What is Collective Impact? Collective Impact is a model of organizing that centers equity to address complex health and social needs through five key strategies: (1) grounding work in data and context, and target solutions; (2) focusing on changing systems in addition to programs and services; (3) shifting power within the collaborative; (4) listening to and acting with the community; and (5) building equity leadership and accountability.

For us to complete the five strategies, we: (1) use a common definition of the problem and vision to solve it; (2) track progress the same way between partners; (3) integrate our partners’ different activities to maximize our end result; (4) build trust and strengthen relationships between our partners and ourselves; and (5) use a backbone team that is dedicated to aligning and coordinating the work of the group.

SIPCW played a key role in introducing the collective impact model to Staten Island. In response to John Kania and Mark Kramer’s seminal work in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, local community leaders on Staten Island came together and adopted this model as a way to organize a diverse coalition of community partners to tackle the complex health issues presented by opioid and alcohol use among youth. The TYSA coalition, then called Tackling Youth Substance Abuse, came together in 2011 under the leadership of Adrienne Abbate, who would be the first paid staff at SIPCW to lead this work. When the Staten Island community identified adolescent diabetes and obesity as a major community concern in 2015, the public health community on Staten Island once again turned to collective impact as a model to organize community partners around addressing this issue, forming the Child Wellness Initiative.

The late Betsy Dubovsky of the Staten Island Foundation was a steadfast champion of the collective impact model, providing initial funding for the TYSA coalition, and her legacy of collective impact continues as other CI initiatives have since emerged to address the complex health and social issues that no one organization can solve alone.