Blog

Since the publication of Collective Impact in the winter 2011 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, this approach to cross-sector collaboration has been adopted by hundreds of partnerships across the globe. Many collective impact efforts have reported achieving positive results through their work, but to date there has not been a methodologically rigorous study of the approach’s impact across multiple efforts on multiple social issues.

We have been inspired watching the field of collective impact progress over the past five years, as thousands of practitioners, funders, and policymakers around the world employ the approach to help solve complex social problems at a large scale. The field’s understanding of what it takes to put the collective impact approach into practice continues to evolve through the contributions of many who are undertaking the deep work of collaborative social change, and their successes build on decades of work around effective cross-sector collaboration.

In order to truly solve the complex social issues our communities face, the structural causes of inequality along race, class, gender & culture lines need to be tackled head on. With its focus on changing systems, collective impact provides a framework through which these equity goals can be explicitly advanced.