Collaborating Across Sectors to Increase Opportunity for Youth and Young Adults

Abstract

Bringing key leaders together to address critical public policy issues is a strategy that communities have used for decades. In fact, special commissions, task forces and working groups have been working together for decades, producing reams of analyses, reports and recommendations on a wide array of topics.

Today, however, a new approach to cross-sector collaboration is emerging as a powerful tool for addressing complex social problems. Known as “collective impact,” this concept is characterized by a disciplined, structured and outcomes-focused approach to collaboration. Writing in the Winter 2011 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, John Kania and Mark Kramer define collective impact as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.” Collective impact strategies differ from the work of most interagency and interdisciplinary coordinating bodies because they “involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants.”