Meaningful Change through Coalition Building – Part 1
A Case Study on the Hennepin County Treatment Courts
Welcome to the first post in a three-part series on building coalition across differences to make way for meaningful change. How do we bridge big divides across professions, philosophies, politics, and priorities? We’re starting with a case study from me, then you’ll get a case study from CJ. Finally, we’ll interview each other about how we approach building coalitions, reaching actionable consensus, and maintaining engagement.
The project: developing a centralized triage process for the Hennepin County treatment courts
Minnesota’s Fourth Judicial District, also known as the Hennepin County District Court, began offering specialized treatment court programs in 1997 with Drug Court. Part of a national movement to meet underlying needs of those with substance use disorder (SUD) who have been charged with criminal offenses, this program recognizes that a defendant’s criminal behaviors may be intertwined with their substance use. In these instances, supporting the defendant’s recovery can be an effective way to prevent future criminal behavior. The model has evolved over time and is a joint effort of court administration, judges, probation officers, prosecutors, public defenders, and social workers. The interdisciplinary team is structured to simultaneously address risks and meet needs.
The Drug Court model proved effective at lowering recidivism and Hennepin County now has three other such courts: Criminal Mental Health Court, DWI Court, and Veterans Court. In all these programs, there is the recognition that someone’s social, medical, and behavioral needs influence their criminal behavior. Traditional risk assessments place them at high-risk of recidivism but addressing those underlying needs has been shown to be an effective way to reduce the risk of re-offense.
The challenge: subjective decision-making created inconsistencies
Some defendants presented at court with complex needs and were eligible for multiple programs. Each court is structured differently to best meet the needs of their specific population, with different lengths of involvement and different requirements for participants. The district court observed that defendants and their public defenders pursued programs based on a subjective assessment of which was most appealing or doable, rather than an objective assessment of which would best meet their needs.
Additionally, prosecutors must agree to let a defendant participate in treatment court rather than going through the traditional court process. This resulted in more subjective decision-making and inequities in who was allowed to participate. Sometimes the specific treatment court was selected via negotiation between the prosecutor and public defender, similar to plea bargaining, again without an objective assessment of which program was best suited to address the participant’s underlying needs.
The task that came to me and a colleague was to lead the interdisciplinary treatment courts team, plus decision-makers from each of the stakeholders, in developing a centralized triage process for all four treatment court programs. The core requirements included putting the decision about which court was the right fit into the hands of experts in need and risk (social workers and probation officers) rather than attorneys (prosecutors, public defenders, and judges) and addressing the inconsistencies and inequities in who was allowed to participate by reducing the amount of subjective decision-making. Additionally, the group needed to right-size the treatment courts in relation to each other and shift resources to courts with more participants.
The solution: coalition building
One of the challenges with making change in the criminal legal system is that there is no one with authority over all the stakeholders, and some of those stakeholders are literally paid to disagree with one another in court. That is by design. To promote fairness, it’s an adversarial system composed of independent parts. As a result, we have to build coalitions to make change. Along with that comes creating consensus that is strong enough to drive action and keeping the coalition engaged over time and through challenges. Here’s how I approached this work with the treatment courts team to address the capacity challenges and develop a triage process that reduced subjective decision-making.
Building coalition
Leverage the influence that exists between team members. My sponsor for this project was then the Presiding Judge over the criminal courts, a significant leadership role. However, her influence mattered a lot more than her positional authority. Her reputation was sterling. People trusted that if she cared about this project enough to ask them to participate, then she would also be committed enough to do her part to make change possible. That got people in the room in the first place. One of the things that kept people in the room when the going got tough was other team members with influence. Everyone trusted and respected at least one of the key decision-makers, and we could leverage their influence to keep the whole team engaged through disagreements and roadblocks.
Center empathy for the people being served and all stakeholders. The treatment courts were largely volunteer assignments, which meant that the people on the team believed in their mission and cared about finding effective ways to support the participants in the programs. People would express empathy for the challenges faced by participants in the meetings, which I was able to build on and extend to empathy for their colleagues. Yes, the team members had history together and often had divergent philosophical stances. There was baggage there. But we took time to talk about the pain points that everyone experienced, and people came to understand their colleagues’ challenges in a different way. They got insight on the reason behind patterns that had irked them in the past. They found places of mutual struggle. It didn’t magically erase the baggage, but it did shift the tone of the conversation and generate interest in change, and we nurtured those things together.
Start by finding tactical common ground, then get into the stickier philosophical issues. Of the outcomes I was charged with, the one related to right-sizing the programs in relation to one another was the most tactical. How could we increase the capacity of some courts that were chronically overfull with long waitlists and downsize another that had fewer participants? How could we better allocate the people and time resources based on how many participants were being served? It was all about scheduling, and that’s what we tackled first. Scheduling can be a painful topic to work on, but most of us feel immensely better when that kind of logistical thorn in the side finally gets addressed. We generated momentum by checking one of the tasks off our list, incorporating team building in the process. The group had better defined their positions, built empathy, and experienced shared success before we got to the much more challenging conversations about subjective decision-making, equity, and who should be playing what role.
