Collective Impact Forum

A core element of collective impact is changing systems in the pursuit of equity. Pursuing policy change and advocacy efforts are some of the key levers to effectively change how systems operate. But how can cross-sector partners within a collective impact initiative work together to co-create a policy agenda that addresses inequities and closes disparities?

In this discussion we learn how a policy agenda can drive collaborative action and strategy to support collective impact work, how it can communicate where a collaborative stands on issues, what are the challenges in building a collaborative policy agenda (including bringing partners onboard), and how to approach shifts in the political environment.

Joining for this discussion to share about their policy agenda work are Maegan Frierson and Dr. Shayla Young from KConnect, a backbone organization that supports a network of public, private, and independent organizations in Grand Rapids, Michigan. KConnect aims to facilitate and advance a common agenda to ensure all children in Kent County have a clear path to economic prosperity through quality education, family, and community support.

Resources and Footnotes

• KConnect
• KConnect Shared Policy Agenda and PACE Toolkit 
• KConnect Community Engagement Compensation Frameworks
• KConnect 2023 Impact Report
• The Water of Systems Change

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and we wanted to highlight the importance of recognizing and supporting mental health as a critical and necessary element of a robust and sustainable collective impact effort.

We frequently receive questions from a wide variety of collaboratives that are experiencing challenges related to the mental health of their team and partners, and the impact that this has on the collaborative’s work. For this episode, we invited the national nonprofit Mind Share Partners to address some of those questions. Mind Share Partners focuses on changing the culture of workplace mental health so that both employees and organizations can thrive.

In this discussion, we discuss four key topics that we often hear from collaboratives:

• How to deal with burnout
• How to manage conflict within the collaborative
• What to do if the collaborative doesn’t have a culture that supports the mental health of its participants
• How mental health can affect a collaborative’s sustainability and ability to make progress on its long-term goals

In this discussion, we dive into these four topics with Mind Share Partners’ Bernie Wong and Carrie Grogan. They provide guidance and examples of what a collective impact effort can consider if its goal is to build a strong and sustainable culture that prioritizes the mental health of participants in the work.

Resources and Footnotes

• Mind Share Partners and their Resource Hub
• Creating Mentally Healthy Cultures: How To Get Started
• Imani Barbarin: Creating Accessible Spaces for Belonging

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

For more than a decade, The Opportunity Youth Forum at the Aspen Institute’s Forum for Community Solutions has been working with a growing network of urban, rural, and tribal communities across the U.S. to build and scale reconnection pathways that achieve better outcomes in education, employment and overall well-being for opportunity youth. (Opportunity Youth are young adults, age 16-24, who are not engaged in work or education.)

Based on their work with a network of 40 communities, along with thought leaders and funders across the field, OYF is advancing four key principles that, when brought together, help empower youth to lead thriving and healthy lives. These principles are: Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose (BMWP).

OYF has brought together what they are learning from their communities on these core concepts, along with academic research and thought leadership. Out of this collaboration, they are developing a BMWP framework as well as a series of examples that demonstrate that when young adults are supported in an environment where they feel they can have a thriving future, the outcomes for both them and their greater community are more successful.

In this podcast conversation, we talk with OYF Director Geneva Wiki about this developing BMWP framework, what the concepts of Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose mean, and how to operationalize these practices into your own work.

Full transcripts of our podcasts are available at collectiveimpactforum.org

Resources and Footnotes

• Opportunity Youth Forum
• Targeted Universalism at the Othering and Belonging Institute
• Youth & Young Adult Wellbeing report
• Centering Youth in Well-Being Research and Programming: A Guide for Adult Allies
• Podcast: john a. powell – Operationalizing Equity in Collective Impact
• Life Course framework
• Purpose and Identity Processes Lab

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

We welcome back members of the Healthy Food Community of Practice to hear what they learned from their multi-year collaboration and how the way they worked together changed over time.

Launched in 2020, the Healthy Food Community of Practice is a network of more than 50 organizations working toward a shared goal—that communities of color across the country can access and consume nutritious food. Through their collaboration, they came to understand that to be successful, the community of practice had to shift *how* they worked together in four key ways:

• Move from scarcity to abundance
• Move from consensus to consent
• Move from breadth to depth
• Move from “I” to “we”

These pivots were necessary for the Healthy Food Community of Practice to strengthen their network and their ability to collaborate with each other, but it wasn’t easy.

In this new podcast conversation, we talk with community of practice members Minerva Delgado (Alliance to End Hunger) and Stacey McDaniel (YMCA of the USA), and Community of Practice Facilitator Carolina Ramirez (Community Wealth Partners) about their experiences and what they learned as they made these shifts in how they worked together. They share what was most challenging and most necessary for their work to be successful.

