Accountability through Interagency Collaboration

Accountability through Interagency Collaboration

Interagency collaborations enable agencies to develop creative cross-agency strategies to shared problems or populations. Twenty-one states, such as Arizona and New York , have established Children’s Cabinets or Councils for the purpose of improving services and outcomes for children and families. In 2000 the Maryland Children’s Cabinet elected to focus on “Children Enter School Ready to Learn” and has seen the statewide school readiness scores increase from 49% to 81% in 10 years.

Many jurisdictions have adopted a results accountability system to track their outcomes and activities because it offers an opportunity to:

• Engage stakeholders and program providers in building broadly shared visions of what goals are important and what strategies are required to achieve them.
• Think creatively about solutions while ensuring that interventions are timely and relevant.
• Move from categorical program approaches to more holistic ones.
• Examine how different interventions can be integrated to achieve mutually shared goals.
• Collect data and monitor progress systematically, to identify and critically examine successes and failures, and to use this information to improve operations, services, and outcomes.
• Demonstrate results and build confidence in public institutions. [1]