Reaching actionable consensus
Make space for many voices. As in most fields, there is an unofficial but clear hierarchy in the criminal legal system. Judges are at the top, followed by other attorneys (the prosecutors and defense attorneys), followed by everyone else. Whether you’re operating in this field or another, these hierarchies are strong patterns that are hard to shift. It was important to be aware of the dynamic and be prepared with several strategies for addressing it. Some of it was about how I structured the meetings (e.g. moving between large and small group conversations), and some of it was about using the power I was granted as facilitator to shift the patterns. I think one of the things that makes me a good facilitator is that I’m not easily intimidated by someone’s title or behavior. I tried to make it clear that everyone was on equal footing in these meetings and I was willing to take the uncomfortable role of disrupting patterns that detracted from a level playing field.
Break into subgroups to tackle specific issues. When it came to the issue of matching prospective participants with the treatment court best suited for them, it is the probation officers and social workers who are trained to assess a person’s needs and risks and create a plan to serve them. Those were the voices it was hardest to center in the large group meetings, plus there were some highly technical aspects that were too far in the weeds for the other team members. So, I broke them out into a subgroup and facilitated them in developing a triage process based solely on their expertise. First, though, I made sure I had the support of my project sponsor and the other key decision-makers to follow the resulting recommendation. I got clear commitments that those other stakeholders were truly turning over this decision-making to the social workers and probation officers. That way, when the subgroup got caught up worrying about the reaction of other stakeholders, I was able to reassure them that they really did get to make this call.
Allow for closed-door negotiations, if needed. I will admit that this is the thing I struggle with most as a facilitator. I strongly value participatory processes and transparency. However, when dealing with deeply entrenched disagreements between people with power, sometimes it is necessary to include closed-door conversations in the process. As an outside facilitator, there was a lot I didn’t know, and I didn’t have long-term, trusted relationships with the team. When we got truly stuck on a philosophical issue, having a large group watching only made people hold tighter to their convictions. I leaned on the team members who had earned their influence through time, consistency, and skill to have one-on-one negotiations and determine how much room we could make for change.
Maintaining engagement
Celebrate the small wins. Even if you still have a long way to go, acknowledging the interim successes is important. When we reached agreement on how to right-size the different treatment courts, I shouted “woohoo!” and pumped my fists in the air and congratulated the group. It generated more eyerolls than not, but I also had two different people come up to me after the meeting to say how pleased they were about the accomplishment. They shared that they hadn’t been convinced we would get there, and this gave them hope for what we could do. Sometimes doing something a little cheesy as a facilitator gives others space to feel and share their optimism, and I count that as a victory, too.
Ensure people can see their interests and contributions reflected throughout the process. This applies from chicken scratch notes on a whiteboard all the way through to the final deliverables. As a facilitator, I worked hard to reflect back the key takeaways when someone spoke. It didn’t always get written down on a flipchart because we may not have reached consensus yet, but I verbally summarized, checked if I got it right, and asked what others thought about it. In terms of what was written down, if a word or phrase was really important to someone and didn’t undermine the consensus, I included it. If we strongly considered multiple options, I documented those options and tried to explain why we chose one over the others. If something was staying the same, I made note of why it wasn’t changing.
Be honest when things are stuck. Maintaining a coalition across significant differences is hard, especially as time passes. It was hard to keep rallying around points of agreement and empathy when a month or more elapsed between each meeting. We got stuck a couple times and I handled it differently. The first time, I was worried about being polite and didn’t want to ignite more conflict, so I didn’t say much. I ended the meeting a little early and then strategized privately with the sponsor after. I noticed that undermined some of the trust the team had built. People left rolling their eyes and muttering about it being “the same old thing” all over again, then huddled in the hallways venting to their allies.
The second time, I named it in the room and asked the group what they thought we should do. A handful of people volunteered to have a separate meeting to try to break through the impasse. This time, when people left, they acted like it was a normal end to a meeting. The second sticking point was actually a much bigger deal, but people seemed to appreciate that I had acknowledged this part of their daily reality. That was different than the normal pattern of keeping quiet in public and then commiserating in private, and I think that difference gave them some hope that we could make a difference with the underlying issue.
The outcome: compromise got us there
It took about nine months, but we hit our objectives in the end. The different courts scaled up and down to more closely match the number of people who were eligible to participate. We put the triage process into the hands of the appropriate professionals, the social workers and probation officers. One of the biggest wins was standardized eligibility criteria based on a defendant’s charges, so the process of getting referred to a treatment court (or not) was no longer at the discretion of individual prosecutors and their negotiations with the public defender.
Every stakeholder made compromises. Every decision-maker in that room chose to sacrifice certain things in the name of big picture progress and owned those hard choices with their teams. I’m grateful to the entire group for seizing this opportunity and persevering through the challenges. And the thing I am most proud of is that the team kept working on the triage process in the years that followed. They adopted a continuous improvement mindset and made more changes as time went on – but without calling it a project and drafting a charter and bringing in a facilitator. The coalition was strong enough to continue functioning, to continue making change.