Collective Impact: Stronger Results with Community-Based Organizations

In this paper, StriveTogether and TASC describe the ways that youth-serving community organizations can participate in and support communities’ collective efforts to prepare young people for success in school and life. StriveTogether offers a framework to build a cradle-to-career infrastructure to support community partners who take on the work of achieving collective impact. We also recommend ways for communities to build increasingly effective relationships among community-based organizations (CBOs) and other partners.

The paper draws upon the successful collaborative approach of several ExpandED Schools in New York, Baltimore and New Orleans where schools and CBOs have aligned around a set of shared goals. Case studies and lessons learned from these schools offer insight into the benefits of actively engaging CBOs in collective impact including:

• The ability to leverage existing relationships between local schools and superintendents, as well as communities and parents.
• The ability to connect academic and non-academic outcomes due to CBOs having access to non-academic data.
• The provision of services and direct impact to the work of local cradle to career partnerships through participation of CBOs on Leadership Teams and Collaborative Action Networks.
• The identification of necessary policy changes by CBOs that can be advocated for by cradle to career partnerships
• Ability to pull on CBOs’ existing community partnerships to mobilize the entire community to improve outcomes for kids