In this episode, we’re talking about the findings from a new article in the winter 2022 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled, Centering Equity in Collective Impact. We’re doing a “behind the writing” deep dive discussion with several of the articles’ authors to hear about what lessons they learned from collaboratives who are practicing deep equity work, and what strategies arose through the process. Moderating this discussion is Cindy Santos of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, and joining Cindy for this chat are article coauthors Sheri Brady, Jennifer Splansky Juster, and Paul Schmitz.
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Please find a transcript of this podcast lower down this page
Resources and Footnotes
- Article: Centering Equity in Collective Impact (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
- Series: Collective Impact, 10 Years Later
- Blog: Redefining Collective Impact
- Article: The Water of Systems Change
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0. The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
More on Collective Impact approach to collaborate for social change:
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Listen to Past Episodes: Listen to past episodes in the Forum resource library. You can also listen and subscribe via Itunes, Spotify, Simplecast, Sticher, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
(Intro) Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative and online community that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we’re talking about the findings from a new article in the winter 2022 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled, Centering Equity in Collective Impact. We’re doing a “behind the writing” deep dive discussion with several of the articles’ authors to hear about what lessons they learned from collaboratives who are practicing deep equity work, and what strategies arose through the process. Moderating this discussion is Cindy Santos of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, and joining Cindy for this chat are article coauthors Sheri Brady, Jennifer Splansky Juster, and Paul Schmitz.
Cindy Santos: For the matter of introduction, I’m Cindy Santos and I’m the senior associate for strategic partnerships at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. One of the reasons why I came to Aspen is particularly my draw to the important collaborative work of the Collective Impact Forum and this opportunity to be a partner in that work and really see that work come together.
In my previous roles I saw firsthand the impact of cross-systems partnerships and community power building and systems transformation. I feel so privileged to have the pleasure to have joined Champions for Change in my first couple of weeks when I arrived at Aspen and to have engaged with the FSG team and the advisors, the presenters, and the participants from the U.S. and internationally.
The focus on centering equity and collective impact is really ever evolving and it’s encouraging to see the community of individuals, communities and organizations really doing the work that it takes to be equity focused and centered. Our guests today have been crucial partners in the Collective Impact Forum work and have really been in close proximity to communities and are boldly pursuing race equity in their work so this conversation accompanies an article that is now available in the Winter 2022 edition of SSIR, titled Centering Equity in Collective Impact. The article can be found at SSIR.org.
The article reflects evolution of equity and collective impact and was an opportunity to bring together the Collective Impact Forum team, our senior advisors, and the authors of the original article to elevate important learning around collective impact, in particular to elevate the elements of how to put equity at the center, which is so important for the field and towards building increased equity. I want to mention that the Collective Impact Forum and the partners have been elevating the importance of equity in collective impact for so many years so this isn’t new. At the 10-year mark, we just wanted to make sure to reach a broader audience and to do so even more formally than before through SSIR who provided the platform.
For today’s conversation, I want to introduce our speakers. Paul Schmitz is the CEO of Leading Inside Out and is a senior advisor of the Collective Impact Forum. He’s also the author of Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up. And I’d like to introduce Sheri Brady, who is the vice president of strategy and programs at the Children’s Defense Fund. She was previously a director for strategic partnership at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solution so I feel that I have pretty big shoes to fill. And Jennifer Splansky Juster who is the founding executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. I’d also like to thank the three other article’s authors, which is Junius Williams, John Kania, and Mark Kramer.
Paul, for folks who haven’t yet read the article I was wondering could you share a few highlights and key pieces of the content?
Paul Schmitz: Sure. Thanks, Cindy, and I think that as we reflected on these 10 years and on even the definition of collective impact and what it means, we were thinking about what does it mean to get to that kind of real change that we’re trying to drive, that real impact we’re trying to drive? Originally, the definition in the article 10 years ago was that it’s a commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.
There was a lot of emphasis at the time on the different sectors versus a focus on really the result and who needs to pull around it and especially equity in that result that any collective impact should make sure it’s achieving the result at some level of scale or population level without leaving anyone behind.
