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Scot Evans

"Transformer: How to Build a Network to Change a System" | WiserEarth Blog - 0 views

  • Start by understanding the system you are trying to change. Involve both funders and nonprofits as equals from the outset. Design for a network, not an organization—and invest in collective infrastructure. Cultivate leadership at many levels. Create multiple opportunities to connect and communicate. Remain adaptive and emergent—and committed to a long-term vision.
Scot Evans

Scalable Social Innovations | nuPOLIS - 0 views

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    nuPOLIS is the Internet presence of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC), a national non-profit helping to develop and spread scalable innovations that transform the performance of community systems such as education, energy, land use, transportation and workforce development.
Scot Evans

Collective Impact (November 17, 2010) | Stanford Social Innovation Review - 0 views

  • Why has Strive made progress when so many other efforts have failed? It is because a core group of community leaders decided to abandon their individual agendas in favor of a collective approach to improving student achievement.
  • These leaders realized that fixing one point on the educational continuum—such as better after-school programs—wouldn’t make much difference unless all parts of the continuum improved at the same time. No single organization, however innovative or powerful, could accomplish this alone. Instead, their ambitious mission became to coordinate improvements at every stage of a young person’s life, from “cradle to career.”
  • Strive, both the organization and the process it helps facilitate, is an example of collective impact, the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.
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  • collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants.
  • arge-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
  • In short, the nonprofit sector most frequently operates using an approach that we call isolated impact. It is an approach oriented toward finding and funding a solution embodied within a single organization, combined with the hope that the most effective organizations will grow or replicate to extend their impact more widely.
  • Shifting from isolated impact to collective impact is not merely a matter of encouraging more collaboration or public-private partnerships. It requires a systemic approach to social impact that focuses on the relationships between organizations and the progress toward shared objectives. And it requires the creation of a new set of nonprofit management organizations that have the skills and resources to assemble and coordinate the specific elements necessary for collective action to succeed.
  • “Mobilizing and coordinating stakeholders is far messier and slower work than funding a compelling grant request from a single organization. Systemic change, however, ultimately depends on a sustained campaign to increase the capacity and coordination of an entire field.”
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