CBEL convenes Salem-area leaders committed to helping families and neighborhoods thrive.

About us

The Community Business and Education Leaders (CBEL) Collaborative is a group of community leaders focused on building community resilience that strengthens families and supports world-class education in the Salem-Keizer School District.

The group meets virtually every other month to discuss real community challenges and listen to the voices of lived experience in the neighborhoods they support. Led by an Executive Council, the group sponsors Neighborhood Family Councils and Collective Impact Initiatives.

What we do

Based on research from George Washington University’s Center for Community Resilience, we believe there are three key ingredients to community resilience:

1. Authentic Community Engagement

2. Interconnected Systems

3. Equity

From innovative social complexity data gathered by the Oregon Health Authority and Oregon Pediatric Improvement Project, we know that more than 40% of youth and young adults in Salem-Keizer who receive health care through the Oregon Health Plan experience three or more social complexity indicators. Youth who experience three or more social complexity indicators experience higher risks for negative health outcomes, costs of care, and long-term social and medical health disparities. Complexity data and its analysis is designed to provide early identification of youth with multiple health-related needs and risk factors. Through population assessments and risk stratification, complexity data helps us identify opportunities and predict future population outcomes using a population-level approach to mitigating adverse experiences, or complexity indicators. The aim is to leverage complexity findings by analyzing system-level data to early-identify priority populations.

This is what Jack Shonkoff, Director of Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, calls a “pileup” of adversity that no child or family should be expected to overcome on their own. That’s where we—the Community Business & Education Leaders—come in.

Shonkoff stresses the importance of building community resilience, noting it’s the community’s job to “build a bridge” over this pileup of adversity. Taking this idea, along with the aforementioned key ingredients of community resilience, CBEL has imagined its work as building a bridge over the pileup of childhood adversity, or complexity factors. The CBEL bridge consists of five main “building blocks,” as seen below.

Social complexity data source: Oregon Health Authority (OHA), Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS), Oregon Pediatric Improvement Partnership (OPIP). Child Health Complexity: A statewide Summary Report. 2018-2022. Analysis conducted by Oregon Pediatric Improvement Partnership, December 2022.

What’s behind our work?

Learn more about the frameworks behind our mission, structure, and work.