2024 Cradle to Career Network Convening Award Winners: Interview with Bill Crim

Welcome to Together for Together for Change, the podcast where we explore the transformative power of systems change and civic infrastructure. 

In this episode, we interview a Cradle to Career Network member who won the Bill Henningsgaard Cradle to Career Champion Award at our 2024 Cradle to Career Network Convening and learn more about the work that won them this award.  

Learn more at StriveTogether.org.

Learn more at StriveTogether.org.

Transcript

Hosted by: Dr. Paris Woods, chief program officer at StriveTogether  

Featured guest: Bill Crim, CEO of United Way of Salt Lake and Utah's Promise

Full Transcript: 

00:19 Dr. Paris Woods, chief program officer at StriveTogether 

Hello, I'm Dr. Paris Woods, chief program officer at StriveTogether and your host for today's episode of Together for Change. In this mini season, we're celebrating the transformative work of leaders and community partnerships that are driving meaningful change across the country. Over three episodes, we're speaking with the winners of the 2024 Cradle to Career Network Convening awards. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Bill Crim, CEO of United Way of Salt Lake and Utah's Promise, which provides backbone support to Cradle to Career Network member Promise Partnership Utah. Bill has been honored with the 2024 Bill Henningsgaard Cradle to Career Champion Award. 

This award recognizes an individual who displays exceptional leadership and vision for ensuring that every child is supported on their path to economic mobility, demonstrates achievements in building cross-sector cradle-to-career partnerships, commits to data-driven collaboration and includes those closest to challenges in the decision-making process. Bill's leadership has been instrumental in shaping United Way of Salt Lake and Promise Partnership Utah into a model of collective impact, driving collaboration across the sectors that impact access to economic mobility and opportunity. 

Through his unwavering commitment to equity and innovation, he has inspired transformative work across the region, including efforts to ensure all children in South Salt Lake and West Mill Creek graduate high school and have their basic needs met by 2028. Bill, thank you for joining us today.  

To start, could you share a bit about your role at the United Way of Salt Lake and what receiving this award means to you, personally and professionally? 

02:11 Bill Crim, CEO of United Way of Salt Lake and Utah's Promise

Well, my role currently is that I'm the CEO of the United Way of Salt Lake and Utah's Promise, an active participant and supporter in of all things Promise Partnership Utah. Prior to my current role, I played, I would say, a more direct backbone role within our partnership, going back to the late 2000s and 2010/11/12 — that time period. 

Receiving the award has been humbling and a little uncomfortable. I guess I might say I feel like I have been surrounded at every moment of learning in this work by really smart people — really smart team members, really smart partners, really amazing community members, leaders. So I lean into that discomfort in the sense that to have the work of partnership recognized, and, you know, to be part of a team that champions work that I believe is the path to economic mobility and justice and equity means a lot. 

Personally, it's humbling. It means a lot, and I recognize that the recognition really is more about the team and the people and the partners that have joined me, or that I've joined on the journey over this past 15 or 20 years.

03:37 Dr. Paris Woods

Absolutely. Well, as I mentioned, United Way of Salt Lake and Promise Partnership Utah are widely recognized as models of collective impact and results-driven social change. This work involves breaking down silos and fostering deep collaboration across sectors to improve outcomes for kids and families. Bill, what do you believe has been the most critical factor in successfully championing this change?

04:06 Bill Crim

I'm going to quote a former Strive Partnership member to answer that question. At the beginning, we were doing partnership-like work, you know, in the early 2000s working with schools and school districts. And I wouldn't say that we were overcoming the silos at that time. You know, we had partnership work occurring. Kids were being helped, but we weren't moving big population-level outcomes. And I remember around the 2011 time, I remember someone saying that, in their view, the most critical factor was to have sufficient backbone infrastructure in a partnership. And he actually put it: “Backbone or go home.” Like, don't try to do the work without sufficient high-quality backbone infrastructure. 

And I think that has resonated then, and it resonates today, many years later, I think the world is filled with people trying to work together without sufficient backbone. And I think for a long time, people didn't, maybe really weren't rigorous about, “What does that mean?” What does it mean to have a good backbone infrastructure? And so I might expand on that quote to just recognize that being clear about what you're trying to achieve in a partnership with the specificity, I would say, of the StriveTogether Theory of Action™, I think that's a critical factor of the backbone infrastructure. The theory of action is —Without that, you know, I don't think you have clarity among partners about what are we doing together, and what are we trying to achieve, and what does it take to succeed? 