We began by revising the definition of collective impact that we’ll be using at the forum, which is that it’s a network of community members, organizations, and institutions who advance equity by learning together, aligning and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change.
Again, an emphasis on the change we’re trying to create in collective impact, which is at that population level, at that systems level, and the work of collective impact which requires us to think about how do we learn together, align our work, and integrate our work. It’s not just coming together to talk or do some coordination. It’s that full process, which involves a lot of learning and a lot of connecting the work in new ways that are much closer than collaboration. Again, really recognizing that any results we’re moving on need to be equitable in their approach.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Paul, this is Jen. Maybe I’ll just add on to that. In addition to updating the formal definition of collective impact, the other big thing that we did in the article and you’ll see this when you read it is that we outline what we landed on as concise strategies for how to implement equity in collective impact work.
We can go into them in a few minutes in more detail but just as an overview, the five strategies are grounding the work in data and context and targeting the solutions; focusing on systems change in addition to programs and services; shift power within the collaborative; listen to and act with the community; and then the fifth is build equity, leadership, and accountability. We can dive into those in a little bit more detail in a minute but that is a core part of the article that we wrote was diving into each of these five strategies with examples from the field of folks who are really living into this work and leading in this way.
The other thing I will say because folks might be wondering right now, “OK, so, I have heard of the five conditions of collective impact and now there are five strategies around equity. How do those relate to each other?” This is actually something that we as the authors struggled with a lot. Do we name equity as a sixth condition or how does it fit with the existing framework? Part of that conversation is what led us to say, actually what we need to do is redefine collective impact to have equity at the core. It’s not a standalone condition. It is the reason the work is happening and it cuts across the way that the whole effort is pursued and undertaken and who is engaged and involved in leading. We didn’t want equity to feel like an added-on sixth condition but rather to be integral implementation of all of the original five conditions and serve as the North Star.
Paul Schmitz: If I can just may, real quick, I think an important thing in that is when we thought about that, is that with equity it was recognized that it’s almost impossible to get to population-level change unless you address disparities, unless you fill those gaps, unless you bring people, everyone forward, and so it was a recognition that without that as a North Star, it’s almost impossible to get there and that equity might look different in different communities and different countries, in different places, but it’s really about as we will go into these strategies, about recognizing who’s not getting to a results and what do we have to do differently to move them there. I think every community can find that place, and obviously, in America, in our context, it’s often around race, but it’s other areas of equity as well.
Cindy Santos: Recognizing that that system-level change is needed to achieve equitable outcomes, Sheri, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about why this group came together to write this piece, the Centering Equity in Collective Impact?
Sheri Brady: I think there are several reasons but I think it really was this idea of really being—to put a more formal stake in the ground around not just why but how one does work with equity and purpose. It was also a way to think about the narrative that’s getting shared about this work. We talked about in the 10 years from the original, I guess it’s more like 12 years now—jeez, time flies. It’s all this Dr. Who wibbly-wobbly kind of thing for me right now but I think it’s more like 12 years since the original article came out. It’s dynamic. It’s been changing. We’ve been called to task around some things that were missing from the original article that communities who have been doing this work long before Kania and Kramer sort of named it, which is an important thing, but really had been doing this work and doing it in a way that recognized what was important and powerful for them and centering that. I think it was really, and it was mentioned earlier- we at the Collective—I’m not at the Collective Impact Forum anymore, but once you’re family, you’re always family—the Collective Impact Forum really put a stake in the ground that equity needed to be centered in the work but really hadn’t talked about it beyond sort of—we talked about it when we did TA. We talked about it at convenings but we weren’t talking about it sort of out in the world and so the narrative that was happening about it was not the narrative that should have been happening about the work. I think narrative change is important in a variety of ways.
You mentioned a little bit in the article. I’ll talk about that maybe a little later but really thinking that this was a good time to sort of sit back and sort of take a look at how it shifted and why and how this work is so important because I think if you’re not acknowledging that it’s this sort of cyclical thing that happens. I know collective impact was something that people were doing. It’s not the shiny new penny anymore but this work is always a shiny new penny because communities need to be centered and invested. If you’re not doing the work in that way, you’re not creating systemic sustainable change for those who are most impacted by the problems that we’re facing.
