Collaborating for community or other types of social changes is not a recent idea. Formal community collaborations have been documented, along with corresponding literature, for almost 150 years. Explicit federal and philanthropic funding for collaborative efforts to address social issues began to burgeon during the 1980s. Before the end of the last century, it was rare to find a public or private Request for Proposal or grant program in the health and human services that did not require some form of collaboration, whether it was called a coalition, partnership, or collaborative. Every city had numerous collaborative efforts going on, each focusing on a certain social or health issue, or type of approach to that issue. By the mid 1990s, it was very common for nonprofit and other community leaders, along with funders, to spend a day or two each week going to meetings of different collaborative efforts in different offices, sometimes in the same building, and generally with the same people. Collaboration became the safe road to community and social change. We saw, during the same time, less funding going toward community organizing and other explicit efforts to redistribute power and wealth. While researchers and practitioners struggled with how to use collaboration to empower disenfranchised communities, Collective Impact was introduced as five basic ideas that would lead to change, devoid of any social justice agenda.