Collective Impact
A collaboration approach for cross-sector work around a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activity, communication and backbone support.
Stanford Social Innovation Review
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- place-based partnership work
- aligning organisations without pretending they are the same
- thinking about backbone support and shared measurement
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Is there a common agenda people genuinely own?
- What activities reinforce rather than duplicate each other?
- Who provides backbone coordination and who holds it accountable?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Collective Impact as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- collaboration can reproduce power imbalances
- shared measurement should not flatten local experience
- a common agenda must include community voice