I am fortunate to have been able to build some great relationships with coalition staff funded with Tobacco Prevention and Control Program funds over the years. While connecting about tobacco-related work, I asked one of them about her experience with the Transform Wi workload so far. I thought you might be interested in her response. This really resonated with me!
"Yeah, it (stress) comes in spurts. Sometimes I feel totally underwater and sometimes I feel like I'm catching up. It varies by the hour! ...Thank you for recognizing that it's a lot on our end too. The rest of our "work" didn't just stop because we got CTG money. So to squeeze this all in when we weren't really sure what "it" was right away is kinda scary!"
What can we do to make her experience less scary on day 1?
It felt really weird to me to not communicate with community partners today. I think our Orientation Packet would've helped a bit in terms of clarity, not necessarily with the sheer amount of work. I am getting a little worried our culture doesn't seem very engaged or communicative with them yet. I imagine that community leaders not knowing their assigned liason, who all these Transform WI people are, how to communicate with one another, or who to call for help has all been added stress over the last two weeks. Maybe those items will help? But alas, we're underwater and chronically understaffed in our startup too!
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, us taking the time to develop in-person relationships cannot be substituted and must happen up front to build trust for the long haul. Getting out to Green Bay last week just felt right, and we all need to be on the road (outside of the Madison bubble) tons more in the coming months. I hope we'll all feel a bit better when this happens.
Even though the 2 month start up period is a challenge to spend lots of money, I think we've done a good job thinking through some low-stress spending solutions, thinking on our feet to pull together a big media splash, and the budget folks have been digging deep for clarity in their one-on-one meetings with less-than-ideal infrastructure support from UW (28 one-on-one meetings in this short time... that's a big accomplishment even if our community support is not ideal yet).
The start-up period itself gives everyone some breathing room to prepare for starting strong on Year 1!