Collective impact4/11/2023 We start hearing what is important to the community. We start discovering things about the community that can be a foundation for change. We create a very different image of the community. How would you like to help make our community a better place? What is helps make our community unique and strong? What do you value most about our community? When was a time you felt our community was at its best? By focusing on the needs and barriers to change in the community, we are more likely to look outside of the community for solutions (because we have created a picture of a broken community). They are essentially operating from a deficit-based approach. How can services work together to improve service delivery? What are the barriers to creating change? If collective impact initiatives start by asking questions As well as having insights about the nature of the issue or problem in the specific context, they also have other important knowledge and experience related to the community including the strengths of the community what people value about where they live local priorities and who is good at motivating others, building connections between people or feeling the pulse of the community. ( Click here for more on collective impact and community engagement.) While practitioners bring valuable specialist knowledge, community members have valuable lived experience and local knowledge 2. If we see communities as being full of strengths and potential having valuable insights and knowledge and having access to a range of internal and external resources we will start by actively engaging community members and the people most affected by the issues we are addressing. Identify and build on individual and community assets, skills and passions.Focus on community assets and strengths rather than problems and needs.If we do not actively engage community members in creating change, it leads to them being the objects of change (having things done TO them) rather than them being the subjects of change (where they are the ones DOING something).Īsset-based community development and other strengths-based approaches to working with communities: My experience tells me that if we truly want to make a difference, we need the people we serve to act as co-producers. However, I believe we have the opportunity to make an even greater difference in our communities when we help the people we serve to move beyond their roles as clients and advisers to become producers of their own community’s well-being. Professionals often believe that we have achieved community engagement when we ask people, “What do you need and how would you like it delivered?” Then we change our service model based on the input received. In addressing the issues involved, we can discover what is already working in the community, what their vision is for their community, what resources they can contribute to creating their vision, and who is passionate about helping to create change. Although the focus of collective impact is on creating change that will help address complex social problems, thus starting with the problem, it is still possible to be strengths-based. When initiatives take a top-down approach and do not involve the community from the start, they are implying that the community has little of value to offer.Īdopting a strengths-based approach to collective impact fundamentally changes the questions we ask and the way we relate to the people affected by the issues being addressed. As discussed in the previous post ( Collective impact and community engagement), community engagement needs to be at the heart of collective impact, but the (sometimes subtle) message underlying too many initiatives is that the community is part of the problem. Collective impact is an approach to addressing complex social problems.
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