Starting Monday, February 27

Collective Impact practitioners Mark Kramer, FSG Social Impact Consultants, and Jeff Edmondson, STRIVE, are joining United Front for a special online conversation generated by the United Against Violence Summit and United Front 2011 events last year. Mark and Jeff will be on hand to share additional insights and answer your questions on a range of topics including accessing resources, data collection.

Think About It.
United Front’s interactive platform is an ideal learning space for deep, critical thinking about how to solve complex problems in our community. Come with your questions and curiosity. We will have resources available to help ground you in the most current thinking about Collective Impact.    

Talk About It.
Spend some time talking with people in our own community like Cathy ten Broeke, director, Minneapolis/Hennepin County Office to End Homelessness,and Jonathan Sage-Martinson, Central Corridor Funders Collaborative and others who will help to expand our discussion.

Take Action.  Register Now!
You must be registered on United Front to participate in the conversation. Our online conversation is NOT a real-time chat. That means you can log on and add your questions or comments whenever it’s convenient for you.

Not Registered? Register Here be sure to check the box next to Collective Impact: Continuing the Conversation.

Already Registered on United Front? Log In, go to the “All Conversations” tab, and click the Collective Impact Conversation “Join” button.

Need Help? Email the United Front Team

By Fay Hanleybrown, John Kania, & Mark Kramer

What does a global effort to reduce malnutrition have in common with a program to reduce teenage substance abuse in a small rural Massachusetts county? Both have achieved significant progress toward their goals: the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) has helped reduce nutritional deficiencies among 530 million poor people across the globe, while the Communities That Care Coalition of Franklin County and the North Quabbin(Communities That Care) has made equally impressive progress toward its much more local goals, reducing teenage binge drinking by 31 percent. Surprisingly, neither organization owes its impact to a new previously untested intervention, nor to scaling up a high-performing nonprofit organization. Despite their dramatic differences in focus and scope, both succeeded by using a collective impact approach.

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.
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