Collective Impact

Every year we spend billions of dollars to address complex challenges, such as education, workforce development, and mobility. However, we fail to achieve the desired results, whereby, the work we are doing on the ground isn’t adding up to the impact we want to see in our community.

Collective Impact

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Every year we as a nation spend billions of dollars to address complex challenges, such as education, workforce development and mobility. However, we fail to achieve the desired results. The work we are doing on the ground isn’t adding up to the impact we want to see in our communities.

Most solutions have historically focused on applying programmatic fixes to the symptoms of these failing systems, rather than transforming the systems themselves to catalyze enduring change.

Collective Impact is a framework through which cross-sector tables work together differently to achieve large-scale results that endure. Effective Collective Impact approaches include a cross-sector partnership of decision makers and do-ers (or many of them) who have:

  • Defined and agreed upon a shared result (or bold endgame) that impacts people
  • Committed to a common agenda that includes changing their behavior to maintain the discipline necessary for achieving the desired result
  • Used data to create feedback loops that signal progress and drive continuous improvement

At Living Cities, we support initiatives that are applying these principles so that we can accelerate learning by doing, and support dramatically better results. Signature initiatives have included StriveTogether, The Integration Initiative, and the Working Cities Challenge.

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