Earlier this year I was approached to share my thoughts about collective impact as part of Maytree's popular lunch-and-learn program Five Good Ideas which invites subject matter experts to discuss "powerful yet practical ideas on key management issues facing non-profit organizations." I eagerly said yes, but then discovered that this is not an easy task.
I became a collective impact evangelist in 2012. I saw and felt its possibility and what it might mean for the unacceptably high and stubbornly consistent number of Australians living in entrenched disadvantage, despite us being the 'lucky country', seemingly immune to impacts like the global financial crisis.
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Collective Impact has increased our focus on moving the needle on population level changes. John Kania, Managing Partner of FSG Social Impact Consultants and author of many articles on collective impact has called this 'positive and consistent progress at scale'. But are population level indicators the only ones that we need to pay attention to when moving toward collective impact?
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Creating a healthy, humane world will require more than new organizational designs, writes Hildy Gottlieb in a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Building Movements, Not Organizations. It will take rethinking the nature of organizations entirely.
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This article first appeared in the July 2015 newsletter of Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Technical Assistance Coordinating Center.
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Last year I joined the Collective Impact Summit after completing a Masters in Africa and International Development from the University of Edinburgh. Having lived, studied and worked abroad on and off for the previous three years gaining insights and experience regarding international development initiatives within southern and eastern Africa, I came home feeling disappointed and disheartened by the track record of the field and lost by the complexities of the issues I had faced in both my practical work and my theoretical studies. Frustrations around top-down approaches to community development initiatives; the saturation and overlap of NGO’s working in silos on similar issues within the same regions; the neglect of context-specific, place-based solutions and the proliferation of silver-bullet ideas to ‘save the world’; the privilege and power of the western voice over the strength and wisdom of community actors. It felt as though one could not take a step forward in this field, without taking two steps back.
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