With a grant of $40,000 and capacity building volunteer support, SVP will assist Futurewise to deepen their engagement and leadership in collective action.  Specifically, they will focus on Futurewise’s work with Growing Transit Communities, an initiative that engages public and private funders, city and regional government, as well as nonprofits.

Futurewise is an ideal partner for the Enviro CAT’s campaign: “On track and all aboard: using transit to build a healthy, livable, equitable and prosperous community for all.” Futurewise understands the vital roles equity and the economy play in championing change in our environment, and have done exemplary work in building transit-oriented communities.

Members of the Enviro CAT are excited to begin their partnership with Futurewise.

“At SVP, we are in a unique position to say to nonprofits like Futurewise: ‘What are your biggest dreams... and how do we help you get there,’” shares CAT member, Meg Enderby.

In their relationship with Futurewise, CAT members hope to leverage SVP’s expertise in connecting philanthropists and nonprofits – exchanging skills and knowledge that strengthens both parties, allowing them to make a greater impact together.  With increased excitement in building transit-oriented cities, SVP has the opportunity to help build Futurewise’s capacity to take on a larger role in community wide efforts as well as support and learn how to deepen SVP’s role in collective action.

This grant is made in coordination with the Puget Sound Funders Partnership for Sustainable Communities, a funders collaborative focused on the environment, equity and the economy, working to build a stronger Seattle where everyone is able to live, lead and thrive.  SVP serves as co-chair of the collaborative.

More About Futurewise

Futurewise is a statewide public interest group working to promote healthy communities and cities while protecting farmland, forests and shorelines today and for future generations.

They are the only statewide group in Washington working to ensure that local governments manage growth responsibly. Founded in 1990, Futurewise has established an impressive track record on growth management issues as the state's primary advocate for smart growth policies.
Futurewise's organizing and advocacy work, public education and legal program, and the technical support that they provide local groups have become the foundation of good growth management in Washington.

Join Us to Welcome Futurewise!

Please join the Collective Action Team and members of the SVP Board as we welcome Futurewise to the SVP family at a reception on May 7^th at Stephanie Solien’s house.

If you want to learn more about SVP’s Collective Action work, please contact Sally Gillis (sallyg@svpseattle.org ) and stay tuned for volunteer opportunities with Futurewise!

This past Sunday while waiting for my beloved Seahawks game to start, I flipped through TV channels and stumbled upon the old Loony Tunes favorite. Watching the Road Runner hastily build a road and decoy tunnels to trip up Wile E. Coyote – I naturally daydreamed about work.

As the Collective Action Program Manager at SVP, I work alongside two teams of SVP Partners who have been crafting our collective action strategy for education and the environment.

Like the Wile E. Coyote we are chasing a moving object. Two years ago, the philanthropic community learned the term “Collective Impact” and has since been considering ways to apply FSG’s five key principles to our community building work. The landscape is ever changing, with one success, another pot hole may appear. Only in our case we’re not trying to snag speedy bird, we’re trying to (for example) double the number of kids who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential by 2020.

On the flip side, like the Road Runner, SVP is striving to act fast but also act smart. While priding ourselves on the ability to be nimble, the Collective Action Teams must also consider our strengths as connectors and network builders and how best to apply those strengths in this emerging field. In addition to partnering with “likely suspects” or other foundations that we often work closely with, we are also working with “unlikely suspects” bridging fields like affordable housing and environmental conservation.

We of course hope our track record will look more like the Road Runners’ when it comes to success, but in the meantime both Collective Action Teams have some exciting news.

Education Collective Action Team Selects Three Investees

The Education Collective Action Team (aka EduCAT) is pleased to announce that we have chosen three nonprofits to participate in our first investment in collective action. They include Powerful Schools, Child Care Resources, and the Vietnamese Friendship Association in their leadership with the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC).

The first step is an investment of $15,000 to each Investee. However, our larger goal is learn more about the skills nonprofits need to effectively engage in collective action efforts like CCER’s Road Map or Eastside Pathways and to build those necessary skills. Ultimately, we aim to extend our capacity building model to meet the needs of organizations working towards a common goal.

We know we have a lot to learn as we explore this new arena, which is why this one-year pilot investment was open to current and former Investees. By focusing on partnerships in which we have already established trust and candidness, we hope to accelerate our growth and learning. The Investees were chosen as a cohort and represent a mix of organizational size, place on the cradle-to-career spectrum, and involvement with a current collective impact effort.

