Five Good Ideas about Collective Impact
Published on September 21, 2015
For complex issues like homelessness, poverty, environmental sustainability and economic development, simple, single-sourced solutions are not working. We need to explore new approaches. Collective Impact provides a framework for community leaders to tackle these complex problems. Collective Impact seems simple in design with five core conditions:
- Building a common agenda;
- Developing shared measurement;
- Engaging in mutually reinforcing activities;
- Focusing on continuous communications; and
- Being supported by a backbone infrastructure.
The execution of successful collective impact initiatives requires the engagement of catalytic, systems leaders who focus on the health of the whole community, understand the complexity of the issue and use data to measure and drive results. In this session, Liz Weaver presented her five good ideas to get you started.
Five Good Ideas for Collective Impact
- When looking to work collaboratively to deal with complex issues, consider implementing a collective impact approach.
- Look for leadership and expertise from different sectors to focus on the health of the whole.
- To attain true change, believe and buy into the common agenda.
- Understand how individuals are impacted by the issue and work toward measureable results.
- In addition to focusing on short-term shifts, focus on the policy and systems barriers that are preventing change to occur.
Good Resources
- Collective Impact (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
- The Promise and Peril of Collective Impact (The Philanthropist)
- Evaluating Collective Impact – Five Simple Rules (The Philanthropist)
- The Collective Impact Forum – a curated website with tools and resources about CI
Handouts