But there are deep, deep flaws in the academic research model, if not in the methods employed—flaws that severely limit the knowledge we gain. The social sector continues to outsource knowledge creation to the academic sector, which is operating according to the rules of academe, not in the public interest. It’s time to free the knowledge, and social sector actors have a key role to play.

What are the problems with the academic research model?

First, the primary purpose of academic research is status within academic communities. To advance—and attain any job security—academics have to publish research in academic journals. Thus, academics are biased toward research that will be publishable in academic journals.

The academic journals, in turn, are biased toward novel research. This means they are generally not interested in research that confirms earlier findings, or that adds nuance and practicality—the kind of knowledge that social sector actors need—to earlier research. And that means that research doesn’t get done. The journals also have strong biases for positive results, which yields suspect research. Recently, studies have suggested that up to 80 percent of published medical research can’t be replicated (and therefore the results are not trustworthy). There is no reason to believe that social science research is significantly better.

Finally, there are strong incentives to lock up knowledge and data—both for journal editors and for researchers. The best research is based on a great deal of data collection, data that can turn into lots of published papers if the researcher keeps the data to themselves. Meanwhile, journal publishers have incentives to make subscriptions very expensive and private.

As a result of these dynamics, useful knowledge for the social sector coming from academic researchers is severely limited. Happily, the academic publishing model is likely in its death throes. More and more people are questioning the value and the business model of walled-garden, peer-reviewed academic journals. Recently Princeton University adopted a policy that prevents Princeton academics from granting copyright on their research to closed journals. Princeton’s move could be the start of one of the most socially important changes of our time by generating a torrent of open-access academic research.

But there is more to be done. Here’s what the social sector should do now to free the knowledge:

1) Don’t wait for academics to do quality research on issues you care about. The toolkits for designing studies and surveys are easily available. Start building knowledge on effectiveness of your programs now.

2) If you do work with an academic, require that any resulting papers be published in open-access journals or be made publically available.

3) Post the results of research you sponsor or are involved in and submit it to knowledge repositories like IssueLab.

Collectively, we can free the knowledge from the shackles of academia and make our whole sector more effective. 

One of the most interesting new organizations is MASS (Mobilizing Architecture to Serve Society), led by recent Harvard grads Alan Ricks and Michael Murphy. The pair, along with co-founder Marika Shioiri-Clark, now an IDEO.org fellow, built a 150-bed, 60,000-square-foot hospital in rural Rwanda last year with Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health. The Butaro Hospital was constructed by hundreds of local residents and, in the words of design advocate John Cary, writing in GOOD, “is breathtaking for its setting…design, and craftsmanship. It’s a job-creating, people-healing, field-innovating success story with origins in a most unlikely place.”

MASS architects worked in collaboration with infectious disease specialists from Partners in Health and the Harvard Medical School to innovate new ways of laying out and naturally ventilating the hospital, in an effort to reduce the transmission of airborne disease. The design also made use of local materials—most notably, the volcanic rock from the Virunga Mountain Chain—reducing the cost of the hospital to roughly two thirds of what a hospital of this size would typically cost in Rwanda.

Murphy, who received the 2012 Designers of the Year Award from Contract Magazine, a design industry publication, took some time to speak about his work and how it’s progressing the public interest design movement:

Courtney Martin: How is your approach different than previous humanitarian design interventions?

Michael Murphy: While our project is driven and inspired by “humanitarian” and “social” architects, what we learned in Rwanda is that all design has this potential—and architecture should be rated by humanitarian and social principles.

CM: The hospital in Butaro has been held up by many as a success. But success isn’t just about the product—the building itself—but about the process. What are you most proud of about the process that you and your collaborators pioneered?

MM: Building processes are usually not configured to serve communities in the most productive way possible. With Partners In Health, we decided to act locally to serve the community. We thought, How many local laborers could we hire? How many local materials could we use? The result was we hired 12,000 local people, and were able to customize nearly every piece of furniture, every window, and every door on site. That type of complete design has been lost in architecture, but it is completely available if we redesign the process of building.

CM: Buddhists talk about the value of “beginner’s mind”—being largely inexperienced so you don’t eliminate possibilities or accept the status quo. Do you see that quality of mind at work in MASS’ first undertaking?

MM: Of course we were completely naive about how to build a hospital, or even how to build an architecture firm. But that naïveté forced us to dive in, move to Rwanda, and really work closely with the doctors and the community to find the core issues this building needed to address. On the ground, we were able to ask, Can a hospital, the facility itself, also heal patients?

CM: I know you’ve been heavily influenced by radical architects of the past. Tell me a little bit more about that.

MM: There is a long and sometimes buried history of architects committed to articulating the socio-political impacts of design and architecture. Some of the Team Ten architects did this, but chief among them was Giancarlo De Carlo, who was deeply influential in this movement and has been largely forgotten.

CM: What have you learned from the local laborers that you’ve worked with?

MM: The results of hiring only local labor on the hospital project were profound. First, we found we could actually build cheaper and faster than if we’d been forced to import labor and machinery. The second thing we learned was that a locally built job force is like a giant educational and economic engine. We were able to customize much of the hospital, building furniture, details, and intricate stonework because of the close relationship with the laborers. It was a profound lesson that puts into question our increasingly prefabricated methodologies of construction in the U.S.

CM: What is the biggest challenge facing young architects and designers who want to do work for the public good?

MM: I think the most profound challenges are starting and sustaining a practice financially. The public good should, of course, be the goal of any architecture or design firm; however, funding vehicles don’t necessarily follow that logic. Young designers are finding their own strategies. Pro bono is one way. Sponsored research support from larger firms or universities is another. If they can fund a “proof of concept,” for example, often markets and new work follow. The more we can encourage this work, the more diverse and public-focused we can be.

CM: The connection between the homes and buildings we live, work, and heal in and our public health are finally become part of the public dialogue. What do you think is most important about this connection?

MM: Most important is that buildings are not objects, but systems that play a crucial role in providing the services they are meant to house. If we focus only on the “objectness” of buildings, we will fail to see the opportunities to make the building function and perform for its long-term goals. A good example of this can be found with ventilation and airflow. While building the hospital, we realized that too many buildings incubate and cultivate diseases that are killing people, so we focused a lot on designing so that fresh, clear air circulated. If buildings can kill, they can also heal, and our firm is focused on that as our principle mission.

CM: What’s next for MASS?

MM: MASS is getting involved in policy work at USAID, writing a primer for health facilities globally, finishing up a school in Rwanda, and an assessment of the health care delivery program of Cincinnati Children's hospital's Cerebral Palsy program.

It is important that India finds a new model of development—one that does not bank on scarce public and philanthropic capital, and one that ropes in the power and expertise of strong stakeholders, such as the fast-growing India Inc.

The work of social entrepreneurs in India over the last decade exemplifies the power of a business-led development model. Their work has demonstrated that business can “do good” while creating value for itself and that scarce philanthropic capital can and should be used thoughtfully. The microfinance institutions in India fittingly illustrate the significant scale and impact that ingenuous startups can achieve—in 2010, close to 100 million households were accessing microloans. This, however, is not enough; the impacts of social enterprises are often localized, and multiple factors constrain their scale, including lack of access to financing and talent, lack of familiarity with business and scale, and lack of an enabling policy environment. Every conversation we have with a social entrepreneur reveals a rewarding but challenging journey.

