Main Body
Leading in Public Health through Collective Impact
Erin Fawley
Introduction
Non-profits have worked in silos for many years to address specific issues and have seen successful results. Though silo work produces success, there are more social factors that contribute to sustaining outcomes, especially in the public health sector. To better address social issues across the board, a company named FSG (Foundation Strategy Group) created the Collective Impact (CI) model (Turner et. al, 2010). This model is expected to be the future of public health leadership, and the model fits into Institute for Alternative Futures’ (IAF) Public Health 2030 Scenarios to address population or community health to stray away from isolated impact and work together to utilize resources (Institute for Alternative Health, 2014). Collective Impact is utilized to move agencies out of silos and integrate efforts to improve topics like health, homelessness, addiction, and educational success. This framework is forecasted to be the future in public health leadership as it addresses community health in a collaborative format that mixes both public and private sectors. Leadership styles can vary in Collective Impact efforts, but transformational leadership is very relevant in addressing complex and social issues. In this chapter, we examine the Collective Impact (CI) Model and transformational leadership.
Background
Many nonprofits currently work in a category of “isolated impact” where it appears to be necessary to work with a single issue, but social problems are often very complex and require collaboration between multiple organizations. Isolated impact may contribute to temporary fixes, but there are typically multiple factors that cause the issue to reoccur (Kania & Kramer, 2011). Collective Impact recognizes that there is not one agency or organization who can solve social issues single-handed. One of the first documented implemented efforts of CI was by the Greater Cincinnati Foundation with their Strive initiative. Strive is an initiative in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky that took the Collective Impact approach to address the student achievement crisis and successfully improved 34 of the 53 success indicators (Turner et. al, 2010). The recent push of “from cradle to career” has motivated many agencies to align by realizing changing one aspect on the educational continuum does not fix the problem. All aspects of the continuum must improve together to make an impact. They found that to observe improvements in students, it involved after school efforts, tutoring, nutrition, etc. More than 300 agencies and organizations were involved in the effort to improved student achievement through high school and set them up for college experience (Kania & Kramer, 2011).
Collective Impact is an emerging paradigm to address systemic changes. The CI framework relies on having “backbone organizational support” to ensure the effort creates progress and impact. A backbone organiz