In my experience mobilizing communities to embrace large-scale change, I have learned that authentic communityengagement moves at the speed of trust. And, while most of us deeply appreciate the importance of trust-building, too often in our eagerness to launch into “the work” little time is actually invested and focused on intentionally building trust amongst partners.
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If we are in the work of community and systems change, which is where collective impact is best suited as a framework, then we should privilege the idea of principles versus the implementation of recipes.
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The movie Hidden Figures tells the story of three African-American women who made a significant difference to the US space industry. Their untold, until recently, story has many lessons for those engaged in community change. How many times do we join a collaborative table thinking that our share efforts will transform the community only to get disappointed that we were not included or that our skills and expertise were not leveraged? It took a crisis to bring forward the Hidden Figures but collaborative tables can uncover hidden assets early on with the Personal Asset Inventory Tool.
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What if we had all the time in the world? Would we use this time to build trust or would we fill the time with all the things that we do now, and still be no further ahead?
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Collective impact efforts are complex and challenging because there are so many moving parts. This presents a communications challenge. There are some emerging examples of collective impact efforts that have successfully synthesized their work to a Plan on a Page.
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Collective Impact is a framework that is being used by many communities to tackle complex problems. At the heart of the framework is the notion of bringing together diverse voices (business, government, community organizations and citizens) to deeply understand the problem and begin to develop strategies to address the systems context and policy barriers. The Collective Impact framework consists of five core conditions: the development of a common agenda that is shared amongst all stakeholders; shared measurement strategies to understand if progress is being made; engaging in mutually reinforcing activities; continuous communications and the support of backbone infrastructure.
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