Experts explore cross-sector collaboration to support immigrant youth

In Brief

• Immigrant youth face interconnected needs across health, education, legal, and social service systems. Effective support requires cross-sector coordination rather than siloed interventions.
• A Stanford-led convening brought together practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to explore developing shared measurement frameworks that can strengthen service provision.
• Partnerships between universities and community-based organizations can translate research into practical tools, improving outcomes for immigrant youth.

Solutions-oriented research can strengthen the connection between academic research and real-world problems, but cross-sector partnership is key to making sure the research responds to pressing challenges. One example, explored at a recent Stanford-led convening: addressing the need for shared measurement standards and systems across service sectors that engage with immigrant youth and families. 

The October workshop, called Measuring What Matters: Aligning Efforts for Immigrant Youth Wellbeing, was hosted by the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Stanford Impact Labs. It focused on how to help immigrant youth in the United States thrive. 

“Immigrant kids have complex needs that cut across different service systems — health, education, legal, social services — that don’t always play well together,” said Ryan Matlow, clinical associate professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. “Kids fall through the cracks of these systems, and there have been historical challenges in coordinating care. We know that cross-sector collaboration is critical, but we haven’t been doing a good job of capturing the impact.”

A key reason for this challenge is the lack of measurement standards for this population that allows all the service providers involved to assess the outcomes related to their efforts. It’s a complex issue, with no clear answers, and one the workshop participants — experts from the legal, medical, education and social services fields, primarily from California — were eager to take on.  

“Measuring the impact of programs that the state designs is critical for their sustainability and accountability as well as process improvement,” said Carolina Sheinfeld, branch chief in the Office of Immigrant Youth at the California Department of Social Services, who participated in the workshop. “Understanding how the designed interventions — in the form of social services, wellness supports and legal services — are implemented and how they transform the lives of immigrant and refugee children and their families helps us analyze how the funds are used, their impact and identify any gaps in services.”

The promise of partnerships

The workshop brought together experts to explore potential solutions to the measurement problem and brainstorm possibilities for collective action. 

“In that room, you had people who were on-the-ground practitioners; people who were one tick up, such as attorneys; and at least four academics who think about how to capture the lived experience of people and translate that into measurement,” said Tomás R. Jiménez, founding faculty co-director of the Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Joan B. Ford Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “The work is emblematic of the institute's solutions-focused orientation and its ability to bring together different kinds of experts to inform one another for a common cause,” Jiménez said. 

Partnerships with organizations outside the university help focus the work on real impact on people’s lives.

This engagement with community-based organizations and individuals is just one part of the institute’s work. It also provides support for Stanford faculty and has partnerships with other campus groups — one example being its collaboration with Stanford Impact Labs on developing the workshop. 

“They helped us think through different activities and ways to bring everybody onto the same page,” said N. Ewen Wang, professor of Emergency Medicine & Pediatrics.

David Laitin, co-director of Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab and James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science, also spoke to the group about the IPL Integration Index to spark ideas for approaches to develop shared measurement.

Taking action

The October workshop built on findings from several years of collaboration, led by Matlow and Wang with support from Stanford Impact Labs, with Bay Area service providers supporting newcomer immigrant youth: in particular, the need for accurate, aligned measurement data to better understand what improves immigrant youth well-being and to ensure that evidence-based findings inform policy and funding decisions. This most recent meeting provided a catalyst for collaboration. 

“The combination of lawyers, physicians, mental health professionals, educators and subject matter experts made this workshop feel like an ideal laboratory of ideas,” Sheinfeld said. “While many of us have interacted in other spaces, too often we don’t have the luxury of being offline and fully present for a full day to reflect, explore and ideate.”

Participants identified two potential projects: one to create a common measurement framework within and across sectors, and a second to map networks and collaborations to strengthen interdisciplinary models of care. 

“We were really excited to have the whole group together, learning from each other, looking at different ideas of measurement,” Wang said. “There was a lot of excitement in the room.”

Since the convening, program managers have worked with participants to form steering committees for the collectively-identified initiatives, with the goal of establishing long-term support for them.

“These are chaotic, stressful times, and people are very caught up in the crises of the day working in the immigrant service world,” Matlow said. “Having these opportunities to be in community with other folks doing similar but complementary work feels really valuable.”