Essential resources for getting started with place-based partnerships and collective impact
The resources below are ones that I've found particularly valuable over the years — spanning the foundational theory, practical toolkits, hands-on training courses, and concrete examples of partnerships putting the work into practice.
Toolkits
- Place-Based Partnership Toolkit — a comprehensive resource built from a two-year project to understand how backbones of place-based partnerships operate and to gain insights into the factors that impact their sustainability and success in driving community-level outcomes.
- Neighborhoods as Systems Toolkit — a practical guide designed to equip you with insight, process, and tools to fix broken systems and build thriving, resilient communities.
- Tamarack Institute: Collective Impact Toolkit — An extensive, practically organized toolkit broken into the phases of a collective impact effort, from early groundwork through sustaining momentum.
Capacity Building
- The Training Hub powered by StriveTogether — The Training Hub provides easy-to-access, high-quality training, grounded in proven approaches and tested by leaders across the country.
- Measure Well — Measure Well offers tools, resources, and coaching opportunities designed for community leaders, data practitioners, and teams working to improve community economic outcomes.
Guides and Case Studies
- Built for Zero's Theory of Change — distills a decade of learning from BFZ communities and identifies four foundational capabilities, along with enabling conditions and resources that help communities achieve population-level homelessness reductions.
- Purpose Built Communities — Resources and case studies about the Purpose Built model, a holistic neighborhood approach which integrates mixed-income housing, cradle-to-college education, community wellbeing, and economic vitality.
- Principles of Collective Impact Strategy — a series of briefs investigating the key principles of systems change through collective impact strategies.
- Collective Impact Forum — A continually updated hub of articles, tools, and webinars curated specifically for collective impact practitioners.
Research
- When Collective Impact Has an Impact (ORS Impact & Spark Policy Institute) — A rigorous cross-site study of 25 initiatives examining when and how the approach actually drives systems change.
- A Roadmap to Results: Lessons for Effective Collective Impact — a study by Equal Measure for StriveTogether that sought to provide insight into the questions "What does collective impact look like 'on the ground'?" and "Is it effective in making big, bold change to entrenched problems?"
Foundational reading
- Collective Impact (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2011) — The original article by John Kania and Mark Kramer that introduced the term and the five conditions framework most of the field still references today.
- What is this Civic Infrastructure? — Infrastructure holds communities together: roads, bridges, an electricity grid. But there are some connections we can't see. Relationships, collaboration, goal setting and data sharing are part of infrastructure, too. These pieces are called civic infrastructure.