for a smallish pot of money, working independently and often at cross-purposes, exaggerating their successes and hiding their failures. And you sort of hope it all somehow works out.
But in Spartanburg, the groups I saw weren’t trying to compete for money to show they were having isolated impact. They were part of a network working in interdependent ways to have collective impact. When life is going well, it’s because these influences are flowing together and reinforcing one another. SAM tries to harness dozens of influences in a way that conforms to the way people and places actually grow.
SAM embodies a new civic architecture that has become known as the “collective impact” approach. SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of seventy communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few community leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter and Gamble executive who was part of the group observed, “We’re program rich, but system poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.
A methodology was born, and with it, yet another new form of community power: organize around the data; focus on the assets of the community, not the deficits; realize there is no one silver-bullet solution; create a “backbone organization” (like SAM) that can bring all the players together; coordinate decision-making; communicate continuously; create working teams to implement action; share accountability.
At one point the folks in Cincinnati noticed that their students were not coming to school prepared for kindergarten. The data suggested that the private pre-K programs were performing better than the public ones. So the public school system allocated some of its money to support other, private, programs, making Cincinnati one of the first cities to offer universal pre-K. That’s a community working as one.
Collective impact structures got their name in 2011, when John Kania and Mark Kramer wrote an influential essay for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, in which they cited StriveTogether and provided the philosophical and theoretical basis for this kind of approach.
Collective impact starts with a group of people who are driven, Kania and Kramer argue, by an urgency for change. Maybe they want to extend the local life span by five years. Maybe they want to end homelessness.
They realize the complexity of their problem. They are not going to have a predetermined solution when they start. They’re going to engage in a long, iterative process of action and response before they can figure out the right mix of programs—in other words, they’re going to have to commit large sums of money and effort before they know exactly what they are going to do with the money, which is an uncomfortable thing to do.
What they’re investing in is a learning process. They’re getting the whole community to look at a complex problem together from a lot of different vantage points and letting the solutions emerge from the ensuing conversation. The quality of their efforts is defined by the quality of their questions, such as, Why, despite our best efforts, have we been unable to make this situation better?
In effect, they’re designing a way to get the whole community to travel like a flock. A flock of birds has the astonishing ability to travel together and shift course without the individual birds bumping into one another. They do it, scientists have learned, because each bird follows three simple rules: maintain minimum distance between you and the neighboring bird; fly at the same speed as your neighbor; always fly toward the center of the flock.
Collective impact requires systems thinking. Systems thinking is built around the idea that if you take the direct approach to any problem, you’re probably going to screw things up because you don’t see the complexity of the whole system. For example, people used to think the way to solve crime was to throw large numbers of criminals in prison. It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear that mass incarceration was taking potentially productive men out of the neighborhood; it was subjecting them to a prison experience that, later on, would steer them back toward crime and further destabilize neighborhoods. Over the long term you’ve ended up making the problem you’re trying to address that much worse.
A systems approach means acknowledging that each of us sees only a part of a