An EduCAT Liaison will be assigned to work with each Investee on capacity building projects and work to share lessons learned with the EduCAT as well as the broader funding community.

These investments were informed by many months of exploration. The EduCAT hosted conversations with other funders, consultants that work closely with collective action efforts, executive directors of current collective action backbone organizations, and nonprofit executive directors working in collective action efforts.

The EduCAT looks forward to partnering with these three nonprofits and deepening our engagement in and education of collective action. Additionally throughout 2013 we look forward to determining how we might support convening (or backbone) organizations.

Environment Collective Action Team Steps Up for Sustainable Communities

The Environment Collective Action Team is part of an emerging collaborative: the Puget Sound Funders Partnership for Sustainable Communities (PSFPSC). Together, this group is looking at the intersection of the environment, equity and the regional economy.

With major light rail transit investments on the way, these funders have come together to ensure that communities develop in ways that are equitable and economically and environmentally sustainable. The Enviro CAT is committed to thinking systematically about how the environment fits in.

As Smart Growth America CEO Geoff Anderson explained: “Building transit without paying attention to things like equity, local economic development and land use is like building a million dollar community garden and watching it dry up because you forgot to install a hose. It’s a squandered investment.”

SVP is participating as a co-chair of the Puget Sound Funders Partnership for Sustainable Communities and CAT members serve on working groups to help determine strategy and investments for both the CAT and the overall collaborative. Please check out the Enviro CAT’s Manifesto and list of key decisions here.

Want to Get Involved?

To learn more about how to engage in our collective action work or tell me about your own Road Runner experience email me at sallyg@svpseattle.org.

We've shared our survey results and lessons learned below and in our “Donor Report.” Now we just need YOUR thoughts!  All of this input will go into next year’s program and into our “in-a-box” effort for exporting SIFP to even more cities.    

 
Impact

Helping the social innovators achieve more impact is of course why we are all so committed to this effort.  A finalist who didn’t get money or investment said to us that despite the disappointment of not winning, “…the SIFP competition has been nothing short of transformational.”  20% of innovators report they have received or are confident they will receive more than $5,000 in additional funding (separate from SIFP awards) as a result of participating in the program.  Two expect to receive $25k+ or more each.   This result is amazing - showing so much leveraged financial impact so quickly.   

Key Lessons for Next Time 

• Provide more opportunities for networking with program leaders and judges as well as donors and investors.  For true impact, the participants need both the training from the program and access to those who can financially support them as they get their ventures going.

Fast Pitch Attendees

They loved the event.  They especially liked text-message voting and connecting with the finalists and semifinalists.  82% are likely or highly likely to attend in 2012 on October 18th – mark your calendar now!  The audience was very favorable to seeing the broad range of innovators, from high school through polished for-profit through established non-profit ventures.

Key Lessons for Next Time

• Solve the wireless connectivity problem so everyone can vote.  Those on AT&T and T-Mobile didn’t enjoy the voting process as much as those on Verizon.
• Keep up the breadth of innovators.  We were concerned that showing high school through for-profits would be too much, but the audience poll and comments show they valued this greatly.

Social Innovation Fast Pitch - Images by Karen Ducey

Program

Looking forward to 2012, we asked many questions about how to improve the specifics of the SIFP program and/or about what new things social innovators would value.  86% of innovators want the same or more mentoring, with 25% rating their mentoring as “exceptional”, while 65% rated mentoring between good and very helpful.  We also identified three new workshops that were highly desirable to the innovation group (business modeling, marketing/PR on a budget, measuring social impact).

Key Lessons for Next Time

• Offer formal training around business models and org sustainability.
• Start mentoring program earlier, giving more time before quarterfinals for contestants to engage with mentors and rework plans and/or improve their pitch.

Volunteers

Net satisfaction with the program was 91%, with 78% rating the program 5 on a scale of 1-5.  One representative  comment was "My overall experience was exceptional and I believe the SIFP approach will greatly expand its impact in years to come."  In the volunteer survey, 100% (!!!) said they "look forward to spending time on SIFP again in 2012".  

Key Lessons for Next Time   

• Find a way to manage volunteer matching and assignments better than using Excel coupled with the limited gray matter of the program organizers.  If anyone knows of software to help determine optimal mentor pairing and manage the process, please tell us!

Thank You!

