Take a look at any set of youth issues that you hear people complain about in the news: youth mental health, youth violence, youth homelessness, you name it. Each of those issues is not squarely in the hands of any one federal, state or local agency to tackle. But because our government agencies aren’t set up to work together very well, they don’t typically tackle these issues very well.

People who run collective impact efforts say one of their toughest tasks is keeping community engagement going beyond the “summits” where everyone gets fired up. What does it mean to keep communities engaged in the mission that they’ve signed on for? Why is it so hard to do this well?

I’ve spent much of this year helping people learn collective impact strategies in communities around the United States, but last week I did some learning myself – by seeing how collective impact is done in the country of Honduras.

“In any given week, you could go to three meetings and hear the same report three times.” “Too many people are coming to us with too many asks.” These are some of the recurring sentiments that prompted the leaders of collective impact initiatives in Northern Kentucky to ask, “What would it look like if we realigned?”