Chicago Public Schools wanted to redesign its Back to Our Future program as a tiered, integrated continuum of services with robust data systems.

Re-engaging disconnected youth with schools or career pathways is a key pillar of community violence prevention. For this reason, the Mayor’s Office and Chicago Public Schools wanted to redesign the Back to Our Future (B2OF) program, a district-led, evidence-informed effort to re-engage disconnected students at an elevated risk for gun violence involvement. 

The objective of the redesign is to identify and mitigate gaps in the multi-stakeholder program ecosystem that led to sub-optimal student experiences. The gaps span outreach and engagement, programmatic design, data collection systems, accountability structures, sustainable funding, dynamic needs assessment, organizational capacity building, and student re-integration protocols. The redesign process implements a structured and participatory workflow to identify existing problems and corresponding solutions collaboratively. Most importantly, the workflow is reproducible and well documented to ensure institutional continuity and seamless scaling-up.

NORC conducted a collaborative, multi-stakeholder design process using dynamic participatory systems mapping.

We supported the redesign of an existing district-wide program involving stakeholders across city government, state government, school district teams, philanthropic funders, community-based organizations, and city agencies providing supporting services. The objective of this redesign exercise was to make sure that stakeholders responsible for a certain scope of work in the program do not feel targeted when identifying shortcomings in the corresponding areas. Rather for all stakeholders to collectively focus on high quality student experiences. This was ensured through an inclusive project environment so that everybody’s concerns and interests were attended to. The participatory causal systems mapping approach helped in the redesign of the program so that its incentive and accountability structures were to avoid longterm conflicts in stakeholder interests and strategic priorities.  

First, we conducted a comprehensive review of successful re-engagement programs across the nation. Second, based on the review, we designed and conducted ‘participatory systems mapping’ workshops over multiple sessions so that the team focused on identifying the problem and exploring solutions, rather than focusing on what went wrong and assigning blame. To achieve this project culture, the workshops were designed to elicit the history of processes and decision-making pipelines that resulted in the observed shortcomings. For each observed shortcoming, we identified corresponding mitigation strategies based on two principles—seamless student experience and integrated data systems for robust monitoring and evaluation. The final redesign adhered to the principles and solutions identified in the participatory workshops. Thus, ensuring mutual respect to the interests of all concerned stakeholders, and the program’s objective of helping youth by re-engaging them with school or work.