Collective Impact

Substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if foundations, nonprofits, governments and businesses focused on achieving broad cross-sector coordination, instead of focusing on the isolated interventions of individual organizations. Collective Impact happens when a group of cross-sector actors commit to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem and agree to each be accountable to a single overarching goal. The New York Times has called the Collective Impact approach “one of the most important experiments occurring in the social sector today”. Stanford Social Innovation Review first featured this approach in the Winter 2011 Issue, in an article published by FSG managing director John Kania, with FSG co-founder Mark Kramer. Since the article, the concept has been shared at the White House and named a top philanthropy buzzword.