Some divides get treated as permanent and unchangeable - managed, not changed. The distance between law enforcement and the communities they serve can be one of them.

Project Resolve made a different bet. For six years and counting, nearly every law enforcement executive in the county - police chiefs, the Sheriff’s department, the District Attorney, Probation, CHP - has met regularly with an equal or greater number of community members. Not a listening session and not a press conference. It’s very much been the slow, unglamorous work of becoming people who can actually influence each other.

Six years in: relationships that have held across a historic divide, mindsets that moved on both sides of the table, and community voice - including young students - shaping decisions, from policy shifts to where school resource officers were placed.

There’s nothing linear about this one. And it ebbs and flows. But we’re all learning a lot and a real difference is being made in the process.

My work with a local school district began as a diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative. It became something more durable: a standing commitment to understanding what conditions in the system were helping students succeed, and what were quietly working against them.

I'm not an instructional expert and have never pretended to be. But I facilitated the conversations, coached the leaders, and ultimately supported a strengthening of how the district reads its own data and runs its own processes.

What's grown over six years of ongoing engagement isn't a program. It's a capacity. The district got better at diagnosing itself, and that outlasts any initiative. And students’ lives and their outcomes are beginning to be improved as a result.

Family Resource Centers are one of the few places positioned to reach and strengthen families in Stanislaus County.

United Way saw what that could add up to - and what was standing in the way. Several good agencies doing related work is not the same thing as a network, and the difference determines how many families you can actually reach and the impact you can have. They brought me in to help close that gap.

The work has two halves. One is convening the centers themselves: helping independent organizations build the trust and shared purpose that lets them act as one thing without giving up what makes each of them theirs. The other was behind the scenes: strengthening United Way's own capacity to weave and hold this network long after I'm gone.

That second half is the one I care about most. A network that depends on an outside facilitator isn't a network yet.

This network is still building, and United Way is still weaving.

Every public agency in the country is competing for the same shrinking pool of people willing to do this work. Probation feels it sharply - the job is demanding, the caseloads are real, and the people who are good at it have options.

Recruitment and retention usually get handled as an HR problem, which is why so many efforts stop at job postings and signing bonuses. The more useful question is why people stay: whether the work feels worth doing, whether someone is helping them get better at it, whether anyone noticed when they did. Those are leadership questions, and they're answerable.

We spent time together talking to staff and working with leaders beyond senior leadership tables to explore what conditions were truly supporting and impeding this department’s ability to find and keep the right people.

Through the use of Human Centered Design tools, the department now has a set of catalytic first bets to try. And a willingness to continue to test, learn, and adapt (that’s what I’m most excited about).