In 2011, two of us, John Kania and Mark Kramer, published an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled “Collective Impact.” It quickly became the most downloaded article in the magazine’s history. To date, it has garnered more than one million downloads and 2,400 academic citations. More important, it encouraged many thousands of people around the world to apply the collective impact approach to a broad range of social and environmental problems. Independent evaluations have confirmed that the approach can contribute to large-scale impact and a global field of collective impact practitioners has emerged. Their efforts have immeasurably deepened our understanding of the many factors that can foster or stymie collective impact’s success.
In the original article, we defined collective impact as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.” We further identified a structured process with five essential conditions that distinguish collective impact from other types of collaboration:
- A common agenda, shaped by collectively defining the problem and creating a shared vision to solve it;
- Shared measurement, based on an agreement among all participants to track and share progress in the same way, which allows for continuous learning, improvement, and accountability;
- Mutually reinforcing activities, integrating the participants’ many different activities to maximize the end result;
- Continuous communication, which helps to build trust and forge new relationships;
- A “backbone” team, dedicated to aligning and coordinating the work of the group.
Reflecting on the past 10 years, we have observed through our own personal and professional journeys and the experience of others that the single greatest reason why collective impact efforts fall short is a failure to center equity. Thus, we believe that we must redefine collective impact to include centering equity as a prerequisite. In this vein, we propose a revised definition of the concept: Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions that advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change. To center equity, collective impact efforts must commit to a set of actions that we will explore in this article. (author introduction)
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