LAST UPDATED • July 13th, 2020
While many stakeholders have told us that they have an interest in building social networks across socioeconomic lines, they are uncertain of how to do it. If someone could give them guidance on how to incorporate it into their programs and help them measure effectiveness, they would be willing to do so.
Over the last 20 years, Potter’s House has worked to create a stronger community through diversity, understanding, and compassion by building personal relationships between children from lower income families and the caring adults who volunteer to tutor, train, or mentor them. Excellerate and Potter’s House have become Partners to see how its model of creating diverse social networks can be expanded to include family-to-family relationships and adapted to meet the needs of organizations across Northwest Arkansas.
Through this project, Potter’s House has created a “playbook” of best practices of how to connect people and measure the progress of relationships based on its decades of experience. Specifically, how to bring diverse groups of people together and the result be relationship. This framework will serve as the foundation for expanding diverse social networks across the region. Excellerate and Potter’s House are identifying Collaborator organizations to serve as pilot sites to see how these principles can be applied or modified to serve those organizations’ unique missions, needs, and populations.
