thinking tool.

Credit: Originally John Kania and Mark Kramer. Further developed by Mark Cabal and Liz Weaver.

Summary:

‘Collective impact’ is a way of working with and for a community to address the systemic causes of social problems. This way of working is underpinned by place-based stakeholders identifying ‘community aspiration’, ‘learning together’ while doing, ‘engaging authentically with the community’ in pursuit of a shared vision, and performing ‘high leverage activities’ while maintaining a ‘systems’ focus. Initiatives like this deliberately dedicate resources to a ‘back bone’ that supports the social action and holds the space for ‘community change’.

This way of working is in direct contrast to the traditional ‘isolated impact’ approach characterised by individual organisations delivering single issue programs or activities to address a social problem using funding often obtained from a competitive tender. Isolated impact is often underpinning by individual organisations operating as if they are the sole owners of a solution to a complex problem, leading in independent activities, fragmented measurement and unclear indicators of change. The community is often ‘serviced’ rather than engaged, and the agenda is often set by others rather than those who live at the centre of the issue.

Real world application:

A leading collective impact initiative in Tasmania is Burnie Works. Click here for more details.

Concept detail:

John Kania and Mark Kramer wrote about ‘Collective Impact 2.0’ in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2011 (see article link to the right). They suggested that ‘isolated impact’ characterised much of the social service activity that sought to address social problems. They believed that successful change initiatives shared five conditions: common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and back bone organisation support. They argued that these conditions produced true alignment of skills and resources within place based initiatives and led to greater impact at scale.

Five years later, Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver shared a revision of the framework for community change (see article link to the right). This re-invisioning of the model sought to move the framework from a ‘mangement paradigm’ to a ‘movement building paradigm’, and lift the horizon from the ‘common agenda’ of services to the ‘aspiration of the community’; that ‘shared measurement by services’ become a commitment to ‘strategic learning’ from activities with shared measurement systems; that the ‘mutually reinforcing activities’ of services become the pursuit of ‘high leverage activities that focus on systems change’; that ‘continuous communication’ evolve to become ‘authentic community engagement’; and that the ‘back bone infrastructure’ condition becomes ‘stewardship of change’.