TechBridge’s Karen Cramer (who leads our Collective Action consulting practice) is attending global nonprofit advisory firm FSG’s Collective Impact Convening (CIC) in Chicago. The CIC brings together funders, backbones, partners, and community members for cross-sector dialogue and peer-learning to tackle complex issues in the collective impact field. The concept of collective impact was first articulated in the Stanford Social Innovation Review article Collective Impact by John Kania and Mark Kramer at FSG.
Hundreds of representatives from cross-sector collaboratives are convening in Chicago to learn from the challenges and successes of other collective impact efforts. On Wednesday, Karen will be on a field trip to learn more about an educational collaborative in Chicago. The Little Village Education Collaborative (LVEC) of Enlace, Chicago convenes over 45 multi-sector partners encompassing the educational pipeline from early childhood education to adult education.
TechBridge focuses on collective action because in order to effectively break the cycle of generational poverty communities must better coordinate services and use data to fund the combination of programs and services most effective in moving residents from survival to stability to success. A community able to successfully execute collective action is empowered with the following:
- Front-line agencies with the capability to collect, share, analyze, and act on meaningful data
- A connected infrastructure that supports the coordination of care and services across agencies and makes data sharing, aggregation, and community-level analysis both possible and efficient
- A coordinated theory of change that sets aspirational goals for the community, connects the coordination of services necessary to achieve these goals and integrates with the theories of change, logic models, and program models of individual nonprofits
- Innovation and decision-making, driven by deep insight into field-level data combined with insight into previously hidden barriers and other drivers of success or failure for community residents suffering from poverty
- Investment decisions based on performance, contributions to community goals, and addressing funder and service gaps hindering progress
- A community engaging in continuous improvement by taking learning and provided innovations and applying them to continuing iterations of introspection, planning, and execution
TechBridge helps our nonprofits prepare for collective action. To see how ready your nonprofit is, complete our operational readiness assessment.
Download TechBridge’s Collective Action White Paper.
Learn more about how TechBridge can accelerate the efforts of your collaborative! Contact Karen Cramer.
