The Culture of Collective Impact
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United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County

The Culture of Collective Impact

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October 27, 2014

United Way of Greater Milwaukee board member, Paul Schmitz shares his vision with Huffington Post on why The Culture of Collective Impact is necessary to succeed.

"I came to believe in collective impact from a cognitive dissonance I increasingly experienced during two decades of work in the nonprofit sector. It culminated in April, 2010, when I awoke to a headline that my hometown Milwaukee had the worst 4th grade reading scores for African American children in America. That same day I received a newsletter from a well-regarded youth organization boasting about the outcomes it was achieving for the children they served. I could not reconcile why we had great programs achieving outcomes, and yet the city-wide numbers did not seem to ever change.

My former organization Public Allies partnered annually with more than 500 local nonprofit organizations in 23 communities. We saw the great impacts of so many groups first-hand, but we also we were confounded by the issue siloes, geographic turf wars, and egos that prevented any real progress on solving complex community problems. Issues like education, economic security, housing, and health are not fragmented in peoples' lives, but the systems that serve them are. They are even fragmented at the neighborhood level. We had a project once that hired youth as community organizers to map out the assets in their neighborhoods, and the youth were shocked to find that the teachers and principals at their schools, local pastors, youthworkers at nonprofit agencies, and other neighborhood leaders did not know each other. Without more comprehensive efforts, it seemed that isolated impacts of organizations rarely sustained or spread.

In 2010, I began writing my book, Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up, and sought examples of truly comprehensive collaborative efforts. Through our Allies, I learned about the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati and The United Way of Greater Milwaukee, which led efforts to bring organizations together in initiatives that had begun actually moving the needle on city-wide numbers in regard to education and teen pregnancy prevention. The White House Council on Community Solutions, which I had been appointed to, also began around that time. We decided that rather than look for great programs to scale, that we should find communities that actually had moved the needle on long-term problems. As we began our exploration, John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG's seminal article "Collective Impact" was published in The Stanford Social Innovation Review and greatly influenced our work. Our own research on community solutions which we published in our Council's 2012 White Paper on Community Collaboratives reinforced and built on the lessons they shared."

Read Paul's entire blog post.