5 things we have learned about sustaining change.
We have recently been doing a bit of digging to find out more about what happens after the 100-Day Challenge has finished. We know that during those 100 days, extraordinary things happen. We see people housed, backlogs in criminal justice systems overcome, and people accessing healthcare instead of lingering on a waiting list. We see teams innovate, ideate and collaborate to solve problems they'd felt stuck with. But what happens next? After the teams have stopped meeting regularly, stopped being coached and supported, and stopped driving toward an unreasonable yet exciting goal.
The key to answering that question lies in how 100-Day Challenges create innovative practices, not just in creating tangible innovations (e.g., a new technology, a new checklist, a new service) but, importantly, in how people work. When talking to our teams about the innovations they saw developing during their journey with us, they identified changes within their system, relationships, power dynamics, and ways of working as much as they did actual process, policy, or technological innovation.
Changing how people work is crucial to the sustainability of those successful changes where our teams met their goals and sustained the changes they had implemented. The picture that we're starting to build of what happens after the 100 days highlights five key elements that help maintain positive change:
Successful outcomes: Whatever the tangible product developed during the Challenge - it worked! Therefore, people keep it up as long as it is still relevant.
Improved ways of working: Increased collaboration, communication, and partnership have demonstrated huge improvements in work outcomes, as well as in work satisfaction.
Relevance: Whatever they were working on continued to be relevant to work priorities/policies
Leadership support: Leadership was involved in the 100-Day process, so they understand how it works. They, therefore, support the changes and the sustainability of those changes.
Permission to innovate: The challenge facilitated the generation, trial, and testing of new ideas. They trusted people to do this, and it worked, and now they continue that thinking.
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Sarah Robens becomes the new CEO of RE!NSTITUTE
We are delighted to share THIS REPORT which outlines how the 100-Day Challenge methodology has supported over 100 teams in 24 Mexican cities in 14 states in 7 years, as well as teams in the Dominican Republic and Honduras, to operationalize a people-centered approach to support the resolution of thousands of criminal cases, improve the quality of victims’ services, prevent femicides and build belief and momentum in change across Mexico and Latin America. We share people- driven innovations that have supported these results and how they were created. We analyze the lessons learned, including where we have fallen short and what the approach can teach us all about how we balance the inherent tension between the need for short-term results and the long hard journey to more accountable and fair justice systems everywhere.
A look back at our role as a founding partner of Nesta's People Power Results program as they reflect on 10 years of work.
Multi-sector approaches to homelessness response have been proven effective at more quickly and efficiently addressing homelessness in communities across the country. The research literature suggest ways of tackling the complexity of multi-sector coordination, and here we highlight examples from past 100-Day Challenges where communities have woven together expertise and services from their housing, healthcare, employment and education sectors.
Starting in October 2022 and ending in February 2023, Palm Beach County(PBC) Conducted a 100-Day Challenge® to both house and connect to service people experiencing homelessness and living with HIV.
That is our objective (to protect women and save lives). This innovation was born because we had a crisis on our hands of missing persons; It all started with a viral post through social media for a missing young woman.
Our 100-Day Challenges produce amazing ideas, innovations, and actions that create meaningful change, helping our teams achieve their unreasonable but believable goals. These innovations can be small or large, disruptive, or the start of a slight ripple; some are temporary, and others permanent. However they work, they all make things different, affecting systems in such a way that the changes we see as a result of a 100-Day Challenge last.
Treatment of wounds is a prerequisite for entering shelters and residential recovery programs. Most shelters have strict rules around substance use, which can be a barrier to entry for some; treating wounds is a first step toward recovery. Untreated wounds can lead to infection and, in extreme cases, amputation. This increases long-term health needs and can make permanent housing placement more difficult.
"Holy moly, it was, like, a pop!" - Christy McCammond, Program Manager at Merced County Human Services Agency
As a part of our journey to make equity a central part of what we do and an actionable part of our internal and external policies and practices, we hope to be transparent and share highlights of what we’ve learned and unlearned. We will be the first to own that this is a journey without a reachable destination, and we humbly acknowledge how far we still have to go but share these lessons in the hope that they will be helpful to others on their own equity journeys.
Catalyzing frontline staff to create successful, innovative solutions to complex challenges is a positive step in itself. But when those innovations are taken and adopted in a different area, the impacts are massively increased, and the possibility of wide-scale, systemic change starts to become a reality. This is what happened with one of the innovations generated through RE!NSTITUTE's 100-Day Challenge methodology.
Rapid Results Institute has now become RE!NSTITUTE, still offering the same impactful methodologies and partnerships.
Bringing together four California communities to discover new pathways to helping vulnerable populations move toward safe and stable housing.
“People deserve a seat at the table they’ll be discussed at.” – Sean Whitten, RE!NSTITUTE CEO
