Blog

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.

ACT Anaheim, an initiative designed to address the needs of at-risk youth and families with a focus on 13-18 year-olds, was formed in 2013 by The Disneyland Resort, Angels Baseball, and the Anaheim Ducks National Hockey team, with the Orange County Community Foundation (OCCF) serving as managing partner. It is a collaborative response to the needs of youth in the area, including poverty, academic challenges, and limited opportunities for meaningful work and constructive engagement in their community.

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.