(Illustration by Hugo Herrera)
In September 2021, Melody Barnes, chair of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, led a conversation with four social change leaders who for more than a decade have used collective impact to create collaborative, place-based change.
Participants included Jennifer Blatz, president and CEO of StriveTogether, a national network of local communities striving to achieve racial equity and economic mobility, supporting the success of every child from cradle to career; Geoffrey Canada, founder and president of Harlem Children’s Zone and the recently launched William Julius Wilson Center, nonprofits working to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty with comprehensive, on-the-ground programming that builds opportunities for children, families, and communities; Rosanne Haggerty, president and chief executive officer of Community Solutions, a nonprofit working to achieve a lasting end to homelessness; and Erik Stegman, chief executive officer of Native Americans in Philanthropy, an organization promoting increased and equitable investments in tribal communities that align with Indigenous values.
During the conversation, which was co-hosted by the Collective Impact Forum and Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, they discussed how their years of experience with collective impact has evolved and what they have learned that will carry them into the next decade of collaborative work to improve communities. Topics included the impact of their network’s efforts, challenges their initiatives have faced, the roles data and philanthropy play in collective impact, and what lies ahead for this field of work.
Below is an excerpt of this conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length. The complete conversation dives further into these topics and shares examples of how this work has taken root in a diverse set of communities across the United States. Listen to the podcast below and follow this series for new conversations and essays about collective impact.
Melody Barnes
Looking Back
Melody Barnes: The Harlem Children’s Zone, founded in the 1990s, is one of the earliest examples we have of a comprehensive community change initiative. Can you speak to the lessons from Harlem Children’s Zone and draw the connection to collective impact?
Geoffrey Canada: The first lesson is that the work is hard. I don’t want to say that lightly. It is hard and it’s hard every day. By going into the toughest places to work, you're going into challenging circumstances and you just have to be comfortable with the fact that it’s going to be hard.
Geoffrey Canada
Two, it takes much longer than I would hope to actually see the change. If someone had looked at our data the first five years, they probably would have said, “I don’t think this thing is working.” It takes a long time to produce the kind of results that you really care about.
The third is that you have to really find the right talent to bring together to do something that’s complicated. The nature of the work is that talent changes all the time and so you have to constantly make sure you have top-shelf talent.
Jennifer Blatz
Melody Barnes: Jennifer, the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati was featured in the original Stanford Social Innovation Review article about collective impact. Tell us where your work with children and communities is today and what impact you’ve been able to have as a result of collective impact.
Jennifer Blatz: We have grown to serve nearly 70 communities in 29 states. We reach 11 million children and 7 million of those children are children of color. When you have a scale of that magnitude, there is so much learning that happens from our partnerships.
The success that we’ve had has been largely a result of the learning—that shared learning that happens across the network—and creating our own framework based on lessons that we learn on the ground. We call it our StriveTogether theory of action for building cradle-to-career civic infrastructure.
We’ve released the fifth iteration of that theory of action, and it is about centering racial and ethnic equity much more explicitly than the earliest days.
But there has been a lot of success. Of our network of nearly 70 partnerships, 16 of those partnerships are “proof point partnerships,” which means they’ve demonstrated that they’ve moved the needle on four of six cradle-to-career outcomes. They’ve seen improvement as well as examples of systems change. That’s really what we’re working to drive, to get the outcomes at scale, to get the population-level impact, we have to change systems.
Our network of communities pushed us to raise the bar. What does systems transformation look like and how do you measure it? We measure it through the shifting of power structures, the shifting of policies, the shifting of resources, and the shifting of practices.
Erik Stegman
Breaking Down Silos
Melody Barnes: Erik, as the leader of Native Americans in Philanthropy, you have watched collective impact gain more and more traction in a wide range of communities around the country. I'm curious what you find compelling about this framework and what may raise concerns for you about this frame as well.
Erik Stegman: I think collective impact is actually an approach that’s working toward a more Indigenous worldview, and I’ll explain how I think about that. We’re doing a lot of work right now at Native Americans in Philanthropy in the climate and conservation space. It’s a growing, very important part of our work. It’s one of the number one priorities for all of our communities and nations.
What I’ve started to realize is the silos and the systems, particularly in sectors like philanthropy, are actually the biggest problem. Although I think a lot of times philanthropy is regularly acknowledging the silos, I don’t think they’re ready to confront the fact that they sometimes are the biggest barriers.