Resources and Footnotes

• Blog: From Chaos and Competition to Clarity and Coordination: Four Pivots for Aligning Coalitions to Achieve Equity
  Resource: Targeted Universalism
  Article: Curb Cut Effect
  Podcast: Strengthening Relationships through a Community of Practice
  Healthy Food Community of Practice
  Alliance to End Hunger
  YMCA of the USA
  Community Wealth Partners

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

The Millers for Nutrition coalition is working with 100+ millers and other partners to achieve an ambitious goal—getting nutritious, fortified food to 1 billion people by 2026.

One of the critical questions that Millers for Nutrition has grappled with is how to get private-sector partners, many of whom may be in competition with each other, to find common ground, build sustained, trusting relationships, and ultimately work together to support healthy food access for millions of people.

To learn what has worked to support private-sector collaboration, we talk with backbone team member Christian Pirzer from Endeva, and Yvonne Bakken from dsm-firmenich, a founding coalition partner. We explore what has been most helpful in developing these partnerships, and how they balanced the needs and considerations of the millers and other partners.

Resources and Footnotes

• Millers for Nutrition
• Endeva
• dsm-firmenich

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

What does it mean to build a movement? How is movement building connected to organizing and practicing solidarity with others? And why are these concepts important to make progress on collective work?

In this deep dive conversation, we discuss core aspects of movement-building with Adaku Utah, senior manager at Building Movement Project. In this discussion, we review definitions of movement-building, organizing, and solidarity. We also explore what it means to be doing movement work and why strong relationships are necessary to build strong movements.

References and Footnotes

• Building Movement Project
• Adaku Utah

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

Getting to the heart of complex problems can be tricky. How does one untangle the many threads that can be involved? How do you uncover what the real pain points are so that you can address them?

In this discussion, we explore the approach of human-centered design and how it can be used to both discover and uplift perspectives to help find community-focused solutions.

To learn more about human-centered design, we talk with Michelle Carrillo and Leslie Tergas of ThinkPlace West.  The discussion explores their work using the “four voices of design” approach, and uplifts examples of how to use this approach within collective work. We also discuss how tools like “empathy interviews” can help draw out community voices so that one can get a deeper understanding of community members’ experiences, including what’s working and what’s not.

References and Footnotes

• ThinkPlace
• Four Voices of Design

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

Communities can be “researched,” engaged, and surveyed to explore a variety of questions such as what barriers are preventing students from graduating? What are the local economic and health impacts of having only a few grocery stores in the area? It’s important to rigorously explore these types of questions, but there can be danger in taking data and stories from a community for the purpose of research. You can fall into the trap of “community extraction” if the research is not deeply connected to how that community progresses.

Participatory Action Research, otherwise known as PAR, is a methodology that engages those closest to the issues and positions them as the leading experts in research on and about their community.

To learn about PAR, and what it looks like when community members are the researchers, we hear about the work of NoLa CARES, a collaborative of childcare organizations that focuses on creating access, resources, and equity for the success of Black and Latine women in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

We talk with Dr. Nnenna Odim (Beloved Community) and community researchers Peggy Patterson and Lisa Williams about how NoLa CARES practices PAR to further their goals -  embedding it into their initiative to uplift community leadership, voice, and expertise, and support community members to take the lead in the changes they want to see.

References and Footnotes

• NoLa CARES
  Beloved Community

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

Addressing homelessness in rural areas has multiple complexities  including scarcity of funding, support services, and shelter options, as well as facing a common misconception that rural homelessness does not exist.

To better understand how homelessness was affecting their community, partners working in Mercer County, IL came together to participate in their own “100-day challenge,” an organized collaborative event that supports communities in kick-starting complex change efforts. As part of their 100 days, they mapped out the broader system that contributes to getting people rapidly housed and stress-tested their support infrastructure to see what was working and what was not.

In this discussion, we talk with several leaders from this work to learn about how folks came together for these 100 days. Joining us to share their experiences is Cathy Jordan (Project Now) and Sean Whitten, Sara Robens, and Peter Muse (RE!NSTITUTE). They share how they worked through challenging times to uncover how homelessness was hidden in their community, and what they did to support people moving into housing. 

Resources and Footnotes

• Project Now
• RE!NSTITUTE
• Systems Change and the 100-Day Challenge
• Palm Beach County 100-Day Dual Sector Challenge

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/

During the winter break, we're replaying some of our favorite past episodes.

This replay episode features a dynamic discussion from the 2021 Collective Impact Action Summit, and focuses on the importance of narrative in collective social change efforts. This discussion is led by Melody Barnes of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, and features Crystal Echo Hawk from IllumiNative, Rashad Robinson from Color of Change, and Nayantara Sen from Real Food Real Stories. 

Resources and Footnotes: 

• Video and Transcript: The Role of Narrative Change in Collective Action (Collective Impact Forum)
• Building Narrative Power (Color of Change)
• IllumiNative Insights and Actions Guide (IllumiNative)
• Making Waves: A Guide to Cultural Strategy (The Culture Group)
• Cultural Strategy: An Introduction and Primer (Art/Work Practice and Power California)
• Stolen Land, Stolen Bodies, and Stolen Stories (Stanford Social Innovation Review)

More on Collective Impact

Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/