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Salt Lake Collective Impact Partnership

A robust cross-sector initiative, for which the United Way of Salt Lake serves as the facilitating organization, has been established in the Salt Lake City, Utah area to improve outcomes for all residents, but particularly those in the most disadvantaged communities. Staff from participating Promise Partner organizations in this collective impact initiative are working together to improve health, economic well-being, and long-term stability and success for children and families. A key strategy is engaging the entire community to support children in reaching important milestones throughout their academic experience, starting with kindergarten readiness. REL West is helping to build the capacity of the United Way team and their partners to leverage research evidence, better make decisions with local data, and employ an improvement science approach to engage in action planning and resource allocation in a continuous improvement process.

Partnership Objectives

The primary goal of the Salt Lake Collective Impact (SLCI) Partnership is to increase the use of data and evidence to improve outcomes for children in the Salt Lake region, with a particular focus on those living in disadvantaged communities, specifically: kindergarten readiness, grade 3 reading proficiency, grade 8 math proficiency, on-time graduation and college and career readiness, and postsecondary attainment of a certificate or degree. SLCI will achieve this by assisting partners to:

  • Use data to understand regional context and student needs and develop improvement goals aligned with needs.
  • Identify high-leverage, research-based practices to support at-risk children and families.
  • Test interventions as part of a continuous improvement process that builds evidence about how to improve outcomes.

Resources

Projects

“We value using research and data in more real time than traditional evaluations allow. REL West’s responsiveness to our requests for research syntheses and other data analyses that take several weeks instead of several years has pushed us to be more data informed in all our strategies.”

—United Way of Salt Lake member

Partners

REL West’s primary partner is the United Way of Salt Lake. Promise Partners in this cross-sector collective impact initiative include six school districts, numerous municipalities and counties, the Utah State Board of Education, other state- and county-level human service agencies, and a range of businesses and community and philanthropic organizations.