Seattle’s v1.0 event was made so much better by leveraging experience from LA, Phoenix, Dallas, RI and other SVPs; our partners in local angel groups like ZINO; and from UW and SU business plan competition leaders and many others.  We thank them all for their help! 

What’s Next? 

The Core Team will continue our “SIFP-in-a-Box” development and start booking our 2012 program, this time with many more weeks for training and mentoring social innovators and also more time for the volunteers to keep things going without neglecting the rest of their life. 

Wanna get involved? 

Sign up and learn more here: http://sifp.net

Share Your Thoughts!

What did you think about the Social Innovation Fast Pitch?  What questions do you have?  What aspects did you like best?  What would you change next year? 

The way we fund nonprofits encourages competition rather than collaboration and limits our ability to solve large scale problems.  That was the take-home message from the “Collective Impact” webinar I, and several other SVP partners and staff members participated in last Wednesday.  

In the webinar (hosted by the Stanford Social Innovation Review), John Kania and Mark Kramer noted that there is a mismatch between the complexity of social problems and how philanthropy tries to solve them.  Funders look at many different organizations and choose the best one to solve a problem. Grantees work separately and try to differentiate themselves in order to get funding. This model promotes competition instead of collaboration. If the problem is a large-scale one, funders look to replicate or scale up.

They referred to this model as Isolated Impact because government, business, and other stakeholders are not part of the solution, and organizations and funders are working alone. 

On the flip side, the goal of Collective Impact is to align the efforts of many organizations including funders, nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses around a common goal. Kania and Kramer identified five conditions for success:

1. Common Agenda: Success requires that organizations share a vision with a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solutions.
2. Shared Measurement: Collecting data and measuring results allows efforts to be better aligned and organizations to learn from each other; it also helps keep focus on the problem.
3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Each organization has a different activity based on its greatest strength but the activities fit into a single plan.
4. Continuous Communication: Communicating builds trust and keeps organizations working together.
5. Backbone Organization: Creating and managing collective impact requires a separate organization with staff and a specific set of skills to serve as a backbone for the effort. Because this organization needs to be neutral, often a new organization or a new part of another organization needs to be created.

They gave an example of a successful Collective Impact Initiative done by Strive Partnership in the Cincinnati metro area. (Read Kania and Kramer's full article.)

In Your Opinion, What Does This Mean for SVP?

Right now SVP does exactly as Kania and Kramer describe – we look for the best organization in a certain area and fund it, promoting competition instead of collaboration. 

What’s your reaction to that, and to the case made for collective impact?  Do you think SVP should make changes to encourage collaboration rather than competition among nonprofits? If not, why?  If so, what would you change?

Twenty-one people sit expectantly on rented chairs in my basement TV room – waiting for the session to start.   There are representatives from the school district, the city, major organizations, some of them the leaders, and only a handful of whom I’ve met before.  I hear the conversation buzz drop to silence as attention shifts toward me, but I’m too busy focusing on an unknown blinking orange light on the projector.  

A small team had worked for two weeks to organize this kick-off meeting for a Collective Impact project in Bellevue, hosted at my house.  Item one on the agenda – watch a webinar describing the Collective Impact process…using the projector that had just died. 

Beam me up, Scotty!

If the meeting was looking for a reason to fail, this would’ve been a good one.  So why didn’t it?  Well, these folks, leaders of organizations across the city and region, had put this discussion on their calendar with only a few days’ notice.  They’d arrived on time to an address they’ve never been to.  They had actually done the pre-reading. Because enabling every child in Bellevue to emerge from our community ready to succeed is a goal they dedicate way more than 40 hours a week to.  And the promise of working together better, in a more intentional and committed way, to achieve that goal was worth the extra effort they’d already shown.

Instead of adhering to the tight two-hour agenda, the failed projector (which I was later informed was likely caused by a dybbuk – some sort of eastern European gremlin) gave us a chance to discuss the Collective Impact approach in detail, tapping into what the attendees had gleaned from the pre-reading article.  I’d read the article several times, but there were many folks who’d obviously studied it even more closely, and the extra time allowed us to really dig into the implications it presented for education in Bellevue.  

The workgroup produced, as intended, many open questions, challenges and work items.  At the end of the meeting, many of the participants were conscious of the changes required for their own organizations to truly embrace this approach.  And we were all cognizant of the biggest risk – that we’d invest the time and energy that collaboration requires but get stuck without achieving true shared goals and convergent efforts.  But despite those cautions, every person in the room enthusiastically supported the decision to move ahead and build out a plan. (For an example of what this effort might look like, check out Strive Together.)