Given the magnitude of India’s challenges, it’s imperative that big business gets involved, and that it integrates development and sustainability concerns into its core strategy. Development needs smarter solutions, and greater thought and investment than corporate social responsibility grants can offer. Looking to the poor as consumers, producers, or actors in their value chains will bode well for its long-term value creation. Big business brings distinct strengths, including experience building large-scale value and brands, and deeper pockets. Take the example of Britannia, a food company that incorporated health and affordable nutrition into its business strategy. In 1997, it adopted the corporate mantra “Eat healthy, think better.” It cut out trans-fats, and reduced sodium and sugar levels from its products, and fortified many with iron, vitamins, and micronutrients. Britannia’s popular biscuit brand, Tiger—now fortified with iron—sells 3 billion units every year. A third of its consumers come from households that live on less than US$25 a month.

Such activity today, however, is in its nascence. For big business, the poor are still not a top priority when it comes to market opportunity, and it often struggles to understand or reach them. Many are not ready for a longer-term orientation to value creation and a higher appreciation of innovation needed to do business with the poor. Social entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are adept at creating business models for the poor. Their ground-up models and innovative solutions sync with client needs, whether that’s providing a collateral-free microloan, a portable toilet, or an energy-efficient stove burner. Opportunities exist to combine the strengths of the two for mutual benefit, faster scaling, and greater impact.

There are early examples of what such partnerships can achieve. Fab India, a popular mid-size retail brand in India, collaborates with producer-owned social enterprises across Indian villages, creating significant value to the artisans. One such enterprise, Rangsutra, is owned by 5,000 artisans and reports that artisan incomes have increased two- to three-fold since the partnership. This is still new and unfamiliar territory, and moving forward with these collaborations requires an openness to learn and engage differently. But if done right, they hold the potential to transform millions of poor people into powerful economic actors who can fuel India’s growth.

“Impact investing” is predicted by analysts to become a $500 billion industry. It has been growing in popularity in the past few years, attracting a diverse set of players with a range of expectations regarding financial returns. Across the globe nearly 200 impact investment funds are now registered and many foundations, networks, and mainstream financial institutions are becoming active in this space.

But the growing excitement around the overall market potential and the higher return expectations of some newer entrants raises a number of questions. Are we creating yet another hype based on a bubble filled with good intentions and hope? Are we too narrowly focused on financial markets and thereby missing out on more holistic approaches to support social innovation?

I have the pleasure to chair a group known as the Global Agenda Council on Social Innovation. This council is in a unique position to discuss such questions in a frank and open way. The council, initiated by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in collaboration with its sister organization, the World Economic Forum and guided by Mirjam Schoening and Katherine Milligan, brings together leading academics in the field of social entrepreneurship, pioneers in impact investing, and globally recognized social entrepreneurs to address some of the most pressing issues facing the impact investing industry. Greg Dees, Jacqueline Novogratz, Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui, Andrea Coleman and Asad Mahmood are just some of the leaders who contribute to this generative effort ensuring that this nascent industry reaches its potential and promise.

In our discussions, a number of issues pop up again and again.

1.Many studies offer unrealistic estimates of the size of the industry, raising expectations beyond what the sector can currently deliver.
2.Despite the current focus on generating returns, subsidized capital from philanthropists or foundations will continue to be critical.
3.Local knowledge is highly underestimated but remains the “x” factor as social needs are related to problems with local root causes.
4.The needs of young social ventures requiring seed capital is largely neglected, indicating that the industry might under-invest in its future pipeline.
5.As more social ventures are involved in traditional capital market operations, there’s an increasing risk of mission drift.
These are just some of the trends identified by our group and that warrant honest debates and interaction among all the stakeholders involved.

My own conclusion for the future of funding social innovation is that we need to consider social and human capital as equally important as financial capital. We need to create a level playing field for investors and investees (social entrepreneurs and their organizations). Investing in the education and knowledge base of both parties will allow us 1) to better understand the nature and types of “risk” involved for investors and investees, 2) to generate new asset classes, investment vehicles and non-financial support activities that are reflective of local realities and challenges on the ground, 3) to develop meaningful schemes for evaluating outcomes and impact and develop fair schemes to compare social enterprises across issue domains and geographies, and 4) to speak with one voice when demanding new regulatory frameworks and legal forms.

I realized, when I arrived, that this group—largely comprised of academics from top institutions—was looking to BRAC to provide practitioner perspective and to help determine what research on innovation to prioritize. Most of the literature on innovation thinks of it as a process, or the assembling of fertile factors, rather than an outcome or orchestrated event (meaning you can’t lock people in a room and tell them they must innovate!). Many factors matter, including the vision and values at the highest level, individual personalities, how meetings are conducted, what behaviors get rewarded, and how learning is captured and shared. And yet there is still no universally accepted definition of social innovation. While one participant recommended spending the day just coming up with a definition, we forged ahead to answer the original question posed to us. Here are some of my reflections on the discussion that followed:

Assumptions matter. All research includes assumptions, including expected potential for change resulting from new knowledge generated by a study. Sometimes assumptions map closely to reality, other times they don’t. Sometimes we don’t know, and to choose prematurely can predispose us to certain findings or strategies. For example, what about our assumption that innovation is a good thing? It comes at a cost—it requires change and some level of risk-taking. There is certainly a danger of jumping for new approaches and solutions when the old ones were just fine, or needed some minor improvements.

Think about translation. And I don’t just mean from English to Bangla or Swahili—I mean from research-speak to practitioner-speak. Practitioners are action oriented; simplicity and ease of adoption are important to them. Researchers often produce “thorough” or “exhaustive” descriptions that capture the complexities of systems and phenomenon but that that few read. What are better ways to get information to leaders of development organizations—information that’s biased towards action?

Stop focusing solely on methods. Researchers worry a lot about methods. At business schools, methods often take second priority to common sense and practice. Take something like the value chain, a tool commonly used to map out all of the primary and secondary activities involved in a production process. Companies use it to determine what configuration of all these activities can produce the best product at the lowest cost, sustainably. No one has rigorously tested how the tool operates, but people keep using it because they find it helpful. I find it helpful! There is a balance to strike between seeing things work empirically and disseminating them, and robustly researching new interventions. Research has limitations and can take time; these are serious issues to consider when we have knowledge of practices that could be scaling up and saving lives.

Ongoing dialog can improve research and practice. I learned a lot from collectively learning and discussing innovation with this group. It’s clear that academics have great interest in understanding what practitioners are doing and in helping them improve their work. This type of collaboration can reveal perspectives and solutions that each group may not see without the other.

As a practitioner focusing on innovation, I’m thrilled at the academic support for this line of inquiry. I’m hopeful that the focus on innovation will extend from the research questions to the methodology, opportunities for dialog and communication, and beyond.

