Achieving Meaningful Collaborations

David Bornstein writes that the “collective impact” strategy of creating alliances of civic and business leaders is being applied to social problems across the nation: “One difficulty is that most foundations and governments like to target their support to individual programs or organizations. They are used to thinking about impact through scale and replication, not integration of effort. Very few funders invest in the connective tissue that is necessary to foster meaningful collaborations.” The first step is to identify a few credible leaders within a community who can serve as conveners and genuinely “understand that every community needs a common table.”