Sitting here writing this, I received the following email:

maybe risking pissing you off by shooting off my mouth: At the meeting when the AV went out, I was wondering if it was my lucky day. If you were really going to use these slides, the meeting would not have had nearly the mojo it had. … You would have lost the room. Instead, everyone was engaged and listening to every word that came out of your mouth. It was the most authentic and constructive meeting I’ve been to in a few years. Really. If guardian angels exist, they totally came through yesterday.

So we’re launched.  And no doubt we’ll encounter more dybbuks, and hopefully encourage more angels, as we develop this plan.   I plan to try and document the journey.  Please feel free to stay tuned in, or better yet, jump onboard.

For more information, or to get involved with developing a collective impact approach to education in Bellevue – from cradle to career – contact me at: bill@ramblingclan.com  and/or share your thoughts below.

Questions. I've Got LOTS of Them...Please Weigh In!    

As this project is just getting started, I’ve got LOTS of questions.  I know we’ve got a ton of great thinkers and doers in our community, and I would really appreciate your thoughts and comments.  Here are just a few of my questions:

1. What’s the best way to convince organizations that are independent and successful that they should embrace this collective effort? 
2. Should we focus on Bellevue (where we have a strong start) or try to engage the whole Eastside?
3. And (here’s a fun one), what should we call this initiative?! 
   

That leaves me a few uncomfortable moments to mentally rehearse the short field takeoff procedures.   With only 3000 feet to work with, I’ll need to bring the engines up to maximum power before releasing the brakes, committing to immediate acceleration to reach takeoff speed.   If it were just the four of us who flew down together to the Collective Impact Conference at Stanford, we’d have had plenty of cushion.  The last minute decision to add Janet and Fraser reduces the margin in a way that now has my full attention.

We had just spent the day hearing how the collective impact model had been applied in several scenarios and comparing notes and questions with attendees from around the country.  Susan was in her accustomed co-pilot seat to my right; the two folks from the Bellevue School District and Bellevue Schools Foundation who had accompanied us to the conference were in the back.  We’d worked on planning our own Eastside effort the whole flight down, and Janet and Fraser’s addition would help us tackle the project plan on the way back north.  Yet first, we had get airborne.  

  
As a pilot, I’m assured that the laws of physics work time after time.  Training and experience build the confidence that airspeed generates lift, lift overcomes weight and flight happens. 

Each of us has learned a similar lesson in life.  Effort and ability overcome challenges.  We apply ourselves and find a path toward achievement.  But how does a child from a home where stress and uncertainty dominate, where encouragement is in short supply, or where volatile housing means frequent moves – how does that child learn such a lesson?   Are they sure that the physics of learning works in their favor, that continued effort leads to academic success and a life destination that will pay the bills?   Students rely on their families, their learning environments and their community to provide the support that builds confidence.  What kind of courage is required every day to start down the runway if support at home is lacking?  And how many students just opt out, averting the risk of failure?

Two months ago, I listened to Geoffrey Canada describe his experience building the Harlem Children’s Zone in NYC.  He is an inspiring and provocative speaker.  His unspoken challenge - if he can accomplish such amazing results in Harlem, with its poverty, broken families and lack of economic opportunity, what’s stopping any of us in our communities?   How did Canada find the courage to start on that journey, to declare that no child will be allowed to fail, in Harlem of all places?  What convinced him that the physics of education and support worked in his favor or were even possible?  

The chatter of conversation over the intercom has gone silent, reflecting attitudes ranging from indifference to barely suppressed anxiety among the folks in back.  Over the drone of the engines, the tower voices cuts back in, clearing us for takeoff.  I nose the plane onto the very end of the runway, aligning with the white centerline.   Throttles forward, the props throw off a piercing roar, the plane straining against the brakes like a roadster at a stoplight. 

Time to commit.

Keep the Conversation Rolling

Join me, Paul Shoemaker, and other SVP Partners for happy hour on Thursday, April 21 at Blue C Sushi in Bellevue.  We will spend SOME time talking about collective impact, Eastside education, the environment, etc., but this is just as much about fun, connecting with Partners, and good conversation. Bring a friend if you’d like. Hope to see you on the 21st!