Looked at from a 30,000-foot view, Stanford is the institution being disrupted here, it’s not the institution doing the disrupting.

I doubt that the Stanfords and Harvards of the world are worried about their own business models. As a friend told me, it's a really exciting time to be a first rate university or a first rate teacher, but a terrible time to be a third rate university or third rate teacher. But even if Stanford can be secure in its future, it seems to me lamentable that Stanford isn't leading the way in online learning instead of simply getting out of the way (as is implied in the Salmon piece). On for-profit vs. non-profit: And in response to the question why he organized Udacity as a for-profit venture rather than following his own inspiration, Khan Academy as a non-profit, Thrun said:

"for profit is not forced to make profit. I needed to get people together really fast, and it’s much easier to do that under the ways of a Silicon Valley company."

I wonder what his Silicon Valley VC investors think of his view that for profit is not forced to make profit. Are VCs investing in social returns over financial returns these days?

We took one user need as our focus: how can a woman in Mathare travel from point A to point B while feeling secure and while still retaining some amount of flexibility? If she cannot find others she trusts who can walk with her to her destination, how can she get to the places she needs to go safely?

Our prototype design intended to scale up existing community walking groups by using mobile technology to coordinate safe travel among people who may not personally know each other. If walking in numbers increased the safety of individual residents of the slum as we expected, then maybe we could leverage mobile technology to coordinate group commuting.

The Makmende System

Makmende was conceived as a safe commute system for Mathare residents—a system of citizen-led escort teams that travel commonly used routes within Mathare. Each walking group traverses the route according to a rough schedule, making short stops at frequented areas such as Matatu bus stands, markets, and communal latrines. The escort teams use smartphone technology to keep track of their location and to coordinate with local residents who want to join the walking group.

We developed the system in coordination with the District Officer of Mathare (the equivalent to the mayor for the area) and Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), a well-respected local community organization with a network of more than 25,000 alumni. These partners provided crucial feedback and have pledged their help in implementing the prototype in Mathare.

We determined that the routes may run for only a few hours a day, and planned to conduct surveys and interviews to identify the most used routes. We also wanted to determine the routes with an eye toward avoiding danger zones. In our preliminary research, Mathare residents felt most unsafe during dusk and dawn hours, so we expected that these might be appropriate operating hours.

The Technology Component

Once the routes are in place, GPS tracks the location of each walking group; each escort leader carries a GPS-enabled smartphone. With data transfer rates of only 2-3 Kenyan Shillings (2-3 US cents) per megabyte, we envisioned this as a cheap and nonintrusive method for walking groups to communicate their location information to potential users.

An SMS-based system coordinates escorts with local residents. We create a central system (the “dispatch center”) to keep track of the constantly updating location information. The user simply sends a text message to the dispatch center, then receives a text in return that tells her two things: the schedule of stops along the walking route and the time when the walking group reached its most recent stop.

For example, Jane, our user, sends a text message indicating the route she wants to travel, say “Route A.” She receives a text back, telling her that the walking group last left the church at 12:29pm. The walking group is scheduled to reach the latrine at 12:38 (based on the average walking time between the two stops), the Matatu stand at 12:47, and so on.

Jane knows roughly when the walking group will pass by her “stop,” and if she texts again around 12:50pm, she can get more up-to-date information. She can stay safely inside her home until she knows it is time to walk to the stop and join the walking group. Once Jane joins the walking group, the escorts and other residents using the service act as a deterrent to criminal activity and allow Jane to reach her destination safely. She can depart from the group whenever she likes, and if her final destination is off-route, she may meet someone else in the group going in the same direction and travel with them.

On the backend, each escort’s smartphone runs a custom application built to cover the various escort team tasks. When the group begins a shift, the leader “checks in” to the phone, and the phone begins tracking their location. At the dispatch center, a computer receives the GPS location updates and stores them in a database. These updates are then used to calculate estimated times of arrival at future stops in response to users’ requests.

The computer also tracks which leaders are working which routes at any given time. Once the leaders check in, the app automatically transmits the groups GPS coordinates to the dispatch center as the group is walking. Under normal circumstances, this is all that the escort leader would have to do with the phone. He or she can put it in their pocket while walking the routes, and then check out at the end of the shift.

Our preliminary research showed that most Mathare residents had access to a phone, but that smartphones were typically kept secure at home and not used during commutes. So we created the system for use with the most basic phones. Concerned about users’ different levels of technology literacy, we planned to include questions about phone ownership, usage, and comfort in our pre-pilot survey.

Another technology concern was the cost of SMS. Our preference was to avoid putting any cost on the user, so we proposed a system that covered SMS costs, expecting that we might be able to  negotiate a bulk messaging rate with Safari.com, a major local telecom company.

The Human Factors

Our other concerns centered around human factors. For one, we were dealing in matters of security—sensitive territory. Our class originally planned to partner exclusively with MYSA, but we ultimately reached out to the District Officer of Mathare, who oversees the local police, for safety guidance and support.

The District Officer in Mathare ran a community policing effort already, but it was primarily concerned with local residents secretly giving information on criminals to the police. Makmende—essentially a cross between “neighborhood watch” and a carpool—would not be operating in secret, and we were concerned that criminals may target escorts and users, especially since they were carrying smartphones, walking on predictable schedules, and potentially interfering with criminal activity.

Another concern was vetting potential escorts. The system hinges on reliable and trustworthy escorts leading the walking groups. If escorts did not show up on time or if they deviated from the routes, then the necessary reliability of the routes would be lost. There was also the issue of escorts potentially abusing their role and acting inappropriately to users, or partnering with local criminals.

One solution was to have an initial vetting process run by local women’s groups and community leaders, who could veto any potential escort. From there, all approved applicants would undergo a background check by the police. This two-step examination would ensure that the escorts would be trusted community members.

Another solution was to monitor selected escorts. We planned to offer a middle-class salary (about 7,000 Kenyan Shillings, or 82 US dollars per month), with escorts agreeing in writing to abide by a good behavior code and fulfill expected duties. We also planned to establish a hotline where community members could make anonymous complaints about escorts.

A final idea was to ensure that each escort team had a gender and age balance. We wanted the leaders to reflect the user population. We hoped that with more women and people of different ages as escorts, more community members would use the service.

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts on the Makmende Community Security Initiative. In the next post, the Makmende team will share their findings from their return trip to Nairobi in July, when they connected with partner organizations and administered a baseline survey.

I am a true believer in the power of place as a tool for social impact. I also believe that land advocates and managers are critical leaders in the movement to harness land’s power for impact. We live in an increasingly urbanized and interconnected world. Time, place, and culture impact how we move in the world, where we go, and what we do. Increasingly, our communities are physically and culturally disconnected from land and nature, and from the benefits that come from connecting with both. 

In America today, nearly 80 percent of people live in cities. More than 2 million acres of land are consumed by sprawling development (that’s equivalent to 3,789 football fields every day). Concurrent with this trend, we are experiencing significant increases in obesity and chronic disease, and decreases in air and water quality, which extract draconian human and economic costs.

