How to Partner for Impact: The Nuts and Bolts of Aligning Collective Impact Efforts
For more than a decade, the Forum for Youth investment has helped communities map, convene and align coalitions and initiatives focused on the interlocking issues that affect young people's futures, from premature births to college completion. Cast the net widely enough – say, along the whole cradle-to-career continuum – and even the smallest communities can identify dozens of efforts with overlapping goals, members, strategies and funders, even if their connections are relatively light. Cast the net narrowly, and those same communities are likely to find that there is more than one coalition focused on early childhood or violence prevention that have never sat together to discuss how their work overlaps.