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In 2011, The HCA Foundation partnered with Lipscomb University and the Center for Nonprofit Management to develop a program that provided nonprofit organizations with the framework and support to combine their strengths and create greater community impact. With a university partner, intensive skill development and team based coaching, this program became known as Collaboration College.

Hi everyone. If I seem smarter and more attractive in the past couple of weeks, it’s because I just came back from Harvard Business School. Well, technically, I was sent as part of Seattle’s delegation to the four-day Young American Leadership Program (YALP). But whatever, I feel smarter already; and since it is technically true, I am telling all my relatives that I went to Harvard. I even have a tote bag filled with pens I stole to prove it. I’ll give my cousins these pens when I visit them in Vietnam this July, and maybe they’ll stop sending me job postings.

My question is, “How are you defining equity?” I ask because it feels like we have different definitions. I define equity as elevating the voices of those most impacted by disparities, often people and communities of color, and then working to close disparity gaps. It means removing barriers and acknowledging that different groups need different services to have a fair playing field.

Last month, over 1,600 viewers from 25 countries and 46 U.S. states joined us for the livestream event Equity Matters in Collective Impact, a keynote and panel discussion at the 2015 Collective Impact Convening in New Orleans that focused on the necessity to include an equity lens within collective impact work, regardless of the social issue.

Earlier this year, the Collective Impact Forum gathered feedback through its first annual survey of members who have created an online profile. We very much appreciate the 244 people who responded to the survey. The purpose of this baseline survey was to assess the Forum’s progress to date and to better understand needs in the field.

Today we see many local communities – urban, suburban and rural – swamped by historic disinvestment and the growing tide of economic and social inequality in our country. Place-based grantmaking can play an important role in turning this tide, but not without addressing the core structural barriers that have produced and propelled it. In local communities, addressing the lived experiences of people who are marginalized by racism, poverty, immigration status, gender discrimination, homophobia and disability will require many funders to retool their approaches to understanding and solving systemic community problems.

In order to truly solve the complex social issues our communities face, the structural causes of inequality along race, class, gender & culture lines need to be tackled head on. With its focus on changing systems, collective impact provides a framework through which these equity goals can be explicitly advanced.

Recently we announced the first round of the fiscal year 2015 grants at the NEA, including the first cohort of arts education collective impact grantees! Fewer grants, larger awards is the philosophy that is guiding the agency’s investments in collective impact. Seven grants—from a mix of established and emerging collective impact initiatives—support projects that embrace cross-sector partnerships, data, planning, programming, and shared evaluation.

Just returning from the Champions for Change gathering in Washington, DC hosted by the Tamarack Institute and the Collective Impact Forum. I was in attendance with a couple of others from the Food Solutions New England Network Team to learn more about people’s experiences with creating and developing a “backbone” function in their “collective impact” efforts, and also had the opportunity to do a couple of skills sessions around IISC’s “Dimensions of Collaborative Success” framework from Facilitative Leadership for Social Change.

This week was bookended with facilitated discussions in Alaska and Collingwood on the topics of Collective Impact and community transformation. While, both conversations were productive, engaging and challenging, a couple of things stuck out for me.