Griffith UniversityCollective Impact Project - Vincent

What is the Collective Impact Project? This is an action research project which works through selected Communities for Children sites and is based on the idea of ‘collective impact’. The idea behind collective impact is that we have to find better ways to work together – COLLECTIVELY – and in genuine collaboration if we are ever to solve complex social issues (like poverty, homelessness, or child welfare). This is because complex problems are caused by multiple causal factors interacting with each other in complicated ways. What we need to see is the impact of lots of people working together collectively: community organisations, government agencies, schools, local businesses, local leaders and community members. The partners in this project come from a range of government, non-government and university organisations: they have made a commitment to work together to support communities to achieve better outcomes for children and families. The overall aim of this project is to improve the functioning of the child serving system in local communities by promoting strong collaborations who work together to solve complex problems. What does a Collective Impact Facilitator do? It takes a lot for organisations to work together: it doesn’t just happen by itself. There are a lot of reasons for this: it can be really time-consuming and challenging to develop a strong and genuine collaboration between disparate partners; organisations sometimes work at cross-purposes; community service organisations are used to having to compete for funding; and it is really hard to implement shared systems for measuring collective impact. Research around the world on collective impact projects suggests that dedicated resources (collective impact facilitators) are needed to support collaborative efforts, to help everyone work together and try to overcome the barriers that often thwart people’s attempts to work this way.