I think all of those things were coming into the conversation as we were talking around the table about this work and what we wanted to share about the work and what we thought needed to be highlighted now as folks were going forward with it. For me, that’s the why, I think. Others might have a different why, but that was the big important why for me.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Right on, Sheri. Thank you to Sheri. I think Sheri, you were one of the initial catalysts for saying we really ought to put pen to paper. We’ve been doing lots of trainings and we’ve talked about this a lot but we really should write something on this topic. Thank you, Sheri.
I realized that we haven’t shared the formal definition that we use for equity which is core to how we’re holding this conversation and this is a definition that we often use in Collective Impact Forum conferences and trainings and we have slightly adapted it from the organization, Urban Strategies Council, which defines equity as “fairness achieved through systematically addressing disparities in outcomes, opportunities, and representation, and addressing those disparities through targeted actions.” That’s the definition that we really anchor this whole conversation about equity on both the North Star and some of the actions that one needs to take in order to move towards greater equity.
Sheri, listening to you I really appreciated your overview of why we took on this piece and one thing I just really want to echo is there are so many folks in addition to the authors of this piece who have really informed our thinking and our work and the field’s work around equity in place-based collaborative collective impact type work. We have a very long list but some of the folks who I just want to name and thank for a really informing the work are Angela Glover Blackwell, Michael McAfee, john a. powell, Vu Le, and then Sheri, you and our advisors, Paul and Junious, and many folks on the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions team have really contributed to the way that equity cuts across collective impact work, Steve Patrick, Monique Miles, Melody Barnes, and others. These are folks that have been talking about this, many for decades and we owe a debt of gratitude to all of you, so thank you.
I guess one more thing I will say. Folks, when you read the article, you might notice that almost all of the examples that we draw from are based in the U.S. We also recognize that challenges around equity and oppression and marginalization exist, unfortunately, in all societies. Our teams’ expertise and knowledge and networks is primarily based in the U.S., and we do hope that the framing and the approach can be adapted to the local context when folks outside the U.S. and in the U.S. are looking at the data and seeing who is most oppressed, who is most marginalized, think about centering that group in your work and then the strategies can apply across different contexts and geographies as well.
Cindy Santos: The changing dynamic that Sheri mentioned is really important to name, and as we change the narrative and shift to acknowledging that community has to be centered and vested. Paul, I’m wondering what you learned about working in communication and that place-based collaboration that influenced the evolution of collective impact and informed the ideas in the article.
Paul Schmitz: I think one of the things I really honed in on when I was working on this were issues of power, and recognizing that I came into collective impact and into the forum, and one of the first things I ever wrote was fairly critical of collective impact and the multisector approach because it was very top-down. It was often about aggregating people who ran powerful institutions or had powerful positions to drive collective change but the people who had to do that change, the people who were going to be affected by that change had no role. I think collective impact has learned a lot because I think a lot of them hit walls early on on those issues.
As Jennifer mentioned when she went through the strategies, one of the strategies is about shifting power, and it’s a recognition of that tension that often exists between what I would call kind of institutional power, system power, those people who have authority or influence within systems or institutions, and those with community power, those with relationships who can influence change within their community among grassroots leaders or residents or others.
The challenge is when you bring both to a table, you’ve got a culture clash often, and the question is how do efforts really work at creating the kind of culture and relationships that can hold that together because what we often find is as a table becomes more inclusive and more democratic if you will, that some of the more powerful leaders bail or find other people to come in their stead because they feel it’s not at their level, and they kind of break the central rule of equity at that point.
On the other hand, people from community come and sometimes don’t fully engage in understanding the system responsibilities and the things the institutions have to do. So it’s really about building relationships and trust in a culture in which these folks can work together and share power, and each recognizing that each other are necessary.
To me it’s always been less about bringing sectors together and more about bringing the people together who can make change, and I don’t know how you get the real change if you’re doing work with just top-down or just bottom-up because I’ve seen lots of bottom-up efforts who just have great intention but can’t get things to move, and I’ve seen top-down just run over so it’s how do you build a table that can do both.
