Collective Impact- A Piece of Cake

For those of you who have been to any of Tamarack’s workshops you hear great speakers, find new resources and learn lots.  You now have the difficult task of communicating what you have learned back to your community and figure out how to implement your learning in your community. I have been in your shoes.  I have attended several of tamaracks events trying to find the answer to one question.  How do I do Collective Impact in my community?  I wanted someone to give me step by step instructions, but at the end of each event I was left with a head full of great tools and ideas but no recipe.

Our communities are changing every day and I realized that there is no "cake recipe" way of doing this kind of work.  I needed to understand my community and listen to what the community is saying.  Prior to working at Tamarack I worked in public health as a Healthy Communities Coordinator.  I learned that you need to build a solid foundation, involve the community from the start and build collaborative efforts to make it work.

This did not happen overnight, in fact it took 5 years.  The first two years we formed the backbone, build the relationships and determine what the needs are in the community (common agenda and shared measurements).  It then took another two years to bring the community together to develop and mobilize a community action plan (mutually reinforcing activities).  It wasn’t until year 4 before we became good at communicating with all those who were involved.

My suggestion is to take one thing at a time, if you try to do everything at once you are going to get overwhelmed and nothing will happen.  The tamarack website has a wealth of tools and resources that will help you through your collective impact journey.  

For those who have been doing  collective impact work  I want to hear from you.  How long did it take you to build your collective impact community?  What suggestions do you have for others who are just starting?  

Collective impact may not be as easy as making a cake but when you celebrate your community efforts serve cake!

Keep up the good work!