And then there's another level down. I've learned through association with so many other StriveTogether Network partners and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the whole Results Count framework, being clear about population-level results and having strong competency around Results-Based Accountability and Results-Based Facilitation. All of that, I think, rolls up into what I would consider the most critical factor in moving partnerships forward.

06:29 Dr. Paris Woods

What challenges did you encounter in sort of shifting to this collective impact model, and how did you overcome those?

06:36 Bill Crim

Well that might require, like, a whole ‘nother series of podcasts. I think those challenges are so numerous and so layered and deep, but I would say I think there are two big ones that come to mind, and I think we, collectively as a society, have created a world in which the incentives are to not collaborate, the incentives are to work alone. So even when you find great partners and great people, great organizations who want to work together, they are surrounded by a philanthropic and public sector funding system that disincentivizes the kind of collective alignment that StriveTogether and Promise Partnership Utah and all the network members seek. So that's maybe a big one. It's about funding and it's about incentives. 

And I think related to that, in some way, is that we've all been conditioned to not believe that large-scale change is possible. So I think a lack of belief gets in the way of really committing to partnership, a lack of sort of a history, maybe, of trying to change things, but not being able to get beyond the barriers that exist and the incentives to stay siloed, and then those incentives are still there. That just creates an enormous amount of inertia within the systems that want to change themselves when, you know, I would say everybody we work with in our school partnerships, all of our community partners, like everybody wants better results. Everybody wants greater equity. And depending on how long people have been part of these siloed systems and what types of incentives are currently playing out, I think it sort of dampens people's belief that you can do things differently. 

But I should say, while those challenges have been encountered, they're possible to overcome. In the first challenge around the incentives and the sort of competition for resources, which is the specific thing, siloed funding produces siloed behavior, and the way we have tried to overcome that over the years is just by really transparent communication and joint fundraising and difficult conversations about resources and credits and trying to build a shared identity as a partnership, I think is one thing we've tried. I think some communities have tried to pool resources at the philanthropic level. We've tried to align public sector resources, but I think you got to tackle the funding incentive to stay siloed and to compete. It has to be tackled head-on all the time, over and over again. 

We're currently trying here in Utah to bring the state's philanthropic leaders together to find alignment that gets at the root cause of the siloed funding and competition. We're early in that process, but I'm hopeful for that getting past the belief barrier of the challenge that like, “Is change really possible? Can we get to 100%? Is it possible to close equity gaps?” The way that I think that challenge gets overcome is starting with people who have enough belief that it can be done, and then proving that it can be done, showing success, showing progress, having a good communication strategy that shares credit for that progress and success, yeah, and then continuing to look for people that have the belief that change is possible, and working with them, building a bigger team, absolutely.

10:28 Dr. Paris Woods

And I'll say, you know, one of the greatest evidences of your success has been, you know, with regard to data sharing with school districts. So I'm curious, you know, by creating agreements and processes for securely sharing student data, your team has been able to measure progress and guide strategic decisions effectively. What advice do you have for other network members who are working to build a culture of data use and sharing with their partners and communities?

10:58 Bill Crim

Well, maybe I come back to the culture question and start with the trust. Like, how do you build trust in a partnership? And then how do you build a culture of data use? Because, or maybe I'll just make this observation, that I think at least school systems are awash in data. Like, there's no shortage of data and many nonprofits, I think, and public sector agencies — like data is abundant in the siloed world that we operate in, whether or not it's used in a disciplined way, I think is that's kind of a hit-and-miss thing. In my experience, some organizations really use have a culture of discipline data use, and some don't. 

To get to an environment of shared data use and shared discipline around that, I think you have to start with trust and just getting partners comfortable with like, “Why are we using data in a shared environment? What are we going to do with it?” One of the incentives I didn't mention before, but it's part of the disincentive to collaboration, comes around the historical practice, or the often current practice, of using data to point fingers and to shame people and to take credit for things that really should be shared contributions of many. All of that behavior disincentivizes collective action. It diminishes trust across partners that then don't share data. 

So I think you have to tackle the trust issue first and foremost, and hopefully you can find people that are willing to test a new way they're willing to sort of break past their present barriers and lack of trust. And that's what happened for us. We were lucky, quite frankly, that in our early part of the journey, we were able to have a conversation with a superintendent that had enough trust in us personally to engage in the conversation and to be real about what his concerns were when it came to data sharing, we had other partners early on that didn't have enough trust to have that conversation, so we couldn't start there, but we started with somebody who was willing to engage in the conversation. 