It is at this crossroads that a visionary and vital “spaces and places” movement can tip the scales, deliver impact, and move from nice to necessary. By understanding and meeting human and community needs, and by effectively communicating relevance and benefits, we can build an effective power of place movement.

Understanding and Meeting Community Needs

Parents, community leaders, public health officials, and environmentalists are concerned about access to healthy food. For 10,000 years our food system was 100 percent organic and nearly 100 percent local. In the last 50 years, it has become an international commodity, often processed beyond recognition and sold far from where it is produced. But the power of place movement is starting to make a difference. In cities across the US—Houston to Brooklyn, Portland to Detroit—communities are turning vacant lots, surplus public land, and school grounds into community gardens. They are creating access to affordable and healthy food while building a connection between people, their food, and the land. But where is the leadership to take this from a set of examples to the way we do things? Is this a role that experts running public gardens, parks, land trusts, and other organizations should take on?

In many cities, access to clean water and air is an increasing concern. Green space, urban foliage, biofiltration, and natural treatment of runoff are all underutilized and cost-effective approaches to treating air and water, and help foster an understanding of how we must change our patterns of use. Can the design, operation, and programming of spaces incorporate more carbon-hungry trees and ways to capture water for reuse? And will that inspire shifts in our expectations, choices, and behaviors related to air and water, which directly impact their quality and conservation?

In just a few generations, we have moved from active to more sedentary lifestyles. Whether it’s our one-stop shopping at superstores rather than walking between shops, or the difference between kids “going out to play” and “having screen time,” the transformation has been dramatic. This must change, and parks, trails, gardens, and open spaces are the key. We need safe and inviting transit corridors to make our daily trips more convenient and fun—corridors we can navigate by foot and bike rather than by internal combustion engine. We need open, green spaces where kids can play and people of all ages can move. Who will provide leadership to ensure that place and space are at the table as part of our public health discourse?

Of course the list of needs that these spaces would serve could go on and on. They would build a stronger sense of community, increase biodiversity—you get the point. Place and connection to land are fundamental to meeting core human and community needs.

Communicating Relevance and Benefits

The greatest barriers to advancing this power of place movement often come down to our own language and frames. Advocates and organizations are often too focused on telling their own story rather than listening to and understanding communities, engaging them, and creating a platform to express their stories. To succeed, we need to focus on several important communication watchwords:

Stakeholders, not audiences: if we treat people as our “audience,” we present to them, offer transactional opportunities, and establish relationships that are often one-way streets. If we see and approach people as stakeholders who have a vested interest in our mission and ownership of the outcomes, we garner investment and commitment, as well as feedback that helps identify solutions.

Engagement, not awareness: Too often our desire in the place-based movement is to build awareness along the lines of, “If only people better understood conservation, the need for parks, etc., they would change their behavior and better support our work.” But what we need is engagement—stakeholders need the agency to express their perspective and vision, to impact decision-making, and to help design the choices and priority setting that managing natural resources and places require.

Listen and lead with alignment to values: By really listening to what people and communities need, and by understanding the values they hold related to open and natural places, we are able to authentically articulate the relevance of place. To capture attention, demonstrate import, and drive action by others, we must meet them where they are and in ways that connect to their priorities and motivators.

Emotion trumps data: In the conservation and place-based arena, we are true believers in the power of science and the ethos of getting the full story before we can arrive at rational decisions. Unfortunately, that is not how most people make decisions. Most of us decide what we are going to do based upon emotion, and then rationalize the choice with data. Luckily, we can connect emotionally about the power of place and provide easy access to the data that backs up our case. Advocates for place have an incredible asset: people already have an emotional connection to land and nature.

Ultimately, we need to consider shifting our focus from building institutions to building a movement that shatters silos. Is our sphere the garden? The park? The nature preserve? Are we really conservationists, preservationists, foresters, land managers, and horticulturalists? Perhaps, but we are also public health champions, community visionaries, and advocates for healthy, sustainable, and meaningful lives and communities. By focusing on meeting broader needs with the power of place, we accomplish our conservation missions, establish our work as an absolute necessity, and build an effective movement.

A remarkable convergence is emerging: as our economies falter, policymakers are embracing entrepreneurship as a potential solution, and the future of our workforce—the young—are eager to get on board. But how will they get there?

Universities are the missing link in entrepreneurship. We are uniquely suited to inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs and filling the sorely needed entrepreneurial pipeline with talented young visionaries eager to impact the world. Universities have access to Millennials at a very crucial time in their lives, a time in which the knowledge and experiences imparted to them can have far-reaching and, in some cases, life-altering effects.

The demand is there. A Kauffman study conducted during November’s entrepreneurship week found that more than half of Millennials are eager to start their own venture. Fifty-four percent of the nation's Millennials either want to start a business or already have started one. “Millennials recognize,” says Carl Shramm, former president and CEO of Kauffman Foundation, “that entrepreneurship is the key to reviving the economy." The study also revealed that while lack of mentorship and access to capital are mentioned as impediments to starting a business, so is the lack of entrepreneurship education.

Entrepreneur Ricardo Levy attests that the key attributes of successful entrepreneurs include being visionary, being passionate, and being open to risk. Many college students posses all three and are chomping at the bit to apply them in the “real world.”

Imagination flourishes in creative environments and those that foster communication across thematic boundaries. Like lights attracting congregating mosquitoes on hot summer nights, universities are hotbeds for creative interdisciplinary exchanges. A motley of Princeton undergraduate and graduate students from the sciences, finance, sociology, and engineering, for example, joined forces to create an enterprise focused on converting waste to methane in a Karachi landfill. Failure during the project implementation proved to be a valuable learning experience. Some of the students in the initial team are now working on their next entrepreneurial venture, equipped with the important insights that come from stumbling and beginning again.

What better place than a university to develop and foster entrepreneurial dreams at limited risk? Unlike many corporate cultures in which individuals remain exclusively focused on specific tasks, interdisciplinary thinking and team collaborations are not at all anomalies at universities. Interdisciplinary teams form readily as subject lines become hazy and as cross-disciplinary dialogue is encouraged. University settings abound with unique knowledge, resources, vibrant peers, entrepreneurial courses, competitions, co-working spaces, and experiential learning opportunities.

Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, developed her plan to recruit outstanding recent college graduates to teach for two years in America’s neediest urban and rural schools through her senior thesis work at Princeton. Today, Teach for America is widely recognized as one of the most successful social enterprises ever created. Over the last five years alone, 17,500 teachers were recruited into the program.

You may be thinking, aren’t many of the world’s most idealized entrepreneurs college dropouts? Indeed. This past spring, PayPal founder Peter Thiel announced his “Twenty Under Twenty” fellowship, which awarded $100,000 to 24 exceptionally talented young entrepreneurs under the age of 20 who committed to suspend their college education for two years to develop their ventures. It created a media frenzy, but ultimately, Thiel’s fellowship applies to a select group of exceptionally talented entrepreneurs. For the Mozarts of entrepreneurship, Thiel’s program is immensely valuable and certainly adds to the larger entrepreneurial eco-system. However, for the majority of budding entrepreneurs, a university education offers the best way to foster entrepreneurial ambition.

