Redefining Well-Being: How CPPR Partners with Communities to Help Families Thrive
What does “Well-being” mean? What does it mean for a family? For a community?
It may sound simple; however it is anything but, according to Center for Public Partnerships and Research (CPPR) associate director Kaela Byers and assistant director Meghan Cizek.
CPPR, a center within the Achievement and Assessment Institute (AAI) at the University of Kansas, is a research and capacity building center that seeks to improve the well-being of children, youth, and families. This is accomplished through partnerships with state and community agencies working to create the conditions supporting comprehensive child and family well-being. Through these partnerships CPPR aims to build organizational and community capacity promoting healthy growth and development, economic stability, learning and educational achievement, safe and healthy relationships, and thriving communities. To achieve the aim of realizing well-being for all, CPPR began with defining what well-being means.
“Well-being is actually really hard to define and is defined in many different ways in many spaces,” Cizek said. “In addition to understanding existing definitions and dimensions of well-being, we did quite a bit of community engagement asking that very question, trying to gather what does well-being mean to you? What does family well-being mean? What does community well-being mean? Because depending on who you ask, the answers can vary widely.”
Byers and Cizek said that the definition can be simplified to a state in which people’s needs are met so that individuals and communities as a whole can thrive. In partnership with lived experts, CPPR researchers categorized well-being into six domains informed by current research on well-being, social determinants of health, protective factors, and by family perspectives: Health, Financial, Family and Household, Environment, Community, and Learning and Development.
Services supporting child and family well-being vary widely and can have huge and lasting impacts on children and families and serve as protective factors against child maltreatment. Well-being services range from support for meeting basic needs (e.g., food pantry, utility assistance, emergency housing, health/mental health) to programs promoting growth and individual fulfillment (e.g., continuing education, counseling, social outlets).
Referencing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Byers and Cizek indicated that attending to foundational and basic needs first is essential, but it is also not the full picture. “Oftentimes when we say that if somebody can meet their needs, they've achieved well-being, but being able to meet your basic needs is the baseline. That’s not well-being, that is existence,” Byers said. “If you’re only meeting food and housing needs but not able to explore what interests you and your family and growing as a human, or vice versa, there’s more work to be done” Cizek added.
A common thread present across CPPR’s efforts to promote child and family well-being is collaboration with lived experts. Lived experts are the primary sources of understanding what a community needs. Lived experts have learned about navigating complex systems by dealing with the challenges in their own lives. Invaluable insight and direction from lived experts based in this earned wisdom ensures systems, services, and the policies and practices associated with them, align with what families need and want.
“All of our initiatives are really driven and guided by partners who have lived expertise with whichever system we're addressing and from the communities we are addressing them in. And they are full partners in decision making, directing assessment of needs, resulting solutions, and understanding of the impact of well-being efforts,” Byers said.
Working closely with lived experts is important because there are often knowledge gaps in the existing data, and because what happens on paper isn’t always what happens in practice. The people engaging with the services and programs in a community know best what it’s like and whether or not they improve their well-being.
Engaging with community members is also vital for building individual and community trust and confidence in the system, which promotes greater access for families. It is understandable that when an individual’s needs aren’t being met, or systems have caused historical harm, there could be some distrust of services and systems. Working together with lived experts helps repair trust and strengthen systems.
“A service or program is only going to work as well as people who are experiencing something believe it's going to work,” Cizek said. “Working with a community and asking people what they need rather than dictating solutions creates buy-in and a sense of ownership. Co-creation and meeting the needs of your own community is very powerful.”
This was evident when CPPR partnered with the Kansas Department for Children and Families to implement a community-designed system of family support in southeast Kansas aiming to offer up-stream support services so that family challenges can be addressed before they become crises.
In the beginning, when CPPR researchers were investigating the needs in the area, data showed poor child and family outcomes in the region, paired with scarce and declining resources, and low engagement with services.
“The first instinct may be to assume families do not care. And that's just simply not the case,” Byers said. “What we learned working with the community and talking to families is that recent regional disinvestment and economic decline, paired with the known historical harm of some systems and services in the region, and the stigma that comes with accessing support in close knit community, created barriers to family support that may otherwise be wanted and needed. Understanding the context of ‘toxic independence’ in an ‘opportunity desert’ where seeking help may result in shame or even harm shaped the approach of this initiative. Strategies were added to adapt and strengthen new and existing programs to ensure practices were trustworthy.”
Had the CPPR team not engaged with lived experts, those challenges would not have been addressed and new services introduced in the region might have gone unused despite need. For programs to be successful and help families thrive, listening to families in designing systems is essential.
“Really understanding the full spectrum of well-being and what families need in order to reach that ideal is important, and the services should be designed around that,” Cizek said. “We believe that everything we do should be community driven, community led, and community owned, and we apply that across everything so that each step of the way is guided by those closest to the system.”