Embedded in that is our fourth strategy around acting with community, and really the key word there is the preposition with. It’s about how do we think about community not in this White savior way or this overly romanticized view that people have of community engagement, and instead just really understand that how we build our table, how we engage, it needs to be organic and authentic to that community, and that if the families, friends, and neighbors of intended beneficiaries, the intended beneficiaries themselves aren’t part of our effort and aren’t part of producing the outcomes, we’re probably not going to get very far. We talk about both of those within a context of equity as shifting power and doing work with community instead of for or to community.
Sheri Brady: Can I follow up a little bit on that because I agree 150% with Paul. I think this too has to do with respecting and understanding the knowledge of those who are most impacted by the issues that we’re facing. I think a lot of times we in this field, the best intentions. We come into it thinking that we know whatever because we have degrees, we have this, and funders and other folks who have traditional power in this place value that more than the knowledge of grandmamas and mamas who are at the table who are dealing with these issues every day.
At CDF one of the things we say about our work in the sense of if we’re not dealing with the problem that didn’t originate at Big Mama’s or mama’s table, then we’re not really dealing with the right problem because they are the ones who are the most impacted by this, and they have the knowledge and understanding of it, and respecting that that is knowledge, that that’s valuable and should be valued in this work, and that it’s not a risk because they didn’t get all the degrees that all of us on this phone call or video are lucky enough to have.
So I think that is a big piece of it for me that I’ve learned working in community, that it really needs to be a both/and, and we need to be—and it also needs to be a constant feedback loop and connections with those folks, and that’s why they need to be as part of the structure, the governance, the working groups or whatever bodies are a part of this, and it needs to be shared leadership, and it’s not just about, “Oh, they came to a meeting and we talked to them and told them what we were doing, and they thought it was great, and then we just kept on going,” because that’s not really getting systemic and deeply rooted change. It’s sort of just doing the top, and also, I think that targeting piece. We really need to be focusing and targeting those who are most marginalized in these situations in order to create change for all. I just wanted to add that to what Paul was saying.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I’ll just build a little bit on both/and, totally appreciate Sheri and Paul’s points, and Cindy, I was thinking about your question around some learnings that we’ve had from working with folks that informed the article. One of the things I was thinking about, one of the strategies for advancing equity—strategy two—is around focusing on systems change in addition to program and service work.
Often in collective impact efforts, I feel like most efforts are one or the other. There are collaboratives that come together and they’re really good at sharing knowledge about what’s working and improving and strengthening some of the programs or creating new programs and services that are extremely helpful for residents today yet they’re not focused on the bigger picture kind of systemic and structural change. We also know that if you want to get to impact at the scale that’s commensurate with the problem that you’re working to address, I’ve heard the expression, “you can’t program your way out of it.” I’m using air quotes with that expression. We have to think about shifting systems as well, and so there are other efforts, some are focused on programs, and then I’ve also seen some that are very focused on the systems change part. With systems change we’re talking about structural changes like shifting policy or resources. We also want to think about systems change as shifting relationships and power as well as mental models and culture and narrative. We reference a framework from a paper called The Water of Systems Change that goes in much more depth about ways to think about those different dimensions of systems change.
But what I have seen is that folks are focused on systems change or programs and services, and in the paper, we really want to encourage folks to think about both. As I said, the systems change work is so important of course if you want to get large-scale change that impacts a really broad share of the population, and a lot of that change takes a lot of time, and often folks are struggling today so also thinking about what we can do to meet more immediate needs, improving services, improving programs. That’s going to really help people today. It’s also the kind of work often that keeps people at the table as you can see progress happen more quickly. So I would think about it as systems change and improving programs and services and not making it a false choice that you can only do one or the other.
Cindy Santos: It’s so crucial to mention that acting with community authentically and organically is really important and central to this work. Jen, I appreciate you mentioning that there are people who have contributed as thought partners and as leaders and as practitioners, and there’s some really excellent examples of collective impact work that does exactly that but we know that writing, especially with a group of six, can be really hard. I’m wondering if there’s anything that got left on the cutting room floor that you’d like to share? Sheri, do you want to start?