We were very slow. We tried to be very specific, and we made really strong commitments, focused on trust, focused on, let's all get comfortable about working with each other and not try to do too much, too fast. So fast-forward to a world in which data sharing is occurring. And one of the lessons that I think I've learned about building a culture of data use in our own organization is that it's easy to try to do too much and to just get overwhelmed by all of it. I think the better approach, which was not my initial approach, is to try to start small. Again, to “shrink the change” as the book “Switch” talks about and just to pick measures that are available, not get lost in the complexity of imperfect data or imperfect measures. Pick some adequate, meaningful measures and to build habits around those. 

And that's something that I still am working on within our own organization and within our partnership. But the idea that disciplined data use is actually a habit and has to be practiced and developed as a habit, so that it happens automatically, so that it's not a struggle, it's just what you do. And I, you know, I have not been perfect at that. I think that's a that's a hard habit to build, at least in my experience. So breaking it down into bite-size chunks, really. Really investing in the data capability of an organization. When we started to do this, you know, our organization had no data capability at all, and we had to start with, you know, just with an investment in having a person whose job it was to think about our data availability, to think about our data habits, too. And then we've continued to invest in that from just a team member perspective, a training perspective, and I think we have much more to do around that. It's sort of ironic that for as much data as exists in the world, the lack of discipline or the lack of a culture of data use is, I think, pretty widespread, at least in my experience.

15:40 Dr. Paris Woods 

Yeah, a lot of good advice. There you mentioned sort of having that first district where you already had a bit of trust built. I'm curious if there are any lessons you've learned in sort of fostering trust in newer relationships for folks who may not have that first district to rely on as they're building out these data partnerships.

16:00 Bill Crim

Yeah, where I think my experience, or our experience here might go with that question is still around shrinking the change. Like I can think of examples, you know, one's playing out right now in a relatively new partnership school district. And I think if we were trying to have a conversation about replicating the districtwide data-sharing agreement that we have with that first school district, I think we'd be nowhere. But what we're having is a conversation about data sharing around a specific initiative in a specific school, and that seems to be going well now. We're starting with people who we have a little bit of trust with and a relationship with, and that took some time to build before we were talking about data sharing, we were talking about, “Why would we work together at all? Why does a high school need support from the community? Why does a district need a partnership to be walking alongside it?” 

And that's taken about a year, I think, with a leader who was open to it. And that leader, I would say, has benefited from being able to look around the country and see other cradle-to-career partnerships and around Utah clearly. That leader can look, you know, a mile south, and see another district doing that, but it helps to see other StriveTogether Network members, and she's been in the room with folks, and I think it helped make what we were talking about more real to see it not just in South Salt Lake and the neighboring school district, but to see it happening in multiple places around the country. 

And anyway, so, having built that trust, then starting small, like we're not talking about changing some big process in the district that feels overwhelming. We're talking about a single school, a single strategy, but really rigorous student-level data sharing. And that progress is occurring, and I would imagine that as that gets, as we get further down that road, then the question of, well, what does a more robust data-sharing agreement look like? And as the success in that project becomes more visible, our expectation is the question about, how could we do this at other schools? How do we expand the work everywhere?

18:19 Dr. Paris Woods

Thank you. So Bill, your organization has set a bold goal to ensure 100% of kids in South Salt Lake and West Mill Creek graduate from high school and have their basic needs met by 2028. These Promise Communities are leading the way in demonstrating what's possible through place-based cradle-to-career strategies. Can you share how these Promise Communities are serving as a proof point for a broader statewide change?

18:49 Bill Crim

So one of the observations we've made over the last decade is that the results from Promise Partnership communities, there are eight of them, the schools and school districts are getting better results than comparable school districts. So broadly speaking, this way of working gives us hope, and it looks like it's working. It's not perfect, but it looks like it's working, but the change is slow. 

So you know, when you aggregate all of that, of that effort across multiple school districts and multiple and multiple communities, and you see, you know, 10 percentage point increases in reading proficiency over a decade. Well, that's hopeful. But does anybody look at that and say, like, that's clearly the way to go? Not in our case. And like, more importantly, far more importantly, do the kids who are not doing okay right now, like, can they wait for a world in which we slowly increase reading proficiency and graduation rates and school readiness… Like, kids can't wait for a change process that might take decades and shouldn't have to. 

So our thought was to look around among our eight Promise Communities and ask the question, “Do any of these communities have the infrastructure — the collective impact and civic infrastructure, the backbone infrastructure — to get to 100% faster? Have we built enough trust? Do we have the data-sharing agreements in place? We're going to going to pour gas on this and make it go faster — could we do that anywhere? Do we have the critical mass of accountable leaders who believe it's possible?”

