Organizational Effectiveness

Five Good Ideas about Collective Impact

Liz Weaver

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

Handouts

Liz Weaver

Co-CEO, Tamarack - An Institute for Community Engagement

Liz leads the Tamarack Learning Centre providing strategic direction for the design and development of learning activities. The focus of the Tamarack Learning Centre is to work with community leaders to co-generate knowledge and become a collective force for social change. Liz is one of Tamarack’s popular trainers and has developed and delivered curriculum on a variety of workshop topics including collaborative governance, leadership, collective impact, community innovation, influencing policy change and social media for impact and engagement.

Previous to this, Liz led the Vibrant Communities Canada team and provided coaching, leadership and support to community partners across Canada. In her career, she was the Director for the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction (a collective impact initiative), which was recognized with the Canadian Urban Institute’s Leadership Award in 2009. She has also held leadership positions with YWCA Hamilton, Volunteer Hamilton and Volunteer Canada. Liz has a Masters of Management through McGill University. Liz was awarded a Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2002 for her leadership in the voluntary sector and has received awards and recognition from the City of Hamilton, Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, Parks and Recreation Ontario and Volunteer Canada.