Sheri Brady: Yeah, I’ll jump in here. There’s a couple of things that I think I would have liked for us to talk a little bit more about but SSIR only had so much room for this. Maybe the next is a monograph for a book, just kidding. But I think the conversation around narrative change and narrative shifting, and that a lot of what we’re fighting are harmful narratives for folks, and that has to be part of the work and part of the goals that this work is doing, that it’s really looking at the communities that we’re working with as assets, and from an asset base, not a deficit base.
Paul mentioned White savior, savior complex earlier, coming in to communities and thinking we’re going to solve your problems for you but really thinking that these communities have been—I hate the word resilient but I’m going to use it here because we need to question that, why folks need to be resilient but again, that’s another podcast. I think that these communities have been making it work in ways that might not seem successful to those on the outside but they’ve been getting stuff done. So that is important to understand that.
I think another piece here that I would thinking about for the previous question is leadership development, and how we think about as a part of this work not just working with communities but investing in communities to help them unlock the power they have and to build leaders, moving some of those people potentially who are informal leaders or who have that potential but haven’t had the access to be able to sort of get into more formal leadership positions. This work should be done with that sort of frame in mind, that we’re building leaders in communities as well to do this work because when some of these sectors folks go because something else has caught their eye or they think we’ve gotten to a point, these folks will still be in the community making stuff work but how are we helping them develop the skills that they might need to operate in other sort of arenas for this work. So I think that’s also an important piece to think about if you think about equity and what that looks like in CI efforts. So those are a couple of things I think I would have liked to be able to explore more as you were talking about some of this.
Paul Schmitz: I agree with Sheri completely. One is—writing this was a form of collective impact in a way that we had to build our own culture and go through a lot of the struggles that many groups do in getting to a goal together but it was really a wonderful experience also because everyone was so collegial in getting there and we practiced a lot of the values I think that are central to this work with each other as we worked through it.
One of the stories that got cut out that I had added was about working with community. It was a story about southwestern Wisconsin and the community action program there and some others who had—the farmer suicide rate is a real issue there, and they did all this work of really listening to the population of farmers and found everything from language to who were the messengers and who were the connectors, and it led to a process of realizing that working through their existing relationships was the way to identify people who might be having struggles and connect them to services that were appropriate and relevant to them. One of the things that ended up happening was training seed dealers, and equipment implementers, and mechanics and others in mental health first aid, the people they already had trusting relationships with. It was a great fit with listening to community, less so with equity in that it wasn’t really about—it was about a population of the workforce that was experiencing greater concern but didn’t fit as much with kind of the topic of racial equity we centered the article on, but I think it was a great example of listening to community, acting with community, and thinking of who produces outcomes beyond programs and organizations where you can really understand how existing relationships and community, wherever they are, can always be part of how you get to change.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s such a great example, Paul. Thank you for speaking to that one. We spoke with so many amazing folks in kind of fleshing out our research for this piece, and some of the work that we really admire that was not included in the final version of the paper is happening within the Opportunity Youth Network so that’s our partners at Aspen, the team that Cindy and formerly Sheri were part of. Part of their work is leading a network of sites across the U.S. and across the globe that are using place-based collaborative approaches to improve outcomes for opportunity youth between 16 and 24 who are not in school and not working. There’s so much amazing work happening in that network.
One of the things that I’ve always been really impressed by and inspired by is some of the narrative change that that group has been doing both at a local level and at a national level around changing the narrative about these young folks that are not working and not in school. Formerly I know many folks in the field referred to these as disconnected youth or other really negative or derogatory terms, and one of the pieces of the narrative change work that has been happening nationally and in places like Philly and Boston is shifting that toward opportunities so a mental model shift of really seeing and authentically experiencing work with these folks as opportunities, the opportunity that these folks have to live into their own potential and also the opportunity for communities and society to really engage folks in community. I love that shift from disconnected youth to opportunity youth, the narrative shift and the mental models that that can change in the terminology but really what it means.