And it turned out, we have two cities where the mayors have that belief and the urgency. We have a school district that, because of the infrastructure that's been built and the history of working together, their superintendent was willing to make that commitment. And because the superintendent was willing to make that commitment, and the mayors were willing to make that commitment, and the other partners were willing to make that commitment. Suddenly, principals in that school district in the feeder patterns of South Salt Lake and West Mill Creek, they were willing to think bigger. So the belief in what's possible grew dramatically when we asked ourselves, “Where is the infrastructure strongest to think big about changing things quickly or more quickly?” 

And again, we couldn't do this everywhere, and we're early in this process, but having a critical mass of accountable leaders who want to work together and who believe it can be done gave us the, I guess the belief in ourselves that we could shift our strategic plan around this. That we could say, like, let's keep building infrastructure everywhere, but let's design a strategy that that achieves a different kind of proof point. It's not a proof point that — it's not only a proof point that system transformation infrastructure can be built and can sustain itself and can exist. That's been done. But let's build a proof point that shows that when that system transformation infrastructure is present and when it is, you know, supported and utilized effectively with a clear objective, let's get to 100% let's get 100% type of proof point that shows the systems really, really doing their work faster and better on behalf of kids and with kids and families. 

And our belief is that that additional type of proof point will inspire other communities to want to pick up the pace or to get on the road. It's interesting that in these two communities, one was the original cradle-to-career partnership community of the Promise Partnership — it's Promise South Salt Lake, so they've been building this infrastructure for the longest period of time. It's really powerful what they've done. The other community, West Mill Creek, they are a brand-new city. That city hasn't even existed for very long, and the mayor didn't know anything about this kind of work when he was elected, but he was the kind of leader who welcomed the lesson of looking across his border, seeing what Promise Salt Lake was doing, and he embraced it quickly. 

And so it just interestingly, it doesn't take 10 years to build infrastructure if you have willing people, and you if you have a critical mass of those willing people, we think you can go pretty fast. So we have these two proof point communities that we're working with really intensely on those 100% goals, and then we have a number of other communities in our region, and hopefully soon throughout the state, who are building the infrastructure that would allow them to make a similar kind of solve the problem, 100% commitment in five years. And we think if we do those two things, if we focus on proving it can be done, building the bench of other communities and the infrastructure in other communities. And then the third strategy of changing systems along the way that surround these communities, through public policy advocacy, et cetera. We think in five years, we'll be working with many more proof point communities, and will create kind of a momentum that will pull more communities along.

24:23 Dr. Paris Woods 

Well, your career reflects a deep commitment to results in equity, so we should have no surprise that you're willing to set such ambitious goals on behalf of young people. From your early work in policy and community organizing to leading United Way of Salt Lake, you've gained a wealth of insights into leading change in complex systems. What lessons have you learned about leading change that could inspire other cradle-to-career leaders across the country?

24:52 Bill Crim 

Well, maybe one lesson that goes like from the earliest days of community organizing to now in terms of partnership, support and development, it's just that this change work is teamwork. It's not about a single leader. Leadership matters, but it's really about building a team of leaders who are all leading change, and that team has to involve the voices of community members and those impacted by broken systems. It has to include people with formal authority and power, and it has to include everybody in between. I think that is, maybe that's the main lesson. Like, change occurs when you can build the most comprehensive, effective team, committed clearly to results. I think you need both of those things, that it can't just be a committed team, you know, that doesn't have the specificity of a clear result and a clear analysis of key drivers, and like all of the work that StriveTogether does to help communities learn the mechanics of collective impact and the rigor of backbone work and partnership building, I think matters a lot. 

For a long part of my career, I did not understand the importance of that rigor. And when I thought about much of the first part of my career in terms of organizing a policy advocacy, I was operating under what I think is a flawed belief that if we could just get enough of the right policies past that we could, you know, achieve justice. And I think the policy work is absolutely essential, but I think you could get lots of really good policies passed, and the broken systems would stay the same, and so building the team of people within those systems that can change those systems from the inside. That was a lesson I learned from StriveTogether, from other partnerships around the country, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, yeah, I think you need you need both for sure.

27:14 Dr. Paris Woods

For sure. Well. Bill Crim, thank you for joining me today and sharing the story of your work at United Way of Salt Lake and Promise Partnership Utah. Your leadership exemplifies the values of collaboration, equity and results that the Bill Henningsgaard Cradle to Career Champion Award celebrates. 

For our listeners, stay connected with us by visiting StriveTogether.org for updates on our work and upcoming podcast episodes. You can learn more about United Way of Salt Lake and Promise Partnership Utah by visiting UW.org and PromisePartnership.org. Until next time this has been Together for Change.