Evolution of Collective Impact: Lessons from Practitioners in Australia and Canada

Background and Purpose: The grand societal challenges, which represent complex multidimensional problems such as homelessness, climate crisis, and racial and economic inequality continue to transcend national borders. With the growing understanding of these complex challenges, scholars across disciplines, practitioners, and policymakers recognize the need for concerted multisectoral efforts that generate innovative, systemic, and collaborative solutions. One such collaborative change framework is collective impact. Collective Impact (CI) is a cross-sector collaborative framework launched in 2011. The framework has since been used in a variety of place-based, national, and international settings to achieve population-level results. While the endorsement and adoption of this framework have been quick, criticism of the model has been primarily centered around promoting a “grass-tops” approach. The objective of this qualitative study was to understand how the collective impact approach to social change has evolved in Canada and Australia, two international sites that were early adopters of this approach.

Methods: We used a qualitative phenomenological approach to develop an understanding of practitioners’ perspectives. Participants engaged in semi-structured, in-depth interviews to share their experiences and perspectives on the evolution of the CI approach. The research participants included fifteen (15) practitioners, 9 in Canada and 6 in Australia. Inclusion criteria for participation were practitioners working in place-based change organizations in local, regional, or national settings in Australia or Canada for at least two years. Given that a vast majority of the existing CI literature is produced from the dominant lens perspective, this study aimed to include a minimum of a third of the participants who identified as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. Ten (10) or 66% of the participants identified as Black (5) or First Nations (5).

Results: Our preliminary analysis identified three key themes: (1) Practitioners’ personal racial/ethnic identity influences not just their approach and priorities in the work, but also deeply impacts their experience in the work. Black and First Nations practitioners consistently shared multiple barriers and challenges they face in affecting change while working in “white” systems. (2) Ambiguity in the definition of community-led change leads to vastly different levels of community engagement across initiatives, with several merely engaging community residents as “informing” versus “shaping” the work. (3) Many efforts that were originally identified as collective impact initiatives have shifted toward identifying themselves as place-based efforts. Several practitioners identified a shift toward a place-based approach as a move toward more inclusive and equity-centered approaches to overcome limitations in the collective impact framework.

Conclusion: Although a lot has been written about CI in recent years, the voices of practitioners are underrepresented in the literature. This study is a small effort to center the voices of practitioners, particularly those identifying as Black and Indigenous, who are the key players in place-based collective impact efforts. The insights from this study offer an opportunity for philanthropists, policymakers, researchers, and other practitioners to refine the practice and scholarship in place-based change efforts.