02/01/2022

The Leading Edge of Collective Impact:

Designing a just and fair nation for all

In the winter of 2011, the same year as the release of the seminal collective impact article in Stanford Social Innovation Review, I stepped out of my comfort zone to pursue more substantial, population-level impact for children and their families. I left my career with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Chicago and joined PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity. I was the inaugural director of the Promise Neighborhoods Institute (PNI) at PolicyLink. Combining the leadership of PolicyLink, the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, PNI worked to build and sustain Promise Neighborhoods. We worked in partnership with the federal Promise Neighborhoods program, itself modeled after HCZ, and envisioned all children and youth growing up in a Promise Neighborhood with access to great schools and strong systems of family and community support that would prepare them to attain an excellent education and successfully transition to college and a career.

When I took the helm of PNI, Geoffrey Canada’s leadership at HCZ and the power and potential embodied in collective impact inspired me. I was obsessed with improving the lives of the millions of children in America living in poverty.

For years, local leaders had advocated for new federal investments, and they finally had them in the Promise Neighborhoods program. At PNI, our job was to organize the Promise Neighborhoods grantees into a national community of practice and support their work with technical assistance, evaluation, and fundraising support. We soon realized that without a disciplined approach to moving from talk to action, it would be difficult to accelerate results. Consequently, PNI fostered the collective impact approach to social change, and soon, our network of leaders from more than 40 communities across America adopted the framework.

Please select this link to read the complete article from SSIR.