Collective impact in our community

Collective impact in our community:
Via United Way of King County

The following is a summary of the May 1 discussion on collective impact hosted by Social Venture Partners.  Mary Jean Ryan from Center on Community Education (CCER) and the Road Map Project and Bill Henningsgaard from Eastside Pathways talked about their collective impact efforts.
Mary Jean Ryan described the Road Map Project at Community Center for Education Results as a marathon with urgency (this could apply to any collective impact effort).  CCER prioritizes three areas: data capability, community/parent engagement and power, and alignment with funders.  The focus in the long run is on systemic change in the outcomes of education.  Short run, CCER has worked with a range of partners to sign up all eligible high school students in south Seattle and South King County for college bound scholarship.  This summer, the Road Map Project and Eastside Pathways will be will be working with others in the community including United Way of King County to kick off the “Let’s Read” Campaign, an ongoing effort to improve grade level reading.

Bill Henningsgaard described Eastside Pathways as apartnership of 32 agencies that are intentionally addressing the outcomes they want to see in education with a focus on Bellevue.  This effort is working on a common understanding of the problems, agreement on the outcomes desired and the relevant indicators of student success to measure the change.  One of the biggest (and most necessary) challenges has been arriving at shared values.  However, Bill emphasized that the discussion of values is the lynchpin of the collective impact effort.

Both Mary Jean and Bill agreed that the concept of collective impact was hard to explain but does require a community wide movement in which everyone in the community feels engaged and invested.  There are 125 projects around the country that are doing cradle to career collective impact.

Leadership of this movement requires a multi-level, multi-sector approach that enables leaders to take responsibility and action at all levels based on a shared vision.  A top down approach and leading with a government mandates does not work.

Another piece of advice is that collective impact efforts need to continually loop back to the community to keep them connected and involved.

These themes were all reinforced in the opening session of the United Way Worldwide annual conference in Nashville on May 2.  A leader from the Mile High United Way in Denver stated that we can no longer talk about a government initiative or a non-profit initiative.  The problems we face in society are now so interconnected and complex that we have to talk about a community, regional or national challenge where everyone works together.  We need to turn from fighting for scarcity to focusing our wealth of opportunities on insuring positive outcomes.  All sectors in the community can agree on certain value such as all third graders reading at grade level and mothers and children not having to live in their car.  The same Mile High leader also emphasized that we are not going to achieve outcomes unless we are engaged in policy.