Given the economic crisis and the entrepreneurial renaissance, it would be irresponsible for universities not to step up to the plate. We can provide frameworks to foster entrepreneurship that support students when they are most open to new ideas, passionate about their beliefs, and interested in shaping the world.

In the winter 2011 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review we introduced the concept of “collective impact” by describing several examples of highly structured collaborative efforts that had achieved substantial impact on a large scale social problem, such as The Strive Partnership¹ educational initiative in Cincinnati, the environmental cleanup of the Elizabeth River in Virginia, and the Shape Up Somerville campaign against childhood obesity in Somerville, Mass. All of these initiatives share the five key conditions that distinguish collective impact from other types of collaboration: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and the presence of a backbone organization. (See ”The Five Conditions of Collective Impact,” below.)

We hypothesized that these five conditions offered a more powerful and realistic paradigm for social progress than the prevailing model of isolated impact in which countless nonprofit, business, and government organizations each work to address social problems independently. The complex nature of most social problems belies the idea that any single program or organization, however well managed and funded, can singlehandedly create lasting large-scale change. (See ”Isolated Impact vs. Collective Impact,” below.)

Response to that article was overwhelming. Hundreds of organizations and individuals from every continent in the world, even including the White House, have reached out to describe their efforts to use collective impact and to ask for more guidance on how to implement these principles.

Even more surprising than the level of interest is the number of collective impact efforts we have seen that report substantial progress in addressing their chosen issues. In addition to GAIN and Communities That Care, Opportunity Chicago placed 6,000 public housing residents in new jobs, surpassing its goal by 20 percent; Memphis Fast Forward reduced violent crime and created more than 14,000 new jobs in Memphis, Tenn.; the Calgary Homeless Foundation housed more than 3,300 men, women, and children and contributed to stopping what had been the fastest growing rate of homelessness in Canada; and Vibrant Communities significantly reduced poverty levels in several Canadian cities.

The initiatives we cited in our initial article have also gained tremendous traction: Shape Up Somerville’s approach has now been adapted in 14 communities through subsequent research projects and influenced a national cross-sector collaborative. The Strive Partnership recently released its fourth annual report card, showing that 81 percent of its 34 measures of student achievement are trending in the right direction versus 74 percent last year and 68 percent two years ago.² Its planned expansion to five cities when the article came out has since been vastly expanded as more than 80 communities (including as far away as the Ruhr Valley in Germany) have expressed interest in building on The Strive Partnership’s success.

Part of this momentum is no doubt due to the economic recession and the shortage of government funding that has forced the social sector to find new ways to do more with less—pressures that show no signs of abating. The appeal of collective impact may also be due to a broad disillusionment in the ability of governments around the world to solve society’s problems, causing people to look more closely at alternative models of change.

More and more people, however, have come to believe that collective impact is not just a fancy name for collaboration, but represents a fundamentally different, more disciplined, and higher performing approach to achieving large-scale social impact. Even the attempt to use these ideas seems to stimulate renewed energy and optimism. FSG has been asked to help launch more than one dozen collective impact initiatives, and other organizations focused on social sector capacity building such as the Bridgespan Group, Monitor Institute, and the Tamarack Institute in Canada, have also developed tools to implement collective impact initiatives in diverse settings.  

As examples of collective impact have continued to surface, it has become apparent that this approach can be applied against a wide range of issues at local, national, and even global levels. In fact, we believe that there is no other way society will achieve large-scale progress against the urgent and complex problems of our time, unless a collective impact approach becomes the accepted way of doing business.

At the same time, our continued research has provided a clearer sense of what it takes for collective impact to succeed. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to expand the understanding of collective impact and provide greater guidance for those who seek to initiate and lead collective impact initiatives around the world. In particular, we will focus on answering the questions we hear most often: How do we begin? How do we create alignment? And, How do we sustain the initiative?

Awakening the Power of Collective Impact

Of all the collective impact examples we have studied, few are as different in scale as GAIN and Communities That Care, yet both of these efforts embody the principles of collective impact, and both have demonstrated substantial and consistent progress toward their goals.

GAIN, created in 2002 at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, is focused on the goal of reducing malnutrition by improving the health and nutrition of nearly 1 billion at risk people in the developing world. The development of GAIN was predicated on two assumptions: first, that there were proven interventions that could be employed at scale to improve nutrition of the poor in developing countries, and second, that the private sector had a much greater role to play in improving the nutrition even for the very poor. GAIN is now coordinated by a Swiss Foundation with offices in eight cities around the world and more planned to open soon. In less than a decade, GAIN has created and coordinated the activity of 36 large-scale collaborations that include governments, NGOs, multilateral organizations, universities, and more than 600 companies in more than 30 countries. GAIN’s work has enabled more than 530 million people worldwide to obtain nutritionally enhanced food and significantly reduced the prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies in a number of countries. In China, South Africa, and Kenya, for example, micronutrient deficiencies dropped between 11 and 30 percent among those who consumed GAIN’s fortified products. During that time, GAIN has also raised $322 million in new financial commitments from its partners and leveraged many times more from its private sector and government partners.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Franklin County / North Quabbin Region of Western Massachusetts has a population of only 88,000 people dispersed across 30 different municipalities and 844 square miles. When two local social service agencies—the Community Coalition for Teens and the Community Action of the Franklin, Hampshire, and North Quabbin Regions—first called a meeting to discuss teenage drinking and drug use, they were astonished that 60 people showed up. From that first meeting, coincidentally also in 2002, grew Communities That Care, that now includes more than 200 representatives from human service agencies, district attorney’s offices, schools, police departments, youth serving agencies, faith-based organizations, local elected officials, local businesses, media, parents, and youth. Overseen by a central coordinating council, the initiative operates through three working groups that meet monthly to address parent education, youth recognition, and community laws and norms. In addition, a school health task force links these work groups to the 10 public school districts in
the region. Over an eight-year time frame, the work of Communities That Care has resulted not only in reducing binge drinking, but also in reducing teen cigarette smoking by 32 percent and teen marijuana use by 18 percent. The coalition has also raised more than $5 million of new public money in support of their efforts.

Different as they may be, these two initiatives demonstrate the versatility of a collective impact approach and offer broad insights into how to begin, manage, and structure collective impact initiatives.

The Preconditions for Collective Impact

Three conditions must be in place before launching a collective impact initiative: an influential champion, adequate financial resources, and a sense of urgency for change. Together, these preconditions create the opportunity and motivation necessary to bring people who have never before worked together into a collective impact initiative and hold them in place until the initiative’s own momentum takes over.

The most critical factor by far is an influential champion (or small group of champions) who commands the respect necessary to bring CEO-level cross-sector leaders together and keep their active engagement over time. We have consistently seen the importance of dynamic leadership in catalyzing and sustaining collective impact efforts. It requires a very special type of leader, however, one who is passionately focused on solving a problem but willing to let the participants figure out the answers for themselves, rather than promoting his or her particular point of view.³ In the case of GAIN, four individuals with deep experience in the development field—Bill Foege, the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control who is largely credited with eradicating small pox, Kul Gautam, a senior official at UNICEF, Duff Gillespie, head of the Office of Population and Nutrition at US Agency for International Development (USAID), and Sally Stansfield, one of the original directors at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—came together to look at large scale opportunities to address malnutrition in populations at risk in the developing world. Together they galvanized the 2002 UN General Assembly special session that led to the creation of GAIN and to the subsequent engagement of hundreds of government, corporate, and nonprofit participants.  

