What is Community Impact?
Community Impact builds upon the Collective Impact framework. It’s a model for bringing people together in a structured way, but also centers community voice to create positive social change.
Watch our video below for a visual explanation:
In community work, often times communication challenges and duplication of efforts can lead to a breakdown of partnership – even when community groups have aligned goals.
Community Impact starts with elevating voices of the people most affected - listening to concerns, desires, and sentiments. We then bring partners together to create a process to address those concerns, identify gaps, and reduce the duplication of efforts to make sure everything is covered and we’re working collaboratively.
This work also creates a process for continuous improvement through data so that we know we are getting better over time.
And above all else, community impact ensures that communication channels are open enough to handle difficult conversations.
This example involved a class of 3rd graders who were not reading at grade level.
Our community impact process began with community navigators who listened deeply to students, parents, and the schools. We then brought together parents, advocates, after-school programs, a library, and other literacy programs working in the neighborhood. We worked together to define the problem and our goals using data.
We ended up building a literacy program across 4 schools with programming in the classroom, library, after-school programs, and at home. Our data and reports were then delivered to policy groups to begin replicating the process at the systems level.
In the end, student reading scores rose, partnerships strengthened, and systems began to change for the better because of community impact.