NNSI to host Collective Impact Summit November 2015
Collective impact initiatives have become popular across the United States since their introduction in a 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article. But is collective impact a new approach to collaboration? What can we learn about collective impact from previous research on collaboration and networks?
The Collective Impact Summit will bring together leaders in the field – practitioners with experience in creating, sustaining, and evaluating collective impact projects – with researchers from a range of academic disciplines (i.e., management, communication, community psychology, public administration, social work, and education) who have studied concepts related to collective impact. We hope to catalyze a learning dialogue between top-tier academic researchers and leaders of national collective impact networks.
The Collective Impact Summit’s objectives are three-fold:
- To encourage mutual knowledge and understanding among scholars and practitioners whose work informs collective impact initiatives in education. We hope to both identify what we collectively know and what questions collectively remain.
- To identify core elements of successful collective impact initiatives, based upon both academic research and field experience. These core elements are processes and practices that could not be adapted or removed without reducing the effectiveness of the approach.
- To identify opportunities for future collaboration between national collective impact networks and academic researchers.
The Summit is divided into four major areas: 1) cross-sector networks, 2) the collaboration process, 3) community engagement, and 4) decision-making using educational data.
For more on the Collective Impact Summit and a list of participants, see Collective Impact: An Introduction