The Collective Impact framework has most often been used as a tool to bring together various institutions or constituencies to address a broader social issue. Most often, these stakeholders are public entities and private entities, governmental agencies, nonprofits, and members of the public. Even when stakeholders are part of the same institution, like one of higher education, it's all too common for units to fall into silos and fail to work as a collective.
A framework like Collective Impact can bring together all the units to increase coordination, communication, and impact. For example, when looking at sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH) at UC Berkeley, each unit or group holds different responsibilities and roles in preventing and responding to SVSH. By adapting the Collective Impact framework to the higher education context at UC Berkeley, our aim was to bring together cross-collaborators and catalyze change by channeling resources and knoweldge into a comprehensive collective effort.
This Collective Impact Toolkit for Project Managers serves as a guide for higher education practitioners who are interested in applying the framework to their new and existing work. The model promotes a collective working structure that focuses on shared measurements, grounds in equity, and focuses on collective resources and knowledge to address large, complex issues. UC Berkeley researched and applied this framework to multiple projects, including the Coordinated Community Response Team (CCRT). In this toolkit, you can explore what Collective Impact is, the principles of practice, and concrete examples of how it was applied at UC Berkeley.
This project was supported by Grant No. 2020-X0942-CA-WA awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this publication/program/exhibition are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women.