When a sufficient number of people adopt an innovation in a social system, the innovation can become selfsustaining and create further growth. Are we at that point of critical mass for Collective Impact?
Read MoreA blog by Mette Margarethe Elf, originally published on http://mindblog.dk.
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In the fall of 2010, I attended my first Tamarack Communities Collaborating Institute. I read every piece of material on the suggested material and I thought I was ready to take everything in over the next 5 days. By day 2 I was exhausted, my hand was so sore from writing so much and my brain was reaching it's digestive capacity. The last time I remember feeling this way was when I was young and I read through several volumes of our Childrens' Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Considerable attention is being paid to the role and importance of community engagement in successful collective impact efforts. The recent paper entitled Putting Community in Collective Impact by Richard Harwood and published by the Collective Impact Forum, dives more deeply into this important issue and concludes that, "civic culture matters for Collective Impact. Big Time!" Civic culture refers to the unique characteristics that describe "how a community works: how trust is formed, why and how people engage with each other; and the degree of readiness for change amongst leaders." Each community has its own civic culture and paying attention to it, makes it possible to accelerate and deepen collective impact efforts.
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Last November, J.W. McConnell Family Foundation President and CEO, Stephen Huddart, gave a talk at MaRS Discovery District that sketched out the emerging path being trail blazed by contemporary foundations. It is a path that is as significant for how it is being created emergently and collaboratively as it is for its destination system changes generating positive social and environmental outcomes.
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Collective Impact is all the rage. In my field, everyone is studying it, doing it, and lauding its virtues. Its birth is sourced from an article written a few years back in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by John Kania and Mark Kramer. The brilliance of this initial article, simply titled, Collective Impact, isn’t because it’s full of new ideas or because the authors identified a way of working that no one had considered before. Instead, their article offers an approach to largescale collaboration that is in effect a convergence of proven practice that they found in various places along the broad and complex landscape of social challenges.
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