Collective impact approach offers hope to kids, country
Not long ago, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, I visited the offices of something called the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM). The walls were lined with charts measuring things like kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores and postsecondary enrollment.
Around the table was just about anybody in town who might touch a child’s life. There were school superintendents and principals, but there were also the heads of the Chamber of Commerce and the local United Way, the police chief, a former mayor and the newspaper editor.
The people at SAM track everything they can measure about Spartanburg’s young people, from cradle to career. They gather everybody who might have any influence upon this data — parents, religious leaders, doctors, nutrition experts, etc.
Together, as a community-wide system, they ask questions: Where are children falling off track? Why? What assets do we have in our system that can be applied to this problem? How can we work together to apply those assets?
There are a lot of things I love about this approach. First, it understands that life is longitudinal. Sometimes social policies are distorted by the tyranny of randomized controlled experiments. Everybody is looking for the one magic intervention that will have a measurable effect.
But life isn’t like that. Lives are influenced by millions of events that interact in mysterious ways. And when life is going well it’s because dozens of influences are reinforcing one another. SAM tries to harness those influences.
Second, SAM treats the whole person. “The disease of modern character is specialization,” Wendell Berry wrote. Sometimes schools treat kids as brains on a stick to be filled with skills and information.
But children don’t leave behind their emotions, their diet, their traumas, their safety fears, their dental problems and so on when they get to school. If you’re going to help kids, you have to help the whole kid all at once.
Third, and maybe most important, SAM embodies a new civic architecture, which has become known as the “collective impact” approach. Americans feel alienated from and distrustful toward most structures of authority these days, but this is one they can have faith in.
SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of 70 communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter & Gamble executive observed, “We’re program-rich, but system-poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. It lacked a system to coordinate them.
A methodology was born: Organize around the data, focus on the assets of the community, not the deficits; realize there is no one silver-bullet solution; create a “backbone organization” that can bring all the players together.
Collective impact approaches have critics, in part for putting too much emphasis on elites (which is fair). But a recent study of 25 initiatives found that these approaches do work, at least most of the time.
Building working relationships across a community is an intrinsically good thing. You do enough intrinsically good things and lives will be improved in ways you can never plan or predict. This is where our national renewal will come from.
He writes for the New York Times.