Blog

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.

As we reflect on 2016, we want to share four key areas that stood out for the Collective Impact Forum community. Read to see the Forum’s most-read resources for the year.

As part of Tamarack’s 2016 Community Change Series, Tamarack thought leader, Mark Cabaj, and myself decided to review the collective impact framework with a new perspective.

The principles and practices of collective impact apply especially well to issues facing community development practitioners because they help set up an implementation system, something that is needed in addressing local concerns. I’m happy to share about a new special issue of the journal Community Development that explores in greater detail how collective impact has been used in community development applications.

Backbone organizations are unusual entities and that means they need unusual boards too. Board members of organizations responsible for performing backbone functions need to assume roles and responsibilities beyond those of a board member of a traditional nonprofit.