Scale and complexity surrounding long-term recovery or a community resilience initiative can make bringing about lasting change a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Since gaining attention from the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2011, Collective Impact has been widely used to tackle complex social issues and bring about lasting change.
The Collective Impact framework can supplement existing long-term recovery practices or provide a different structure for undertaking a recovery project or community resilience initiative. The Collective Impact framework creates many beneficial processes for both recovery and resilience initiatives. Collective Impact creates:
- An intentional way of working together
- Defines mutually reinforcing activities
- Establishes shared goals
- Ensures consistent and open communication
- Develops a mutually agreed upon measuring and monitoring process
- Facilitates the collection of resources necessary to achieve the initiative
- Distributes the workload across partners
Lantern Strategic can help community impact groups, local leaders, or nonprofits looking to use the Collective Impact framework to supplement long-term disaster recovery projects or community resilience initiatives.