While facilitating a planning session with a group of communities as part of the Corridors of College Success Initiative, Luzelma Canales of the RGV Focus partnership in Rio Grande Valley made a profound summary statement that captured the heart of their work: “We see what we do as making sure success — graduating from college — happens by…
In education, challenges are complex, often chronic and sometimes seem insurmountable. But what if we tackled these challenges with a “How Might We” approach? As IDEO’s CEO, Tim Brown, explains in his blog, The Secret Phrase that Sparks Creative Solutions: “How assumes that solutions exist and provides the creative confidence needed to identify and solve for…
As communities across the country engage in collective impact generally and the work of building cradle-to-career civic infrastructure specifically, one of the first issues that always comes up is stress and tension around the selection of a “backbone organization.” This is a core component of the work that Kania and Kramer lifted up in the…
Last month, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation (GCF) and FSG Social Impact Advisors (FSG) published a series of blogs in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on “Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations in Collective Impact” in which they shared their insights about the work of six backbone organizations in the Greater Cincinnati area. A must read for…