Second, there must be adequate financial resources to last for at least two to three years, generally in the form of at least one anchor funder who is engaged from the beginning and can support and mobilize other resources to pay for the needed infrastructure and planning processes. The Gates Foundation, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the USAID played this role in the case of GAIN. For Communities That Care, a federal grant provided the necessary multi-year support.
 

The final factor is the urgency for change around an issue. Has a crisis created a breaking point to convince people that an entirely new approach is needed? Is there the potential for substantial funding that might entice people to work together, as was the case in Franklin County? Is there a fundamentally new approach, such as using the production, distribution, and demand creation capacities of the private sector to reach millions of people efficiently and sustainably, as was the case for GAIN? Conducting research and publicizing a report that captures media attention and highlights the severity of the problem is another way to create the necessary sense of urgency to persuade people to come together.

Bringing Collective Impact to Life

Once the preconditions are in place, our research suggests that there are three distinct phases of getting a collective impact effort up and running.

Phase I, Initiate Action, requires an understanding of the landscape of key players and the existing work underway, baseline data on the social problem to develop the case for change, and an initial governance structure that includes strong and credible champions.  

Phase II, Organize for Impact, requires that stakeholders work together to establish common goals and shared measures, create a supporting backbone infrastructure, and begin the process of aligning the many organizations involved against the shared goals and measures.  

Phase III, Sustain Action and Impact, requires that stakeholders pursue prioritized areas for action in a coordinated way, systematically collect data, and put in place sustainable processes that enable active learning and course correcting as they track progress toward their common goals. (See ”Phases of Collective Impact," below.)  

It is important to recognize that the initiative must build on any existing collaborative efforts already underway to address the issue. Collective impact efforts are most effective when they build from what already exists; honoring current efforts and engaging established organizations, rather than creating an entirely new solution from scratch.

Being realistic about the time it will take to get through these initial organizing stages is equally important. It takes time to create an effective infrastructure that allows stakeholders to work together and that truly can ameliorate a broken system. The first two phases alone can take between six months and two years. The scope of the problem to be addressed, the degree of existing collaboration, and the breadth of community engagement all influence the time required. Conducting a readiness assessment based on the preconditions listed above can help to anticipate the likely time required.

Once the initiative is established, Phase III can last a decade or more. Collective impact is a marathon, not a sprint. There is no shortcut in the long-term process of social change. Fortunately, progress happens along the way. In fact, early wins that demonstrate the value of working together are essential to hold the collaborative together. In a collective impact education initiative FSG is supporting in Seattle, for example, collaboration in the first year of the initiative led to a dramatic increase in students signing up for College Bound scholarships; not the ultimate goal, but an encouraging sign. Merely agreeing on a common agenda and shared measurement system during Phase II often feels like an important early win to participants.  

Setting the Common Agenda

Developing a well-defined but practical common agenda might seem like a straightforward task. Yet we find that regardless of the issue and geography, practitioners struggle to agree on an agenda with sufficient clarity to support a shared measurement system and shape mutually reinforcing activities. Setting a common agenda actually requires two steps: creating the boundaries of the system or issue to be addressed, and developing a strategic action framework to guide the activities of the initiative.

Creating Boundaries. Establishing the boundaries of the issue is a judgment call based on each situation. For example, in another collective impact initiative that focused on teen substance abuse, a cross sector set of stakeholders in Staten Island, N.Y. drew their boundaries to include key factors such as parental and youth social norms as well as prevention and treatment activities. They could as easily have included many other related “root causes” of substance abuse such as youth unemployment or domestic violence. While these issues undoubtedly contribute to substance abuse, the group felt less able to impact these areas, and therefore left these issues outside the boundaries of their efforts. On the other hand, working with retailers to limit the availability of alcohol to minors, although outside the social sector, was determined to be an issue inside the boundary of what the group felt they could take on.

Or consider the boundaries drawn by Opportunity Chicago, a collective impact effort that included foundations, government agencies, nonprofits, and employers working to connect low-skilled public housing residents to employment in connection with the city’s sweeping plan to transform public housing. The initiative’s leaders realized that new housing would not help if the residents could not meet the work requirement established to qualify for residency. As a result, they included workforce development within the housing initiative’s boundaries and established Opportunity Chicago, the collective impact initiative that ultimately placed 6,000 residents in jobs.

Boundaries can and do change over time. After nearly a decade of addressing teen substance abuse prevention, Communities That Care is launching a second initiative to address youth nutrition and physical activity, applying the existing structure and stakeholders to a closely related but new topic area within their mission of improving youth health in their region.

Determining geographic boundaries requires the same type of judgment in balancing the local context and stakeholder aspirations. While Shape Up Somerville chose a city-wide focus to tackle childhood obesity, Livewell Colorado addressed the same issue for the entire state by bringing together a more widely dispersed group of representatives from businesses, government, nonprofits, healthcare, schools, and the transportation sector.  

Although it is important to create clarity on what is and what is not part of the collective efforts, most boundaries are loosely defined and flexible. Subsequent analysis and activity may draw in other issues, players, and geographies that were initially excluded. Communities That Care, for example, began by serving only Franklin County, and expanded their geographic boundaries in their seventh year to include North Quabbin.  

Developing the Strategic Action Framework. Once the initial system boundaries have been established, the task of creating a common agenda must shift to developing a strategic framework for action. This should not be an elaborate plan or a rigid theory of change. The Strive Partnership’s “roadmap” for example, fits on a single page and was originally developed in just a few weeks. The strategic framework must balance the necessity of simplicity with the need to create a comprehensive understanding of the issue that encompasses the activities of all stakeholders, and the flexibility to allow for the organic learning process of collective impact to unfold. This framework for action can serve a critical role in building a shared agenda. As Chad Wick, one of the early champions of The Strive Partnership explains, “Our map got everyone to suspend their own view of the world and got us on a common page from which to work. It allowed others to suspend their preconceived views and be open minded about what was and what could be.”  

Successful frameworks include a number of key components: a description of the problem informed by solid research; a clear goal for the desired change; a portfolio of key strategies to drive large scale change; a set of principles that guide the group’s behavior; and an approach to evaluation that lays out how the collective impact initiative will obtain and judge the feedback on its efforts.

Since 2002, the Tamarack Institute has been guiding Canada’s approach to fighting poverty through the Vibrant Communities initiative in a dozen Canadian cities. The Tamarack Institute refers to their strategic action frameworks as “frameworks-for-change,” and cogently describes their value as follows: “A strong framework for change, based on strong research and input from local players, shapes the strategic thinking of the group, helps them make tough choices about where to spend their time and energy, and guides their efforts at monitoring and evaluating their work. Ask anyone involved in the effort about where they are going and their road map for getting there, and they will tell you.”⁴

We believe their description applies equally well to any strategic action framework that guides a common agenda. Our experience also suggests that it may not always make sense to start off by implementing every single strategy identified in the common agenda. It is also important to pursue a portfolio of strategies that offer a combination of easy but substantive shortterm wins to sustain early momentum for the initiative, as well as more ambitious, long-term systemic strategies that may not show impact for several years.

