John Kania of the consulting firm FSG has been doing some great work on how communities mobilize change through Collective Impact. I saw him present this summer to the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading Conference in Denver. Here’s a recent article from the Stanford Innovation Review, where he summarizes this approach: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact
He started his presentation in Denver with pictures of a cake, a space shuttle, and a child. He made the point that on the spectrum of challenges, some are simple, like baking a cake; some are complicated, like sending a rocket to the moon; and some are complex, like educating youth.
The social sector treats problems as either simple or complicated, he argues. Yet, some issues, like educating youth, resist system-wide progress despite heroic efforts of countless teachers, administrators, nonprofits and billions of dollars in charitable contributions. It’s only when a core group of community leaders decide to abandon their individual agendas in favor of a collective approach that student achievement really improves.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how a collective impact model might work in Boulder County to close the achievement gap for kids growing up in poverty. I agree with John that the key conditions for collective impact to work include: a common agenda; shared measurement; mutually reinforcing activities; continuous communications; and backbone support.
The Community Foundation aims to provide at least some of this backbone support. The backbone’s key functions are to guide vision and strategy; support aligned activities; establish shared measurement practices; build public will; advance policy; and mobilize funding.
It’s a lot to take on, when you consider Boulder County is 751 square miles and has a population of 300,000 people. But the challenge becomes immediately easier to wrap your arms around when you consider that only about 3,000 kids ages birth to 5 are growing up in poverty in Boulder County. And about half of them live inside 15 square miles of the county — in east Longmont, Old Town Lafayette, and pockets of Boulder.
What if we could come together as a county and laser our focus on getting kids in these three areas ready for Kindergarten? It’s something I’d like to see come together, and soon.
BVSD Superintendent Bruce Messinger and I will be on KGNU 88.5 FM this Monday, Aug. 27, from 8:30 to 9 a.m., on the Public Affairs program hosted by The Community Foundation’s own Morgan Rogers. The topic is school readiness. Please tune in. I can be reached at chris@commfound.org.
