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A collaborative effort, driven by a diverse group of stakeholders united behind a common goal, can serve as a catalyst for addressing inequities at a systems level. But beneath the unity of purpose, initial disagreement can arise when stakeholders have to decide how to invest in those with the greatest need without sacrificing community-level goals or appearing to favor one group over another.

Collective impact (CI), a framework for influencing systems change, was launched in the winter of 2011. The CI approach has been deployed by community collaboratives across Canada, the US and internationally to move the needle on a wide variety of complex issues from decreasing homelessness and poverty to improving health and education outcomes for children and youth.

The role of technology in social efforts has grown over the past several years. With the advancement of technological tools, technology has facilitated the efforts of nonprofits, governments, and private sector actors in catalyzing social change. However, the feasibility and the degree to which technologies could support the efforts of collective impact efforts remained unclear. The Collective Impact Forum recently partnered with Sony to survey members of the Collective Impact Forum to understand their technological needs and understand whether there was an opportunity for new technology to support collective impact efforts.

As we close out the year, we’re excited to share with you 2018’s most popular resources from the Collective Impact Forum. Before we get to that, we want to offer first our gratitude to you. The Collective Impact Forum is a global community (over 25,000 strong and counting), and we want to recognize that the very heart of social change are those who are pushing the work forward every day—with determination, faith, humor, curiosity, resilience, solidarity, hope, and love.

Earlier this year, the Collective Impact Forum gathered feedback through its fourth annual survey of members with online profiles. The purpose of this survey was to assess the Forum’s progress to date, to understand the current state of our members’ collective impact initiatives, and to collect input on topics of interest for our programming. Thank you to all who responded to the 2018 survey.

We’ve all witnessed the importance of culture in organizations. Many leaders have seen their efforts fall apart because their team wasn’t aligned or power dynamics impeded their progress. On the other hand, others have been part of teams that built such a deep sense of trust that they took greater risks and ultimately achieved greater change. Culture can speed up or slow down progress because, at the end of the day, we’re complex humans working with other complex humans. These same dynamics are at play in collaborative efforts such as collective impact initiatives. If we want to be successful at collective impact, stakeholders must define and tend to a shared culture across the collaborative.

One of the five core tenets or conditions of collective impact is “Continuous Communication,” which usually means meetings, lots of meetings. And let’s face it, most meetings suck. They don’t have to. There are some lessons we can apply to ensure that meetings are purposeful, engaging, and advance our work in ways that people anticipate with enthusiasm instead of dread.

This past April, over 700 attendees and hundreds more online viewers joined us for the livestream event Beyond Seats at the Table: Equity, Inclusion, and Collective Impact, a keynote at the 2018 Collective Impact Convening in Austin. The Collective Impact Forum is excited to share with you the video from this livestream event, as well as a transcript of the keynote remarks by Vu Le (Rainier Valley Corps), with introductory remarks by Sheri Brady (Aspen Forum for Community Solutions.) We have also included tweets below from attendees and livestream viewers who shared their thoughts during the session.

Operation Youth Success (OYS), located in Douglas County, NE has been on its own journey with respect to equity. Specifically, the initiative has evolved its approach to inclusion of the youth it seeks to support – those currently or formerly involved in the juvenile justice system. When FSG began its work with OYS in 2015, there was an urgency to make the collective impact process more inclusive than past reform efforts. Many efforts in the past had been top-down and driven by the “system” rather than taking an inclusive approach to involving families and youth in the change effort. OYS leadership was committed to a different approach to change – but the path forward was not clear.

We are excited to share with you the recently published: “When Collective Impact Has an Impact: A Cross-Site Study of 25 Collective Impact Initiatives,” conducted by a research team from the organizations ORS Impact and the Spark Policy Institute. This study, commissioned by the Collective Impact Forum in early 2017, was designed to look at the question of “To what extent and under what conditions does the collective impact approach contribute to systems and population changes?” In order to explore these questions, the research team studied 25 sites -- with eight deep dive site visits -- and has generated a rich set of findings that we hope will be useful for the field of collective impact practitioners, community members, funders and researchers/evaluators.