Native communities do not think about the environment in a siloed way, both from our cultural practices, our worldview. So when we’re talking about solutions and systems change, it’s really hard for me to go and say, “Hey, why aren’t the climate funders talking to the conservation funders on this coastal resilience project?” Because the tribes are also thinking of the area as an economic development space, as a cultural space, and just to even get to that point of having a similar conversation with one another is really challenging.
What I would like to do to push the collective impact community and stakeholders into new directions is to really think about how we are talking about it. I think it’s really important to have the analytical approach to everything that we’re doing on the ground and trying to invest in systems change, but we’re going to have to share that story differently when it comes to each community.
Melody Barnes: What’s the best way you believe to go about building that narrative and storytelling shift so the field of collective impact can scale those practices?
Erik Stegman: In my past position, I was working with a lot of youth who had experienced the foster care system in Indian country, and a lot of what we were doing was really trying to co-develop leadership development and advocacy platforms for them in a way where we could lift up their personal stories in a non-extractive, strengths-based way, and then to help connect that story to different stakeholders.
Rosanne Haggerty
I think one of Native Americans in Philanthropy’s strongest roles is to make sure that we’re investing in the voice of who’s impacted, and do work behind the scenes with them to ensure that we’re getting that voice out to a lot of different channels so that lots of different potential system change agents can actually act on it, in collective impact and other forms of systems change work.
Effectively Using Data
Melody Barnes: Rosanne, we know that part of what led to the MacArthur Foundation’s recent $100 million investment in Community Solutions is your deep commitment to data and rigor and impact. I want you to tell us a little bit more about what this looks like in the context of your work to end homelessness and how your approach to data has evolved over the past decade.
Rosanne Haggerty: We took this leap 10 years ago with an understanding that good programs were not enough to gain ground on homelessness. A different way of thinking and working was needed to address the fragmentation of responsibility, as well as the lack of accountability in seeing that all of the investments and worthy activities and good programs in a community were adding up to less homelessness.
We started about five years ago, not just doing more quality improvement work, more work with data, but we actually put a different end state out there. We asked what it would take for communities to work together to get to functional zero homelessness population by population—to work toward an end state where homelessness is measurably rare overall and brief when it occurs, and where a new case of homelessness is quickly spotted and resolved.
We now have 89 cities, counties, or regions that are part of this movement. We have 14 that have gotten to the sustainable end state of functional zero for people experiencing chronic or veteran homelessness. We have another 44 communities that are showing measurable progress.
The key to all this is having a shared end state and having shared measures. This allows community teams to focus on implementation of a collective aim and the practice of using data to improve the quality of their system. Shared, comprehensive, real-time data also allows communities to see how the issue is moving and changing, who it’s affecting across the population and individually. Tracking these two at the same time—the population level and the person level—is vital to shifting a system to achieve comprehensive and lasting improvement. It’s also necessary to understand how racial disparities are producing and sustaining homelessness.
I think this rigor around data, both personal (which is held in a HIPAA-compliant way in each community) and at the aggregate level (across a community and across our network), is helping communities understand that effective collective action requires quality, real-time data.
You cannot actually have a common language around what’s working, what isn’t, where we need to put our investment, or who is being left out without this kind of data rigor. Data as a learning tool, not used for judgment or merely filing reports, may be the most powerful tool for effective collective action.
Melody Barnes: I would love for you to talk a little bit more about seeing data as a helpful tool, an accelerant to try and meet your mission. There are those who shy away from data—or the perception is that they shy away from it, or find it’s hard to gather data and use it effectively. Can we hear more about some of the challenges and the ways you’ve been able to overcome them?
Rosanne Haggerty: At the outset of our journey, I will say that we were kind of in that trap of thinking that if we only got the right data matching systems set up and the right agreements in place, everything would look clear and there’d be a straight path. What we’ve learned is that the process of understanding a shared reality in a community and having the data that reveals that shared reality is really a social process. The key agencies that are touching homelessness—the nonprofits receiving Department of Housing and Urban Development funding, county agencies, the housing authority, the Veterans Administration—they all need to be sitting at the same table and constructing and responding together to the shared data. In many places, this collaboration is an undeveloped process.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In each one of the communities in our Built for Zero network there are groups of people sitting down and getting this new kind of shared truth established, accounting for everyone experiencing homelessness across the community, and having data quality standards that can allow teams of folks to understand: Are we missing anyone? Are we able to update the data regularly? Are we able to use the data to see trends and run tests to see what improvements will actually move the needle on some of the biggest opportunities that the data suggest could reduce homelessness?
