Anyone working on collective impact strategies for children and youth doesn’t want to miss the new issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review – the journal that helped to launch the collective impact movement. A special supplement, Collective Insights on Collective Impact, offers nine articles from leading practitioners, funders, and thought leaders in the collective impact field, curated and funded by the Collective Impact Forum. These include two articles of particular interest to those working on youth issues, written by the Forum for Youth Investment: About how to align multiple collective impact initiatives in a community (p. 15), and about how government policies can be crafted to enhance rather than impede collective impact efforts (p. 22).

The Forum for Youth Investment is proud to have contributed the following articles:

• Aligning Collective Impact Initiatives. Northern Kentucky once faced the dilemma of how to reduce competition and increase impact when an array of education initiatives had overlapping missions, members and audiences. Today, these efforts are aligned through a backbone organization that aims to improve all youth supports, from birth to career. Getting there required lots of analysis and negotiation, including some “uncomfortable conversations” among partners.
• Making Public Policy Collective Impact Friendly. While partnerships around the country work to achieve collective impact, federal, state and local policies often impede these efforts, albeit inadvertently. The obstacles include rigid funding models, a narrow focus on annual reporting, siloed agencies and unaligned data sets. The good news: Some current policies, governmental structures, and processes do help partnerships achieve collective impact.