquiry. The visits were a form of accountability. The sites were sent an outline of questions in advance so that they could think about and discuss their responses within their own group before the HDI team arrived. The visits also helped to build and sustain relationships between the management team and the sites. They helped to demonstrate that while HDI respected the sites' ability to solve their own problems, the team was interested in the sites' challenges and achievements and was available to give advice or support, as needed or requested.

"There is no substitute for direct, personal contact," said Dr. Cohen. "Seeing the programs in operation and sitting down with the people involved for in-depth discussions gave me an understanding of the sites I would not have had, viewing them from an office in Toronto. The site visits served several purposes - reflection, accountability, management and support. After these visits, our Evaluation Coordinator would write up what we heard, and I would debrief our team at HDI to let them know if there was some response needed from us or if there was some situation we should be keeping an eye on."

The relationship between the HDI team and the sites was based in mutual respect. "You tend to trust the people you know," said Freda Martin. "We got to know each other. We trusted them and they trusted us." Dr. Martin called attention to "parallel" relationships of trust, between the Lawson Foundation and the Hincks-Dellcrest team, between the HDI team and the sites, and ultimately between the sites and the families they served.

Sue Formosa, director of the Vancouver project, defined the cascading effect from a site perspective: "They were very respectful. We said: what do you want us to do? And they said to us: what do you think will work for you? Their approach gave us confidence, and then we turned around and did the same for the families. We truly turned the program over to the parents. We saw our role as guiding them to discovery of their relationship with their child. It worked wonderfully."

Both Dr. Cohen and Dr. Martin noted that, in retrospect, the HDI management style worked well with program development, but slightly less well with the evaluation. The local project coordinators had less experience with evaluation, and some of them would have liked more direction and hands-on assistance. However, the HDI team could not do the evaluation for them. Since they were all so different and so geographically dispersed, it was simply not possible to hand out a template for everyone to use. "They tended to adopt fairly elaborate evaluation plans," said Dr. Cohen. "One of the things that might have helped early on was to emphasize that the evaluation plans should be simple."

Some Implementation Factors

Selecting site organizations with an existing administrative structure and a capacity for community development was seen as a good way to implement best practices for children and families quickly. This approach allowed TLC³ to maximize the available financial resources by contributing to program enrichment and enhancement, rather than investing in building a new organization. The host organizations had enough experience to be confident introducing new programs, seeking out new partners, managing a local project, identifying problems and solving them locally, and sharing what they learned.

The site organizations identified the importance of time and planning to put in place quality programs that meet the needs of local communities. Being inclusive - whether you are talking about including parents in programs, finding out what programs work for the community, involving staff in changing practices, or bringing partners on side - takes a lot of time and effort.

Having a shared vision for the project and feeling part of a community of interest - people committed to improving children's life chances through early childhood development programs - helped to sustain the morale of local site teams through difficult periods in the implementation of their programs. It also inspired them to exceed their own expectations. It was recognized that both within the site teams and across the country, TLC³ stood for some shared principles, including:

• all families can benefit from help in nurturing their young children's development;
• parents should be encouraged to get involved in programs for their young children;
• programs should build on the strengths of parents and children; and
• programs must be sensitive to cultural, linguistic and community diversity.

Every site had some implementation challenges to overcome. Some lost key staff members. Community economic circumstances and government funding regimes changed over the TLC³ period, creating ripple effects on organizations. Having a local team that could work together and problem-solve was considered an important success factor in overcoming obstacles.

Building Bridges

There were different kinds of links developed through TLC³. Building bridges, particularly across traditional disciplinary divides, contributed to the project's success.

At the local sites, a variety of professionals with different expertise worked together on behalf of young children and their parents. Speech language pathologists, early childhood educators, preschool teachers, home visitors, librarians and other professionals all collaborated on TLC³ programs. The host TLC³ organizations developed new partnerships. In B.C., a spin-off of the partnerships created by the project led to the training of almost one thousand professionals in the Parent-Child Mother Goose Program. Bridges were also built at TLC³ sites between professionals and parents, and some parents were trained to cross over and become program leaders and facilitators.

At the local and national levels, links were encouraged between the academic community and the service provider community. Bridging the academe-community gap remains a challenge. Sites that encountered some difficulties finding a good fit with a researcher or evaluation consultant suggested that positive relationships are possible only if there is mutual respect, willingness to work as a team, and an appreciation of the complexity of measuring outcomes in the changing contexts of family and community life.

Where the relationships were a success, which was in most cases, they were not one-way, with researchers transferring their knowledge to the community. There was a knowledge exchange. The national advisors to TLC³ all talked about what they had learned from the sites and how impressed they were with the expertise and experience of the site participants. The advisors also said they learned from each other. They identified a culture of knowledge-sharing that had been created through this project. The site participants said they learned not only from the advisors and the HDI team, but from each other as well.

Sustainability

It was important to consider the issue of sustainability relatively early in the process. There was a certain amount of stress created when sustainability was raised around the mid-point of TLC³, but it prompted site teams to start thinking about what sustainability would look like. Some formed special committees to examine options for the future.

Sustainability could be interpreted in different ways. In one sense, gains achieved through TLC³ were sustained through training of professionals and parents and changes in organizational cultures so that language and cognitive development strategies became part of a range of programs for young children. Sustainability was also achieved through new partnerships that had not existed before TLC³ came along.

It must be said, however, that the main strategy for sustainability was fundraising - finding a new local community funder or becoming part of a government-funded initiative. There were no easy solutions for the funding challenge. However, it helped that the TLC³ site organizations had earned credibility in their communities.

It should also be pointed out that some TLC³ activities were sustained at all the sites one year after the end of TLC³ funding, but that is no guarantee that the host organizations will not run into financial difficulties down the road. Unless or until there is a public system for early childhood development accessible to all families, voluntary sector community organizations like those in TLC³ that rely on private donors and/or insecure, time-limited, piecemeal government funding will continue to struggle to make ends meet.