Collective Impact - What Leads Up to this?

In the August 31 Huffington Post Emmett D. Carson, CEO, Silicon Valley Community Foundation offers a critique of Collective Impact.

In the September 5 FSG blog Emily Gorin Malenfant offers a response.

I've written a number of articles focusing on collaboration and collective impact and I've posted comments on FSG blogs in the past.

In the FSG response Ms. Malenfant writes that it is essential that "nonprofit organizations, funders, businesses and government agencies actively work together from a common base of facts and a shared set of goals."

In my comments on FSG blogs I've asked for more information showing how these different stakeholders were brought together to the point where they had trust in each other and shared a common vision. This is a form of community organizing that is extremely difficult, but perhaps made easier if the person/organization doing the convening were also someone with a bucket of gold.

My faith in the Internet is that anyone, regardless of your status, wealth, etc. could post a good idea and reach out through free media to build a following. However, I recognize how difficult this is.

I encourage you to read both of the commentaries and more of the articles about collective impact. I don't think we can help millions of kids living in high poverty move through school and into jobs without a lot of people sharing the same vision and a long-term commitment to making this result a reality.

Getting Realistic about Funding Non Profits

There are two discussions on the Mentor Exchange forum that I encourage you to visit.

One is titled "Getting Realistic about Funding Non Profits" and focuses on the infrastructure costs that are essential to building great businesses, but which are terribly underfunded in non profit organizations. Read the article titled The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle, by Don Howard, Ann Goggins Gregory.

I can't tell you how often I look at the guidelines of potential donors which say "we don't pay for salaries". How would a business operate if there were no people on staff? Yet, that's what many grant makers seem to expect.

The second article is titled "Measuring Outcomes Across Multiple Youth Serving Organizations and Programs". The recommended reading is this report:

Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact, by Mark Kramer, Marcie Parkhurst, and Lalitha Vaidyanathan, FSG Social Impact Advisors, 2009
http://www.fsg-impact.org/ideas/pdf/Breakthroughs_in_Shared_Measurement.pdf

If volunteers,leaders, board members, donors, policy makers can read the same information, and view shared actions toward common goals, maybe we can move more consistently toward the real work of helping kids.

Making Music. Getting it Heard.

This is a new presentation created by Mina Song, an Intern from IIT, who has been with the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in Chicago for the past three weeks.

I've been operating in Chicago since 1993. This is the third largest city in the US. Without any dollars for advertising and public awareness, good ideas are like great tasting cheese in the back of the refrigerator. No one knows they are there. (I'm not so good at metaphors. Maybe this FSG article will stimulate your imagination so you can offer some that I might use.)

So, I've been innovating ways to get ideas into media and in front of more people for many years. In this page you can see a number of news stories generated in the 1990s because we had help from a PR firm in Chicago and we were part of a youth mentoring program that also was a source of stories.

However, through the last decade we had less help and fewer dollars so the types of ideas I've been generating depend on actions other people take to share these. Mina's presentation reviews some of those ideas and also illustrates how students can help in this communications effort.

I hope you'll take a look and want to help develop some of these strategies.

Collective Action - challenges and opportunities

This is one of many graphics created by the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections to show the role of a tutor/mentor program in connecting many people for many years to achieve a result we all want. See more like this in the Tutor/Mentor Institute site.

We've never had much money to build this organization and share our ideas with the powers that be in Chicago, yet what we are trying to do is critically important as the article below illustrates.

This introduction was received in my email today.

In the current issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, Collective Impact authors John Kania and Mark Kramer from FSG write that collective impact happens when a group of cross-sector actors commit to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem and agree to each be accountable to a single overarching goal.

Successful collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants, often organized and led by a 'backbone' organization.

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Read the full article and share it with future philanthropists who might fund the T/MC as a think tank and intermediary the way STRIVE is funded in Cincinnati ($1.5 million a year)and the way mentoring partnerships are funded in other cities and states ($300k to $1.5 million a year).

Then take a look at this video describing how to document actions taken in a collective effort. This demonstrates use of the OHATS that T/MC has piloted since 2000 and was created by a volunteer from the UK. The OHATS itself was re-built in 2008 by a volunteer based in Baltimore and his company in India.

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