- Bill Henningsgaard

Every day, I field calls and sit in meetings with an assortment of wonderful people who want to save these kids.  Every day I go home wondering why we are still waiting on superheroes to save whole communities instead of empowering them to save themselves. 

 
This is why I was surprised when reviewing the conditions for collective success (more here):

1.    Common agenda
2.    Shared measurement
3.    Mutually reinforcing activities
4.    Continuous communication
5.    Backbone organization
 
“Community” doesn’t make the cut.  Be it community initiated, community buy in - however you want to phrase it.  These criteria imply that people who are not of the community will succeed in saving the community.  I question the sustainability of this approach.

Community engagement is at the core of collective impact, but what if it was an explicit condition for sustainable success?  Maybe we’d view social change as strength building rather than as deficit reduction and truly value the expertise those whose lives are impacted.

Collaboration vs. Collective Impact

Members of the communities I work for have asked me to explain the difference between collaboration and collective impact.  From a resource perspective I see the difference as this:

Collaboration = Do more with less. What weaknesses can someone else shore up for us?
Collective Impact = Do more with more. What unique strengths do we bring to the table?

Austin McNamee, another Partner who attended the conference, captured it in a slightly different way: 

Collaboration is not enough.  Organizations that collaborate well may meet often and discuss common goals and challenges, but collective impact requires a results-oriented objective through systems change.

Nobody wins unless everybody wins.  Collective impact is sustained by balancing individual organizations’ self-interest with shared interests.  Collectives that build a solid foundation of trust and mutual benefit from their shared efforts are more likely to maintain commitment to the group and reinforce activities that meet the group’s objectives.

So What Do You Think?

Is Collective Impact the new old way of collaborating or are there significant differences between the two?

Should everyday community members be setting the Impact agenda or is it okay for that responsibility to fall on recognized leaders and interested others who see a need, but are not of the community?

Please share your thoughts below or email me to chat about what collective impact looks like in my District as we pursue a Promise Neighborhood initiative and engage with the Community Center for Education Results.  You can also join me and the whole SVP community as we tackle collective impact at our Spring Meeting!  

For more details from the Collective Impact Conference itself, check out SVP Partner, Janet Levinger’s notes.

After hearing my wife Janet tell enough stories about inspired discussions and activities at SVPI Annual Conferences, I finally carved out time to go to Long Beach last November.  Those two days re-ignited my passion for making a difference in our community and gave me the idea of what to do next. 

 SVP LA’s workshop on their Fast Pitch program was fantastic.  The concept is simple, and as I later discovered, has been run successfully in Phoenix (whose winner is photographed above), Pittsburgh, Dallas, Providence, and even Seattle (albeit 10 years ago!). 
 

I am a regular at local angel investing events and am a member of Zino Society and Alliance of Angels.  I have also participated as a judge and coach in UW’s business plan competition.  So I readily understood the concepts that the SVP LA team explained:

1.  Define attractive grant (or “prize”) categories.
2. Promote them heavily to the non-profit and social entrepreneur community.
3. Engage with, mentor, and coach contestants.
4. Run a cool event that community influentials, donors, and contestants all attend.
5. Every participant wins, whether they take home a grant or not, because they learn and connect in new and profound ways.

Check out the winning presentation from LA SVP’s 2011 Social Innovation Fast Pitch:

After returning from Long Beach, I made the rounds of local angel groups, university entrepreneurship centers, SVP members, and anyone else willing to talk.  My questions were simple:  Does Seattle need a Fast Pitch competition to ignite innovation within established non-profits and to nurture the social entrepreneurs among us?  Is the need being filled elsewhere?  If the need is valid, should SVP address it?  

The answers were overwhelmingly positive as to the need and were similarly positive towards SVP’s role. We have the credibility, neutrality, and focus (on the social sector) that make us ideal to bring a Fast Pitch to the Greater Seattle area, working with established angel and university groups.

As of last month, we’re off and running, preparing for Seattle’s 2011 Social Innovation Fast Pitch (SIFP) to be held on October 3 at the Seattle Center's Fisher Pavillion.  We’ve assembled a great team of long-time SVP partners, two new SVP partners, and three more connected community volunteers.  Over the summer, as we launch the effort, we will be recruiting a small army of pitch coaches, mentors, and others to screen applications, coach participants on everything from business plan building to Fast Pitch skills, and hopefully to form mentoring relationships that will last for years to come. 