Importantly, strategic action frameworks are not static. Tamarack goes on to note: “They are working hypotheses of how the group believes it can [achieve its goals], hypotheses that are constantly tested through a process of trial and error and updated to reflect new learnings, endless changes in the local context, and the arrival of new actors with new insights and priorities.”

FSG research bears out this need for continuous adaptation. The Strive Partnership has evolved their roadmap three times in the last five years. GAIN has built in a robust feedback loop from its programming, and over the past eight years has incorporated best practices and lessons learned as a fundamental component of its fourth annual strategic action framework. And Communities That Care has revised its community action plan three times in the last eight years.

Implementing a collective impact approach with this type of fluid agenda requires new types of collaborative structures, such as shared measurement systems and backbone organizations.  

Shared Measurement Systems

Practitioners consistently report that one of the most challenging aspects to achieving collective impact is shared measurement—the use of a common set of measures to monitor performance, track progress toward goals, and learn what is or is not working. The traditional paradigm of evaluation, which focuses on isolating the impact of a single organization or grant, is not easily transposed to measure the impact of multiple organizations working together in real time to solve a common problem. Competing priorities among stakeholders and fears about being judged as underperforming make it very hard to agree on common measures. Organizations have few resources with which to measure their own performance, let alone develop and maintain a shared measurement system among multiple organizations.

Yet shared measurement is essential, and collaborative efforts will remain superficial without it. Having a small but comprehensive set of indicators establishes a common language that supports the action framework, measures progress along the common agenda, enables greater alignment among the goals of different organizations, encourages more collaborative problem-solving, and becomes the platform for an ongoing learning community that gradually increases the effectiveness of all participants.⁵ Mutually reinforcing activities become very clear once the work of many different organizations can be mapped out against the same set of indicators and outcomes.  

Consider the collective impact effort to reduce homelessness in Calgary, Canada, supported by the Calgary Homeless Foundation (CHF). When stakeholders first came together to define common measures of homelessness, they were shocked to discover that the many agencies, providers, and funders in Calgary were using thousands of separate measures relating to homelessness. They also found that providers had very different definitions of key terms, such as the “chronic” versus “transitional” homeless, and that their services were not always aligned to the needs of the individuals served. Merely developing a limited set of eight common measures with clear definitions led to improved services and increased coordination. Even privacy issues, a major legal obstacle to sharing data, were resolved in ways that permitted sharing while actually increasing confidentiality. As Alina Turner, vice president of strategy at CHF put it, “Putting shared measures in place is a way to start the deeper systems change in a way that people can get their heads around . . . starting from a common framework to get alignment across a whole system of care.”  

Developing an effective shared measurement system requires broad engagement by many organizations in the field together with clear expectations about confidentiality and transparency. The Calgary homelessness initiative worked with both a cross-sector advisory committee and a service provider committee to develop common measures from evidence-based research. The measures were then refined through iterative meetings with dozens of stakeholders before being finalized.

Shared measurement systems also require strong leadership, substantial funding, and ongoing staffing support from the backbone organization to provide training, facilitation, and to review the accuracy of data. In CHF’s case, the foundation funded and staffed the development of the homelessness management information system (HMIS) and the process of developing shared measures.

Developments in web-based technology permit huge numbers of stakeholders to use shared measurement inexpensively in ways that would have been impossible even a few years ago. CHF has adopted a sophisticated HMIS system with different levels of secure data access for providers, government agencies, and funders. The Strive Partnership, in collaboration with Cincinnati Public Schools, Procter & Gamble, and Microsoft, has made major advances in shared measurement by introducing the “Learning Partner Dashboard,” a web-based system that allows schools and nonprofit providers to access data including the performance of individual students and the specific services they receive. Memphis Fast Forward’s Operation, Safe Community, built a tool for tracking and publicizing county-wide crime data and facilitated the memorandum of understanding that resulted in data sharing and participation by all five local municipal police departments and the Sheriff’s office.

Having shared measures is just the first step. Participants must gather regularly to share results, learn from each other, and refine their individual and collective work based on their learning. Many initiatives use standardized continuous improvement
processes, such as General Electric’s Six Sigma process or the Model for Improvement. In the case of GAIN, the initiative has both a performance framework and rigorous monitoring and evaluation criteria which feed into an organization-wide learning agenda. Their Partnership Council, comprised of world experts in the fields of nutrition, agriculture, economics, and business, advises the board of directors on the learning agenda, reviews the data to ensure its integrity, and recommends programmatic and management improvements.

Regardless of the continuous improvement approach chosen, the backbone organization plays a critical role in supporting the process of learning and improving throughout the life of the collaborative.

Keeping Collective Impact Alive

Two key structural elements enable collective impact initiatives to withstand the overwhelming challenges of bringing so many different organizations into alignment and holding them together for so long: the backbone organization and cascading levels of linked collaboration.

Backbone Organization. In our initial article we wrote that “creating and managing collective impact requires a separate organization and staff with a very specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative.” We also cautioned, “Coordinating large groups in a collective impact initiative takes time and resources, and too often, the expectation that collaboration can occur without a supporting infrastructure is one of the most frequent reasons why it fails.”

Our subsequent research has confirmed that backbone organizations serve six essential functions: providing overall strategic direction, facilitating dialogue between partners, managing data collection and analysis, handling communications, coordinating community outreach, and mobilizing funding.  

Although the core backbone functions are consistent across all of the collective impact initiatives we have studied, they can be accomplished through a variety of different organizational structures. (See “Backbone Organizations," below.) Funders, new or existing nonprofits, intermediaries like community foundations, United Ways, and government agencies, can all fill the backbone role. Backbone functions can also be shared across multiple organizations. The Magnolia Place Community Initiative in Los Angeles, for example, strives to optimize family functioning, health and well-being, school readiness, and economic stability for a population of 100,000. The Initiative has a small, dedicated staff that drives the work. Multiple partner organizations from the 70 organizations in the network fulfill different backbone functions, such as collecting and analyzing data, and maintaining a coherent strategic vision through communications.

Each structure has pros and cons, and the best structure will be situation-specific, depending on the issue and geography, the ability to secure funding, the highly important perceived neutrality of the organization, and the ability to mobilize stakeholders. Backbone organizations also face two distinct challenges in their leadership and funding. No collective impact effort can survive unless the backbone organization is led by an executive possessing strong adaptive leadership skills; the ability to mobilize people without imposing a predetermined agenda or taking credit for success. Backbone organizations must maintain a delicate balance between the strong leadership needed to keep all parties together and the invisible “behind the scenes” role that lets the other stakeholders own the initiative’s success.

