An Analysis of the Collective Impact Lens for Lane County’s 2018-2021 Strategic Plan

13 pagesLane County’s 2018-2021 Strategic Plan puts forth three strategic lenses including Financial Stewardship, Equity, and Collective Impact. This report focuses on the implementation of the Collective Impact lens by exploring and presenting significant aspects of relevant literature, best practices for the use of collective impact, examples of collective impact projects, and specific recommendations to Lane County based on these findings. Collective Impact is an innovative way to foster cross-sector collaboration to address the most complex societal problems using data and performance-based measures to track progress (Stachowiak, et al., 2018). The collaboration should include government entities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations. It is implemented through five principles: having a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support (Kania and Kramer, 2013). In addition to establishing the five principles for a collective impact initiative, three pre-principles have been put forth as important considerations prior to establishing the initiative. They are influential leaders, sufficient financial resources, and an urgency for the issue. The support of these pre-requisites fosters the successful establishment of collective impact. In addition to better understanding the purpose and creation of collective impact, it is important to see the challenges and criticisms of the practice that have come out of the research. There are three challenges highlighted in the literature that hold particular relevance to Lane County. First, while collaboration is not a new concept, the collective impact framework needs to be mindfully applied with all of the principles intact in order to develop sustainable solutions to complex problems. The two other notable challenges are that the nonprofit sector faces significant barriers to entering collective impact efforts, mostly due to limited resources, and the necessary consideration as to whether collective impact is the appropriate approach to a given problem