That is one piece that I would mention, and then even just more specifically, the work of the Philadelphia Youth Network and Project U-Turn for example, they’ve been working on that with that same population. This is one of the communities that was part of the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions network, and another way they’ve gone about shifting mental models is shifting the expectations towards having high expectations of young people in the community. So many folks, 10, 15 years ago would look at a lot of the young people from certain neighborhoods, often young people of color, and not assume that these were kids that would be going into postsecondary education and on career paths towards economic opportunity and wealth building, and there’s a lot of work they’ve taken on locally to shift the mental model that folks have about the potential that these young people hold and the potential to thrive in college and thrive in careers. That has opened up new opportunities for new programming and new pathways based on building from that mental model shift, and so that’s another amazing example. We could go on with so many awesome examples but a shout out to the folks in Philadelphia doing that work. We learned a ton from it.
Sheri Brady: Can I just add something to that, to Jen, and also thinking about with that narrative shift of the OY work is thinking about taking the onus off the young people and their “failures,” and I’m using air quotes to say that, and thinking about the systems and how the systems—that the systemic things that are happening that these young people are facing that are roadblocks, and that they are sort of—again I talk about that resiliency of these young people to still sort of survive and get through things but not necessarily thriving in a way because there are lots of system barriers that they’re dealing with so I think also we’re thinking about this work, we talk about not just programming but also systemic changes and thinking about that connection. I think that’s an important piece of that narrative shift for OY work and the work that’s happening here. It’s this moving from sort of individual responsibility, individual blame to thinking about systems and why systems are failing communities or populations.
Cindy Santos: We’ve talked about the importance of shifting power and that narrative change and authentic engagement just to name a few themes. Is there anything that any of you would like to add?
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I would just want to thank all of the folks that we spoke with in the process of doing additional research to write this paper. There are some amazing folks that were so generous with their time and stories written up in the final article and some that didn’t but I just really wanted to thank everyone. Also we have our three co-authors who are not on the line, Junious Williams, John Kania, and Mark Kramer. Huge thanks to the three of you as well. This is, as folks have said, fully a team effort. All of our fingerprints on this work and our ideas are in here so huge thanks to all of you as well.
Paul Schmitz: I would just say that so many efforts I visited and worked with over the years are trying to figure out how to get this right. We’ve seen some great practitioners. Even the great ones still would say they’re on a journey, that they’re not at the destination, that it’s a practice, it’s not something that you just arrive at and it’s done. It’s something you’re continually—you know, to improve and work on and make sure it’s the center of the work in all aspects. I think we try to approach it holistically, and I feel like the lessons and examples we bring will help groups who have been struggling with what does it mean to do that, and I’ll just say I’ve seen a lot of groups I’ve been pretty critical of who pick up a piece of it. Early on I was very critical of groups that were very focused on racial equity or equity at the level of outcomes but weren’t looking at who’s at their tables and how they were dealing with community and all those other things, and I think we’ve given this kind of a holistic view that will help groups really think comprehensively about how to embrace this as part of their efforts and to have some practices and examples they can follow for that.
Sheri Brady: I will echo Jen’s thanks to the team. I had left sort of at the tail end of—or sort of middle of the tail end of the writing of this piece and was working my new job and trying to be responsive so thank you for the patience and the kindness of the authors for that.
I want to add a piece to that. One of the things that is bothersome for me, sometimes we talk about this and then people talk about, “Well, I don’t know enough about equity. I don’t know where to start.” That kind of place and stuff, there’s never going to be the perfect moment. It’s always the perfect moment, take whichever one you want to do but really jump in. There are tools here. There are resources available for folks who are not sure if they’re doing the right thing that can be helpful so I just want to say to folks who are listening to this, it is daunting but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It’s actually sort of a good thing. It can be challenging but it’s good because it’s pushing the work to be the best so really don’t let that hold you back. There are ways to get—there are places to get help. There are resources out there and so I would say just sort of jump in where you are and work with folks to make it better. There will be mistakes, acknowledge those and keep it moving. Mistakes are how we often learn so I just wanted to add that.
Cindy Santos: Thank you all so much for talking with us today, and thank you all for listening. We’d like to shout out the Collective Impact Forum website. There are lots of resources on advancing equity. We’d like to point you folks to the resources. There are many other resources as well on the site so until next time, thanks for being with us today.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes of this podcast, including a link to the article Centering Equity in Collective Impact.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast host. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, we hope you are safe and well.
