|
Jeff Edmondson is managing director of StriveTogether, a network of "cradle to career" efforts in 26 states considered one of the most expansive and prominent collective-impact endeavors.
Twenty organizations in the Portland, Ore., area offer summer programs to help prepare rising ninth-graders for high school, but their early efforts weren't reaching enough kids at risk of dropping out.
That sobering message wasn't delivered by a school superintendent but by All Hands Raised, an organization in Portland that aspires to raise educational achievement in six low-income school districts.
The organizations aimed to have at least 75 percent of those enrolled in the summer-enrichment program Ninth Grade Counts consist of students classified by their schools as at risk of dropping out-the ones most in need of a summer boost. When All Hands Raised crunched the enrollment numbers, however, it found that only 55 percent of students in the program were so classified.
At monthly meetings, All Hands Raised pushed the 20 organizations to work more closely with school counselors to get more students who were struggling into the program.
"Everyone had to accept that this was a failure," says Dan Ryan, chief executive of All Hands Raised. "It wasn't about shaming everybody. It was about shining the light on the possibility to improve."
Since that weak start in 2009, the organizations are now reaching more of those the program is designed to help. Today, students at risk of dropping out make up nearly 80 percent of the program's enrollment.
All Hands Raised is one of many new organizations around the country that champion an approach called "collective impact," in which a number of local organizations work together to solve systemic social problems and use data to chart their progress.
The strides made by Ninth Grade Counts illustrate why advocates of collective impact hope it can achieve the nonprofit sector's holy grail-something often attempted but too seldom accomplished: achieving lasting progress in tackling big systemic problems, in areas such as education and criminal justice.
But even the most ardent advocates of the approach worry that it is being overhyped, and they acknowledge that many prominent collective-impact efforts have a long way to go before they can claim success. In Portland, for example, some schools that have succeeded in getting more at-risk students to enroll in Ninth Grade Counts have yet to see that participation translate into higher graduation rates.
"It's a work in progress," says Jeff Edmondson, managing director of StriveTogether, a network of "cradle to career" efforts in 26 states that is considered one of the most expansive and prominent collective-impact endeavors. "All of the pioneers will tell you that we have to fail forward, and build this as we go."
Different Approach
Until recently, grant makers and nonprofit leaders focused heavily on identifying high-achieving charities-often headed by charismatic chief executives-and helping them spread their top programs throughout the country.
Collective-impact efforts are different and more challenging. The focus is distinctly local, and often involves as many as 100 partners, all corralled by a "backbone organization"-like All Hands Raised-that keeps the focus on the goal of making steady progress in fighting a particular problem that is thorny and persistent. The groups agree up front on various data points that will guide their progress and point them toward areas in which changes may be needed, as in the summer programs for at-risk students in Portland.
"Collective impact is fundamentally different from the paradigms that we've seen for trying to solve social problems in the past 50 years," says Fay Hanleybrown, a managing director at FSG, a consulting firm that is perhaps the strategy's biggest champion. "This is about having a very structured approach to using data and course correcting as you go."
New Buzzword
One of the first, and perhaps the best-known, collective-impact efforts is the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati. Strive was created in 2006, when a diverse group of leaders-school-district superintendents, early-childhood educators, nonprofit and business leaders, grant makers, city officials, and university presidents-came together to try to improve education. They agreed on a common set of goals and indicators to track progress, including readiness for kindergarten, fourth-grade reading and math scores, graduation rates, and college completion.
FSG drew heavily on the Strive Partnership when, in late 2010, it adopted the term "collective impact" to describe broad approaches to social problems that rely heavily on data to chart progress. Within a short time, "collective impact" became a buzzword in philanthropy, and since then, excitement about the strategy has increased.
Today, it's hard to find a major U.S. city that doesn't have some kind of collective-impact effort under way. In March, FSG and the Aspen Institute's Forum for Community Solutions created an online forum devoted to collective impact. Within six months, 7,000 people had signed up.
The Obama administration is among the believers in the approach. In December 2012, the seven school districts participating in the Road Map Project, a collective-impact effort in South Seattle and surrounding areas to double college completion rates, won a $40-million Race to the Top grant from the U.S. Department of Education. And the federal Social Innovation Fund, which has given $243-million since 2010, announced in September that in its latest round of grants, it gave special consideration to proposals involving collective-impact approaches.
Improving education has been the main goal of many collective-impact efforts, but some successful results have been achieved in other areas. For example, an effort to overhaul New York State's juvenile-justice system significantly reduced the number of juvenile arrests and the number of youths in state custody two years later.
The approach has also helped Vibrant Communities to significantly reduce poverty rates in 13 cities in Canada; has enabled Somerville, Mass., to reduce obesity among its residents; and was effective in reducing binge drinking in Franklin County, Mass.
In Name Only
Not surprisingly, some old-school collaborations are adopting the collective-impact name.
John Kania, an FSG managing director who helped popularize the use of the term in the nonprofit sector, wrote recently in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that grant makers are getting proposals from charities that claim the use of a collective-impact approach but aren't really practicing that. And conversely, some foundations are pushing grantees to collaborate in "collective-impact" efforts that aren't true to the strategy.
Steve Patrick is executive director of the Aspen Institute's Forum for Community Solutions, which manages a fund that plans to invest $13-million over five years in local efforts that use a collective-impact approach to help young people who have either dropped out of school or are unemployed. When giving talks about the fund, he addresses the faddishness of the approach up front.
"How many of you got a little nauseous when I just put 'collective' and 'impact' together in the same sentence?" he says.
The buzz around the Strive Partnership has spawned copycat efforts around the country. The interest is so strong that Mr. Edmondson, its founding executive director, left to create and lead the StriveTogether network.
By 2012, the network had 100 members. Now the number is down to 49. Mr. Edmondson booted more than half the groups from the network after determining that they had not met certain milestones, like reaching broad consensus on desired outcomes or identifying data points as markers of progress.
"This is the hardest work you could ever do, and we were at risk of watering it down," Mr. Edmondson says. "We had to set a higher bar for what it means to take this work on in an authentic way."
Need for Evidence
As the pretenders fall away, the more important question becomes: Does the intensive approach actually work? Despite all the enthusiasm about it, there is little evidence demonstrating that a collective-impact approach can solve intractable social problems.
One reason for caution is the weak track record of previous collective attempts by philanthropists, schools, government agencies, and political leaders to tackle persistent systemic problems.
The language used by the Annie E. Casey Foundation for its 1988 New Futures program-a $50-million, five-year effort to aid at-risk children in five cities-sounds a lot like collective impact today. Strong political leadership, data-driven decision making, and interagency collaboration were supposed to drive down the rates of kids who dropped out of school and of teenage girls who became pregnant. By Casey's own admission, New Futures didn't work.
The foundation's mission is creating a brighter future for low-income children, so the organization continues to take on difficult urban challenges.
In May, at a sold-out conference held at the Aspen Institute for foundations interested in the collective-impact approach, Patrick McCarthy, Casey's president, described how it's being used by four current foundation projects, most of them based in Baltimore.
Mr. McCarthy says that in spite of the failure of the New Futures program, he is optimistic about the collective-impact approach, in part because of all the energy people are putting into refining the model.
"The how-to, the implementation approach is much more fully described and documented" than when Casey unveiled New Futures, he says.
"I'm not claiming that we've found the magic potion," Mr. McCarthy adds. "There's a lot more work to do. We need to be modest in what we claim for how much the collective-impact principles are backed up by rigorous evidence."
| 