Backbone organizations must also be sufficiently well resourced. Despite the growing interest in collective impact, few funders are yet stepping up to support backbones associated with the issues they care about. Adopting a collective impact approach requires a fundamental shift in the mindset of many funders who are used to receiving credit for supporting specific short-term interventions. Collective impact offers no silver bullets. It works through many gradual improvements over time as stakeholders learn for themselves how to become more aligned and effective. Funders must be willing to support an open-ended process over many years, satisfied in knowing that they are contributing to large scale and sustainable social impact, without being able to take credit for any specific result that is directly attributable to their funding.  

Worse, backbone organizations are sometimes seen as the kind of overhead that funders so assiduously avoid. Yet effective backbone organizations provide extraordinary leverage. A backbone’s funding is typically less than 1 percent of the total budgets of the organizations it coordinates, and it can dramatically increase the effectiveness of the other 99 percent of expenditures. Backbone organizations can also attract new funds. As mentioned above, both GAIN and Communities That Care have raised substantial new funding for their work.  

Even the best backbone organization, however, cannot single-handedly manage the work of the hundreds of stakeholders engaged in a collective impact initiative. Instead, different levels of linked collaboration are required.  

Cascading Levels of Linked Collaboration. We have observed markedly similar patterns in the way successful collective impact efforts are structured across many different issues and geographies. Each begins with the establishment of an oversight group, often called a steering committee or executive committee, which consists of cross-sector CEO level individuals from key organizations engaged with the issue. Under the best circumstances, the oversight group also includes representatives of the individuals touched by the issue. This steering committee works to create the common agenda that defines the boundaries of the effort and sets a strategic action framework. Thereafter, the committee meets regularly to oversee the progress of the entire initiative.

Once the strategic action framework is agreed upon, different working groups are formed around each of its primary leverage points or strategies. GAIN, for example, is overseen by a board of directors, with a 100-person secretariat that operates through four program initiatives: largescale fortification, multi-nutrient supplements, nutritious foods during pregnancy and early childhood, and enhancing the nutritional content of agriculture products. These programs are supported by 15 working groups on both technical and programmatic topics like salt iodization, infant and child nutrition, and advocacy, as well as functional working groups on evaluation and research, communications, and donor relations. Livewell Colorado operates with 22 cross-sector coalitions that reinforce the state’s common agenda within individual communities. Communities That Care has three working groups focused on parent education, youth recognition, and community norms, and a school health task force. More complicated initiatives may have subgroups that take on specific objectives within the prioritized strategies.

Although each working group meets separately, they communicate and coordinate with each other in cascading levels of linked collaboration. Effective coordination by the backbone can create aligned and coordinated action among hundreds of organizations that simultaneously tackle many different dimensions of a complex issue. The  real work of the collective impact initiative takes place in these targeted groups through a continuous process of “planning and doing,” grounded in constant evidence-based feedback about what is or is not working.

The working groups typically develop their own plans for action organized around “moving the needle” on specific shared measures. Once plans are developed, the working groups are then responsible for coming together on a regular basis to share data and stories about progress being made, and for communicating their activities more broadly with other organizations and individuals affected by the issue so that the circle of alignment can grow. This confers an additional benefit of collective impact: as the common agenda’s center of gravity becomes more apparent to all those working on the issue, even people and organizations who have not been directly engaged as a formal part of the initiative start doing things in ways more aligned to the effort. Brenda Ranum, a leader within The Northeast Iowa Food & Fitness Initiative that has brought five rural counties together to improve access to healthy, locally grown foods and to create opportunities for physical activity, refers to this benefit in alignment as getting “order for free.” In our own consulting work supporting collective impact initiatives for issues as varied as juvenile justice reform, sustainable fishing, education reform, youth development, and agricultural development, we have also observed the benefits of this “order for free” phenomenon.

The backbone organization provides periodic and systematic assessments of progress attained by the various work groups, and then synthesizes the results and presents them back to the oversight committee that carries the sustaining flame of the common agenda.

The number of working groups and the cascading layers of collaboration may also change over time. As working group strategies are modified based on an examination of what is working, some groups may end and new ones begin to pursue newly identified strategies defined by the common agenda. What is critically important is that all strategies pursued clearly link back to the common agenda and shared measures, as well as link to each other.

Memphis Fast Forward illustrates how one community can address multiple complex issues through this multi-level cascading structure. The work of Memphis Fast Forward is overseen by a 20-person crosssector steering committee with the goal of making Memphis one of the most successful economic centers in the southern United States. They developed a common agenda focused on four key levers: public safety, education, jobs, and government efficiency. Each lever constitutes its own sub-initiative and is overseen by its own cross-sector steering committee and supported by a dedicated backbone organization. Each sub-initiative then cascades into linked working groups focused around the strategic levers unique to each of the four selected areas. Public Safety, for example, has developed its own strategic action framework that has 15 strategies, each with lead partners and cross-sector representation. The combined efforts of these linked work groups has led to a decrease in violent and property crimes of 26 percent and 32 percent respectively over the last five years.

One of the lead individuals associated with Memphis Fast Forward characterizes both the challenges and the value of this approach: “By using a decentralized but linked approach, each effort has its own governance and unique structure but all efforts come together to share learnings. It took us a while to realize the value in formally bringing the backbone organization leaders together for sharing and problem solving. Initially, the different initiatives were only loosely communicating, but then we realized that we had a great opportunity to all learn from each other and should do so more intentionally and proactively.” Now leaders from the four initiatives meet monthly.

The Essential Intangibles of Collective Impact

Our guidance here on implementing collective impact has said little about the “softer” dimensions of any successful change effort, such as relationship and trust building among diverse stakeholders, leadership identification and development, and creating a culture of learning. These dimensions are essential to successfully achieving collective impact. We, as well as others, have written extensively about the profound impact that getting the soft stuff right has on social change efforts. And indeed, all of the successful collective impact practitioners we’ve observed can cite numerous instances when skillful implementation of these intangible dimensions was essential to their collective efforts.

One such intangible ingredient is, of all things, food. Ask Marjorie Mayfield Jackson, founder of the Elizabeth River Project, what the secret of her success was in building a common agenda among diverse and antagonistic stakeholders, including aggressive environmental activists and hard-nosed businessmen. She’ll answer, “Clam bakes and beer.” So too, The Tamarack Institute has a dedicated “Recipes Section” on its website that recognizes “how food has been that special leaven in bringing people together.” In attempting collective impact, never underestimate the power and need to return to essential activities that can help clear away the burdens of past wounds and provide connections between people who thought they could never possibly work together.

As much as we have tried to describe clear steps to implement collective impact, it remains a messy and fragile process. Many attempts will no doubt fail, although the many examples we have studied demonstrate that it can also succeed. Yet even the attempt itself brings one important intangible benefit that is in short supply nowadays: hope. Despite the difficulty of getting collective impact efforts off the ground, those involved report a new sense of optimism that dawns early on in the process. Developing the common agenda alone has produced remarkable changes in people’s belief that the future can be different and better even before many changes have been made. For many who are searching for a reason to hope in these difficult times, this alone may be purpose enough to embrace collective impact.

Download the PDF