Improvement for a Community Population: The Magnolia Community Initiative

Improvement science is a promising approach to changing practice in complex community systems, which are characterized by many independent organizations with separate missions, services, and outcomes. This example shows how a network of diverse organizations is using iterative learning to come up with promising ideas, test and prototype these ideas, and spread and sustain what is found to work. The Magnolia Community Initiative (MCI) is an approach for improving population well‐being at a community scale, as a voluntary network of 70+ government, nonprofit, and for‐profit organizations supporting a population of over 100,000 people. Diverse organizations from multiple service sectors strive to work as a system by aligning and improving resources to change conditions and outcomes for local families that they could not achieve by working alone. MCI adopted an approach that combined knowledge of what to change to improve child and family well‐being, based on theory and on the expertise of organizations that comprise the network, with knowledge of how to change within a complex system, using improvement science.