Thriving Together Theater: Experiencing the Challenge of Increasing Community Well-Being
In December 2024, Washington Thriving hosted two virtual sessions of Thriving Together Theater. These sessions used an interactive tool to help participants understand how different community investments affect people's well-being over time. The goal of the sessions was to gain a collective understanding of how the different parts of a complex system are connected and work together over time to achieve desired outcomes.
What Did We Do?
Participants took on the role of community leaders and made decisions about where to invest resources across four key areas:
Vital conditions - Basic needs like housing and a healthy environment (these are sometimes referred to as social determinants of health)
Fairness in system design - Making sure the system treats everyone fairly
Urgent service capacity - Providing help to people in crisis
Belonging & civic muscle - Building community connection, involvement, and collective will
The Theater brought together participants from many different backgrounds, including public health, behavioral health, education, advocacy, policy, insurance, state administration, equity, and other areas relevant to Washington State's Prenatal-through-age-25 Behavioral Health System. Together, they explored how their investment choices over time affected the number of community members who were thriving, struggling, or suffering.
Both sessions followed the same agenda. A recording of our second full session on December 18 is available here: (Second session recording selected due to better quality recording and higher attendance)
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To learn more about the Thriving Together Theater's design, or engage interactively with the platform, visit https://rippel.org/thriving-together-theater/
What Did We Learn?
The Theater revealed several important insights:
When everyone understands the same basic framework, it's easier to make good decisions together
Having clear goals from the start helps guide better choices
Good data helps teams adjust their plans when needed
Early investments in fairness and community involvement lead to better long-term results
Communities can often create more available resources - money, time, effort, and community will - which increases the total available to allocate across all areas
Changes can affect different groups of people in different and disparate ways
Staying committed to long-term goals is important, even when facing challenges
Targeted shifts in investment can make big differences in outcomes ("leverage points") when effectively deployed
What Else Should We Consider?
The Theater experience also helped identify important things to think about as Washington Thriving builds and uses its own systems model:
Different groups need different support. While the Theater looked at the whole community, Washington Thriving focuses on young people who face the biggest challenges in the behavioral health system. Washington Thriving's model will need to understand how changes affect different groups disproportionately based on where they live, what they've experienced, and who they are.
Real-world challenges matter. Political pressures, resistance to new ideas, and social tensions can affect how the system responds and resists changes. As Washington Thriving builds its model for the P-25 Behavioral Health System in Washington State, it needs to consider these real-world forces while keeping the model clear enough to be useful.
What's Next?
The Theater experience was just one step in Washington Thriving's larger system modeling effort. Washington Thriving intends to use modeling to help understand and identify ways to improve the behavioral health system for young Washingtonians. Modeling will help "see" how all the pieces of the system work together. This visualization makes it easier to understand complex relationships and identify where changes could have the biggest positive impact.
In 2025, Washington Thriving work with subject matter experts and people with lived experience from across the system to build a more detailed model of Washington's behavioral health system. This model will help us:
Understand how different parts of the system work together
Find the best ways to make positive changes by identifying areas of highest leverage
Make smart recommendations to the state legislature in November 2025
Systems modeling is one of many activities Washington Thriving will be undertaking in 2025 to consider what recommendations will be included in the strategic plan. Stay tuned for more to come as we build and engage in conversation around Washington State's system of behavioral health for prenatal through age 25 young people!
Want to Share Your Thoughts?
We'd love to hear from you! Email us at info@washingtonthriving.org to share your ideas and feedback.