December 16, 2025
Learning from the Yolo Way
In 2022, California’s Yolo County joined Hate Free Together, a joint initiative with the City of Davis, the University of California (UC) Davis, the County Office of Education, and the Davis school district. The effort started in response to a rise in hate crimes and incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Modeled on Healthy Yolo Together, an award-winning COVID-19 joint response with the same partners, the group wanted to move beyond public statements to enhance prevention and response to hate-motivated crimes and incidents.
In 2025, I teamed with the Yolo Conflict Resolution Center (YCRC), a local nonprofit, to convene a summit and develop a three-year strategic plan for the Hate Free Together initiative. The goal: to expand the effort beyond its initial test bed in Davis, to identify actions to dispel othering and enhance belonging, and to identify how to work most effectively with local CBOs. Working with these agencies, I’ve become familiar with an especially rich kind of collaboration known locally as “The Yolo Way.”
“The Yolo Way” means working together across jurisdictions to do what needs to be done for maximum mutual benefit. Certainly, this kind of collaboration exists elsewhere, but I’ve found Yolo County has unique qualities that help it exemplify this sort of cross-jurisdictional partnership, and I’ve identified principles that can aid collaboration in an array of contexts beyond Yolo County.
Between the Yolo County agencies, collaboration seems to be the default mode. Work across the five jurisdictions can feel nearly seamless, with an early and easy comfort and aligned purpose among the member agencies. This is the comfort that happens when people trust each other to make decisions with the interest of the greater whole in mind. Communication is part of the story. When a tricky decision or discussion is needed, people coordinate via email or prioritize hopping on a quick call to confirm consensus before moving forward. I’ve seen how the approach of the Yolo County agencies is built on some common values: care for the community, agility and adaptability of systems, and equity and inclusivity in public engagement.
Community Care
At the heart of the Yolo Way is this: staff and community-based organizations care about the well-being of residents, and recognition of that common motivation builds trust and fuels collaboration. Staff invest time and energy because they know their counterparts share their dedication to community impact. Partly this happens because many staff are themselves county residents; also, long-standing relationships across agencies have created a culture of trust that is conveyed even to new staff. The county’s size helps, too: it’s large enough to have resources, yet small enough that city council members and county supervisors are held to account by their constituents in conversations in line at the grocery store. Decision-makers speak frequently with constituents and with each other, continually establishing and reinforcing shared commitments.
Adaptability
As an agricultural county, generations of farmers, and therefore public agencies, have been shaped by the need to adapt to dynamic factors like changing weather, water, markets, and pests. Consequently, a natural kind of adaptability is woven into the fabric of the Yolo Way. The very design of Healthy Yolo Together’s thorough yet efficient approach to testing, quarantine, and vaccination distribution was modeled after UC Davis's approach to pathogen detection for crops. There’s a natural agility; people expect uncertainty and build flexible systems, and neighbors are accustomed to showing up for one another in times of change. Across agencies, a shared culture of experimentation, rapid learning, and scaling what works sustains this adaptive mindset, and the development of efforts like Hate Free Together and Healthy Yolo Together result from this orientation toward adaptation.
Equitable Engagement
Yolo County is diverse, consisting of three very different mid-size cities (Davis, Woodland, and West Sacramento) with very different populations from each other, a major university, plus a handful of mostly agricultural towns, and substantial unincorporated areas. Public agencies have a shared understanding of the importance of equitable outreach, of meeting people where they are both in terms of location and cultural understanding. For years, public agencies have been going to the fields to meet workers and to communicate with the many immigrant groups throughout the county.
Fostering this Collaborative Culture Beyond Yolo County
The Yolo Way is shaped by the County’s size, level of resourcing, diversity, and the lessons in innovation from its agricultural heritage, but the key lesson isn’t a checklist of regional characteristics. It’s a mindset. If you understand your community’s unique connective qualities, those qualities can guide collaboration, engagement, and innovation, and inform flexible systems that honor local knowledge. Every community can apply this principle, even if specific connective qualities differ depending on local culture, geography, and partnerships.
Trust and relationships are the fundamental connective pathways at the core of this method, in Yolo or anywhere else. Staff turnover, hierarchical culture, or a focus on bureaucracy can undermine the personal connections that sustain collaboration. Some basic practices are useful to counteract this. It helps when people make time to check in, share meals or attend events together, respond quickly to communications, share information freely, and extend grace when things get messy. These things prompt us all to recognize when we’re working toward the same shared and common good. When cross-jurisdictional partners treat one another as neighbors—and in many cases, they are—connections strengthen.