The year 2021 marked 10 years since the publication of the article “Collective Impact” in Stanford Social Innovation Review. Over the last decade, organizations working around the globe have applied the practice of collective impact to solving a broad range of social and environmental challenges, and the approach has been incorporated into the structure of national and local public programs in the United States and abroad.
We can attribute much of the growth, success, and sustained interest in collective impact to the learning and sharing of practitioners, funders, and many partners who have cultivated and worked to adapt the practice over time. Their experiences and feedback, as well as decades of collaborative work predating 2011, have contributed to the evolution of the approach, particularly around themes of equity, community ownership, power, data, and sustainability.
A decade of applying the collective impact approach to address social problems has taught us that equity is central to the work. In this new article, we redefine collective impact to include centering equity as a prerequisite, and we provide a set of practices for putting equity at the center.