This is basically the real-time use of information and a feedback loop to help communities accomplish a collective goal, and I have to say we hear all the time from communities that this is actually changing the way they think about public services generally. It’s changing the way they think about the whole constellation of issues surrounding homelessness.
The Role of Philanthropy
Geoffrey Canada: Early on in my career, you were punished for being honest about outcomes and data, right? If the data was bad, then people said, “Oh, that didn’t work. We’ll stop funding you.” There was reluctance in the field to be transparent. It’s the opposite of the way that medicine works where people say, “Oh, it didn’t work, so what are you going to do next? Let’s fund you to do something better, more creative, more innovative because we know we have to solve the problem.” So if the answer is, “If you fail, then we don’t fund you anymore,” you drive all of the creativity out of the field.
Melody Barnes: How has collective impact linked up with philanthropy? Can these two—a transformative approach to solving a challenge and a powerful funding source—be friends?
Geoffrey Canada: People keep trying to force folks to make a choice. Are you going to work at this level of systems change or are you going to work at the community level?
What I would say to the philanthropic community is you all need to practice a little collective work yourselves, right? You all need to come together and say, look, if I can’t fund all of it, I need partners because you can’t get folks thinking you have to choose between which one you’re going to do. We’ve got to figure out a way to do both of these things, and it’s going to take resources to do it.
Melody Barnes: Funding both the direct services and the “unsexy work” of backbone organizations is what makes collective impact successful, helps the collaboration take place, and supports the data and so many other elements of the work. They need resources as well. That’s something that we often see missing in communities.
Jennifer Blatz: In terms of philanthropy as a partner in collective impact, it goes back to what Geoff said at the outset of this being long-term work. I see that philanthropy can commit to longer term, particularly at the national kind of capability building, but local philanthropy is where it’s been more challenging, and for the reasons that you discussed, this kind of false dichotomy of program versus systems work.
And so much of the work that we’re trying to move in communities is publicly funded. So particularly in this time of economic stimulus, we’ve been working on how to tell the story of the return on investment—the drop in the bucket that philanthropy pays to move those public dollars to a more equitable recovery.
We’re seeing examples of that driven by collective impact partnerships in communities like Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Bridgeport Prospers put together a cross-sector partnership to work on prenatal-to-3 strategies that they call the Bridgeport Baby Bundle, and they’re leveraging American Rescue Plan funds to spread that type of practice across the state of Connecticut.
Looking Ahead
Melody Barnes: In closing, what have you learned over the last 10 years that we need to carry into the next 10?
Geoffrey Canada: Having grown up during the war on poverty when people said that you couldn’t solve these issues and giving public dollars just really didn’t matter, I think the big lesson is that we’ve proven it works. You can do these tough things. You can eliminate the achievement gap. You can tackle homelessness. You can scale this work across regions. I think that’s huge. It’s important. We’ve got data and evidence that it actually works.
Rosanne Haggerty: I’ll echo that with the fact that homelessness is solvable. We now have the evidence that communities have done it, and we see what the path looks like and that it’s not just about money. It’s about the way we organize ourselves to be accountable for driving solutions.
Jennifer Blatz: I think a key learning for us is that those who are most impacted by the systems that we’re working to change have to be part of changing those systems. So really working to get to authentic community ownership and working together with communities to co-develop solutions is the best way to get outcomes at scale.
Erik Stegman: I think we are at a unique point when the broader public is understanding the problems in these systems at a much deeper level because of the pandemic and a lot of the other things that have been going on. I think now what I really want to focus on is to continuing to leverage that understanding in a new way for a bigger audience and to figuring out how we can use collective impact as an approach to help really showcase these solutions.
Listen to a podcast of the complete interview and follow this series for new conversations and essays about collective impact.
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Read more stories by Melody Barnes, Jennifer Blatz, Geoffrey Canada, Rosanne Haggerty & Erik Stegman.