Our grant categories are still in the making (weigh in here), but they will likely include:

• Youth Ventures Software for Social Gain
• Collective Impact & Collaboration
• Education, Environment, & Sustainability
• Local Implementation, Global Relevance
• Simply Innovative (anything great that does not fit the above)

Get Involved!

If you’re intrigued about how SVP can help increase the speed and depth of social innovation in our community, please visit our website and register your interest areas.  We need help from SVP Partners on mentorship, sponsorship, or simply spreading the word around.

You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter (@SIFPnet) and provide your feedback as we continue shaping this program and preparing for the first of many events. 

--- Will Poole, husband of Janet Levinger, SVP Seattle members since 1997.

Three months ago, I wrote a note about an idea to launch a collective impact effort on the Eastside to “enable every child in Bellevue to emerge from our community ready to succeed.”  At the time, we’d had a set of initial discussions, but the entire project was in front of us.  Pretty much all we knew was that a key set of community leaders felt it was worth stepping forward together, using the collective impact model as a roadmap.

Now, a group of three brain-storming at a local Tully’s has grown to a leadership team of 23, representing the school district, the city, the schools foundation, service providers, community groups, faith-based organizations and many volunteers.  A series of one-on-one conversations with community organizations expanded to a launch conference with 70 attendees representing 38 organizations.  A task list of next steps has grown to 10 project teams with volunteer leadership in each, covering items as diverse as community engagement, data systems, marketing and communications, governance, fund raising and most critically service provider planning and collaboration.  A contact list that I could recite from memory has grown to over 170, necessitating the need to migrate from personal emails to a professional-quality newsletter system.  And we’ve  agreed on a mission/vision statement.

Eastside Pathways mobilizes our entire community to support every child, step by step, from cradle to career. Families, providers, schools and cities unite around common goals, measurements, and strategies to maximize each child’s opportunity for a productive, fulfilling life.

In some ways, we’re daunted by “yes.”   Where we expected to find resistance or indifference, we’ve met a community which has understood and embraced the opportunity.   Organizations have joined, leaders have stepped forward, volunteers have engaged.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the pace we’ve set.  And this is just the start-up phase! 

The most interesting and important questions remain in front of us. 

• How do you support a collaboration across these diverse organizations from a technical point of view, allowing people to interact and contribute productively, in a way that also allows them to pay attention to their day jobs of running lean and excellent organizations? 
• How do you create a governance and communications infrastructure that allow participants to understand when and how key decisions are made, and to feel fully included and represented without requiring everyone to be in a room to move forward? 
• How do you organize and present the accumulated data in a way which allows a diverse audience to understand Bellevue’s current track record in supporting kids cradle to career and invites engagement and action at whatever geographic scope is appropriate? 
• How do you create a backbone organization that is truly value-add to all constituencies, leveraging able volunteers while delivering the quality and reliability that this work requires?

Which brings me to perhaps the real question behind this posting.

What is Social Venture Partners’ role in this kind of work? 

To date, SVP has been sort of “invisibly present” in Eastside Pathways, both through the many volunteers (about one in three key volunteers to date are partners) and investees (Kindering, Youth Eastside Services and Childcare Resources are former investees that are playing leadership roles).   But EVERYONE who understands the collective impact model and understands SVP sees our capacity to provide unique and meaningful leadership in ALL of the questions I list above. 

SVP could, if it chose, create a knowledgebase of best practices around governance, collaboration, measurement and infrastructure that would enable collective impact initiatives to focus on their unique challenges. For each of the “how” questions listed above, SVP could serve as a repository and consultant, accumulating that knowledge over time through its work with various community initiatives.  Just as we help individual organizations raise their game to the next level, we could enable collective efforts like the Community Center for Education Results, the Environmental Priorities Coalition, or even Eastside Pathways aspire to known standards of excellence.

Should SVP get engaged in this kind of work?  Partly, the answer depends on what you think the potential these kind of collective efforts have to really impact communities for the better.   Some might argue that the kind of change proposed by efforts like collective impact is a fad or a waste of time.  Or that SVP should not dilute its focus on individuals and organizations. But a wildfire of adoption suggests that, for complex and chronic challenges like enabling every child to succeed, determined and hopeful communities are making a bet on the collective approach.  I’m hoping SVP will be in that vanguard.

If you're interested in learning more, or getting involved with Eastside Pathways, please feel free to contact me at: bill@ramblingclan.com

- Bill Henningsgaard, SVP Partner