Policy and Practice | June 2022

president‘smemo By Tracy Wareing Evans

Shifting Power to People to Unlock the Assets of Families and Communities

I n this column, I share the second part of my own reflections on what struc tural power is and what it means to system leaders aiming to center com munities in delivery of their agency mission. It is at the heart of the theme of this month’s issue: Shifting Power to People and Communities: What It Takes to Drive System Change. A key to achieving this objective is shifting how we work . For the power dynamics to change, we have to show up differently than we have before. It begins with building authentic rela tionships with community leaders, not just in the occasional stakeholder meeting, but by getting out into com munities at the table set by the people who live there. As we enter each community, we have to respect its uniqueness, seek to understand its history, and value its strengths. Focusing on the assets of family and community is not new to human services leaders. Nor is the concept of designing systems and service delivery from the perspective of the end user. And, yet, if we are being honest with ourselves, we knowwe are far from achieving a human-centered, commu

whole family approaches, trauma informed care, and social determinants of health, we have gained critical insights into how our institutions and systems work—both their potential for good, and the inherent and cumulative harmwe are obligated to undo. Put another way, the lens of these orienta tions has helped us, as human services leaders, see more clearly that people and communities are too often held in place by the very systems and structures we run. Our imperative is to learn how to use our positional power to remove that structural hold. This is at the heart of leadership today. We must resist the temptation to pass off relation ship-building and engagement with community stakeholders as “nice to

fosters authentic engagement in service of people. And, contextually, the public institutions in which we aim to do good are themselves a historical vehicle of systemic racism and structural bias. Recognizing our part in generating inequitable systems that stymie the inherent power of people is a first step to truly being able to shift structural power and help unlock the assets of families and communities. A colleague recently described what we need to do as “radically disrupting the current system” through a human-centered lens that “sees people as experts and whole.” This disruption is more than a shift in policy or practice, it requires a new mental model that shifts the paradigm of how government itself, including human services, interacts with people and communities. In many ways, leaders of public human services agencies have been on this path for some time. Through the applied lens of the Human Services Value Curve, as well as

See President’s Memo on page 24

nity-led system of care. We work within systems and structures

that are rules based and constrained, fueling a culture of compliance instead of one that

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June 2022 Policy&Practice