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We’re excited to share with you 2017’s most popular resources from the Collective Impact Forum. From tools to strengthen community engagement to stories about system change, there’s a lot to explore in this year’s Top 5.

There are nearly 5 million 16- to 24-year-olds in the US who are neither in work or in school. While there are some federal resources available to meet the needs of these young people, community organizations report that the rules surrounding use of these funds can hinder, rather than help, young people. Our new report, Opportunity Lost? Maximizing Large Federal Funds to Support Opportunity Youth, investigates the ways in which the existing federal funding streams of WIOA, TANF, SNAP (Food Stamps) Education and Training, and Pell Grants are challenging to use and hard to combine – even when it would be in the best interest of the young person and the community to do so.

“Systems change approaches” have become a mantra of the social sector. Communities feel the frustration with being “resource rich and coordination poor.” But what does taking a systems approach look like in action? How can communities move beyond programs to influence attitudes and beliefs, improve coordination, and change policy?

Building a steering committee or leadership team for a collective impact initiative can feel high stakes. When done well, it opens the door to innovation and impact; when done poorly it can dissipate precious time, commitment and enthusiasm for the endeavor. Whenever I build a leadership team, I like to think about Broadway. Not because we all need a little razzle-dazzle once in a while, but because recent research on teams, networks, collaboration and creativity has learned a lot from show biz.

As the dust settles from hosting our fourth annual Collective Impact Convening, I have been reflecting on many of the wide-ranging conversations that unfolded while we were in Boston. One of the highlights for me with the “master class” in Organizing that we were lucky enough to have Marshall Ganz share with us. I confess that I am still processing all of the implications of his talk, and strongly encourage you to watch it yourself, but there are a few points that were particularly resonant and may help collective impact practitioners think about some of their work in helpful new ways:

This past May, over 800 hundred attendees and hundreds more online viewers joined us for the livestream event Complementary or in Conflict? Community Organizing and Collective Impact, a keynote and panel discussion at the 2017 Collective Impact Convening in Boston. 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 Marshall Ganz (Harvard Kennedy School), with introductory remarks by Monique Miles (Aspen Forum for Community Solutions.) We have also included tweets below from attendees and livestream viewers who shared their thoughts during the session.

A couple of weeks ago, IISC was invited to offer a post-conference session at the Collective Impact Forum Conference in Boston. The title of this 8 hour session spread over two days was “Advancing Racial Justice Through and Within Collective Impact.” This was an opportunity for Cynthia Silva Parker and Curtis Ogden to formalize our ongoing efforts to bring IISC’s core collaborative methods, frameworks and a variety of racial justice content and tools to the different elements of the collective impact framework.

Since the publication of Collective Impact in the winter 2011 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, this approach to cross-sector collaboration has been adopted by hundreds of partnerships across the globe. Many collective impact efforts have reported achieving positive results through their work, but to date there has not been a methodologically rigorous study of the approach’s impact across multiple efforts on multiple social issues.

Last November, Matt Forti and Kim Siegal penned an article titled Actionable Measurement: Getting from “Prove” to “Improve” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The article calls upon the social sector to unite around “common questions” that “nonprofits ought to answer about their impact so that they can maximize learning and action around their program models.”

Almost every collective impact effort I have visited has struggled with community engagement at some level. During the past few years, I have learned a great deal from projects I’ve visited, while also drawing on my experience doing community building for more than two decades through Public Allies and The Asset-Based Community Development Institute.