‘Collective Impact’ to Solve Problems Gets More Attention From Grant Makers

Foundations are increasingly interested in how they can work together with a diverse group of partners to make headway against complex social problems, and that strategy drew lots of attention at the conference of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, held here this month.

The goal of these “collective impact” coalitions is to get government agencies, schools, businesses, and nonprofits to work toward a shared vision, such as improving the health of local citizens or raising graduation rates. One of the best-known examples may be the Strive Partnership, in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. Since 2006 the joint effort has made progress toward the goal of raising college-completion rates by enlisting a broad array of partners, including groups that begin working with kids even before they enter kindergarten.

Other such programs less well known are also having an impact. Linda Gibbs, who served as deputy mayor of health and human services in New York City from 2005 to 2013, gave a short talk at the conference about how the city began making strides in reducing the number of juvenile offenders only after her office pushed police, case managers, and others to clean up their data and agree on common measures.

Ms. Gibbs said that when she took the job, 89 percent of juvenile offenders were committing a second offense within a decade. The city needed good data to segment the population by how likely the kids were to commit crimes again after serving time in juvenile detention or correctional facilities. The low-risk kids were placed with their families without much follow-up. The high-risk juveniles remained incarcerated. The city focused on the medium-risk group, believing that the group could return to their homes without the risk of re-entering the system as long as the city took intensive steps to help them stay out of trouble.

From 2006 to 2013, the number of children in the juvenile-justice system dropped 60 percent, said Ms. Gibbs, who is now a consultant with an organization founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that provides free advice to cities.

The secret, she said, was to identify and closely track a handful of statistics that marked progress. “You have to work hard to get the key numbers, and then really chase the top five,” she said.

Tracking Progress

In another session, Ken Thompson, a program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discussed the Road Map Project.

Adopted in South King County, Wash., including parts of Seattle, it’s an effort to double the number of kids who are on track to graduate from college or earn a degree credential by 2020. The project’s coalition of schools, colleges, and hundreds of community organizations, which began working together in 2010, has focused on building public support, getting a handle on the data, and aligning financial backing, Mr. Thompson said. The Gates Foundation got involved, he said, after it determined that grants it had made to individual organizations weren’t doing much to meet broader goals, even thought the grantees could show their own specific accomplishments.

Whether the “all in” community-wide approach will work better remains an open question. The Road Map Project is finally putting ideas and programs into place, after years of planning.

At the conference, there was plenty of skepticism about collective impact, but mostly in private conversations. Attendees talked about stumbles among efforts under way or in the planning stages in Portland, Chicago, and Santa Barbara.

The Road Map Project is in a better position than some of the other efforts; it got a big boost in 2012 when it won a $40-million federal Race to the Top grant. But with just six years left to meets its goal, the work of individual organizations will play a large role in determining whether the larger mission is achieved, and Mr. Thompson conceded that accountability at the organizational level amounts to little more than “peer pressure.”

“Everyone has been in the room so long promising to do stuff,” he said, “they’re going to feel weird if they don’t.”

A ‘Noisier’ Successor

Julie Rogers, who is stepping down as president of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation in June after 28 years on the job, offered some of the frankest commentary at the conference, during a panel discussion.

Ms. Rogers has been widely praised for her leadership of the foundation. But at the conference, she conceded that the foundation perhaps blew opportunities by doing its work quietly and nearly always putting the focus on the grantees it supports in Washington.

“I hope that my successor will be noisier,” she said.

For a generation, Ms. Rogers, who is white, ran a foundation focused on a city in which roughly half the residents are African-American. One audience member, frustrated by the still-small number of minorities in foundation leadership positions, asked pointedly whether Ms. Rogers had stayed too long. She didn’t take offense.

“Some of us have to get out of the way,” Ms. Rogers said. Foundation presidents have a mentoring role to play, she said, but real progress in appointing greater numbers of minority foundation leaders will fall to boards.

“If they get it, they’ll tend to this issue,” she said.