Live United by Ann Austin

I had the great pleasure of attending the Albert Lea Area Schools kickoff last month. My mom was a teacher, so I have always had great reverence for the work teachers do — and how much they care for their students. This is definitely the case with teachers in our district. And after watching the presentations, I can say we have much to look forward to!

An analogy that came up several times during the presentations that morning was how a forest is much stronger than an individual tree. A grove of trees helps protect individual trees against storms and strong winds. In some cases, like with aspen trees, the root system is interconnected, creating an even stronger network.

This analogy was used to describe the importance of community. For students to be successful they need good teachers and innovative schools, but also involved parents, a supportive community, secure funding, quality infrastructure, policies that are student-focused, etc.

There are so many variables that impact an individual or organization’s success. If we are to create a better tomorrow, we can’t shy away from the fact that any issue is a community issue.

A paper I have referred to often, and one that has defined the work of many United Way chapters is titled: “Collective Impact” by Stanford Social Innovation Review. The full paper can be found by visiting this link: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact.

Something we encounter quite often with nonprofits is a tendency to compete for funding and recognition. This environment, called “isolated impact,” has existed for decades, perhaps even since nonprofits were formed, but it’s not effective at solving community problems.

According to the Review, “As a result of this process, nearly 1.4 million nonprofits try to invent independent solutions to major social problems, often working at odds with each other and exponentially increasing the perceived resources required to make meaningful progress. Recent trends have only reinforced this perspective. The growing interest in venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship, for example, has greatly benefited the social sector by identifying and accelerating the growth of many high-performing nonprofits, yet it has also accentuated an emphasis on scaling up a few select organizations as the key to social progress.”

Just like there are so many variables when it comes to creating an ideal environment for our students to learn and thrive, we must look at community problem-solving in a different way.

Our United Way has been working on the collective impact model, also termed community impact (in the United Way world). This is not always easy and is often confusing, as organizations have different policies and methods of operating, but we are off to a great start!

I can attest that local program leadership is excellent — people are willing to come to the table and meet halfway; they are willing to leave their agendas at the door for a time and focus on the people they serve.

To effectively move toward a collective impact model, organizations need to have a common agenda and shared vision, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication and backbone support/quality foundation.

This kind of model makes United Way look different than in the past. We are focused on building partnerships and community awareness of social issues, such as poverty.

Every board meeting involves discussion about some community issue that needs to be  addressed and how we can better support efforts. We are an organization that embraces innovation and continues to look down the road to identify emerging needs. It’s truly exciting to be part of this process.

But it is a process. We know there are going to be challenges along the way and things won’t get easier for a while; getting to the root cause is messy. Yet this collective impact model is worth the extra effort because every single child, woman and man in our community is worth trying to find some resolution to the challenges we are facing.

“No single organization is responsible for any major social problem, nor can any single organization cure it.”

 

Albert Lea resident Ann Austin is the executive director of the United Way of Freeborn County.