Originally appeared on Collaboration for Impact blog on April 10, 2015 by Olivia Wright

Dr Andrew Young, CEO of The Centre for Social Impact shares some thoughts on collaborative approaches.

Two weeks ago we had the enormous privilege of announcing Burnie, Tasmania as Australia’s most promising early stage Collective Impact initiative.

The Search – an initiative offering up to $1 million in support to an Australian community working to address society’s biggest challenges – commenced in June last year. 49 communities applied and in November eleven were shortlisted. On March their Excellencies Peter and Lady Cosgrove generously hosted the announcement of Burnie’s success at Admiralty House in Sydney.

On behalf of CSI’s partners in The Search, I think I can say we are optimistic that all of these communities have the potential to fundamentally change how we address complex social issues in Australia.

Why are we optimistic? After all, the concept of collaborative approaches to difficult issues is hardly new. In Australia in the 1980s and 90s we called it community development. In the late nineties and early this century we called it place-based approaches. While many examples of these approaches may have made progress for a time, on the whole they failed to revolutionise how we do things.

Three reasons for optimism

I have at least three reasons to be optimistic.

My first was neatly expressed by a member of one of the communities I visited as a Search judge. I asked why they felt hopeful, given that this community has been involved in previous attempts to resolve the same issues they face today. This person was active in at least two of these previous efforts. She said: “because this time it’s different. There is more in it: More commitment. More resource. More structure. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re in it for the long haul.”

I’ve since described this as “realistic optimism” – many of the leaders in these communities share this positivity, grounded in real understanding of the challenges.

Second, we’re seeing governments are starting to do some unusual things.

State Governments in all states are grappling with at least one “Collective Impact” community approach. I am hearing some really constructive questions from bureaucrats including “I am convinced that approaches like this are fundamentally important to our future. However, I can also see these approaches challenging how we think about funding, accountability and control. How can we work with five or ten approaches like this, let alone hundreds?” More importantly, I am starting to sense real commitment to working out the answers.

And the funding tide is turning: a year ago if you’d asked me how funding for Collective Impact approaches might work, I’d have said that funding for the “backbone” of the effort would likely come from philanthropy. I would have said that if communities could even start to influence Government funding for service delivery over the mid-term (several years) that’d be amazing progress.

I was wrong. The key funders for backbone resourcing in several communities will be Governments; for example, GoGoldfields in Victoria has received a commitment of $2.5 million from the Victorian Government. This is huge.

The Commonwealth Government is in some different examples also exploring locally-led collaborative approaches. The Empowered Communities: Empowered Peoples report was recently launched, and while the Government has yet to respond in detail the Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion expressed his support for the new approach, recognising this kind of thinking is required to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage.

My third reason for optimism may sound like a negative: we’ve run out of money. I’ve spoken previously about the implications of our ageing population and slowing growth. For the first time in decades we have no choice but to seriously consider new approaches that might – in time – deliver more social outcomes and potentially at less cost. I think Commonwealth and State Governments are recognising collaborative, community-based approaches as one idea worth genuinely testing.

Learning opportunities

The final eleven communities in The Search were very diverse; it’s hard to imagine a community in Australia that can’t learn from the successes and challenges of one or more of these. The shortlisted communities included large urban areas (like Logan, Qld), large regional cities (like Geelong, Vic), small cities (like Burnie) and remote communities (like Bourke in NSW and Halls Creek in WA). You can read more about the communities here.

The eleven communities will also form a learning community; they will support and challenge each other. One of CSI’s overall goals is that learnings from these communities will support the collaborative efforts of many others.

The broader learning has well-and-truly started. All the tools you need to begin are right here. We hope the Collaboration for Impact community of practice flourishes in years to come.

We also hope to conduct research alongside some of these communities to develop more nuanced understandings of the keys to success of collaborative approaches for complex social issues. With thanks to the Macquarie Group Foundation, we’re also working with The Hive at Mt Druitt in Western Sydney, another collective impact approach involving the ten20 Foundation, United Way and FACS NSW.

Challenges for funders

I touched earlier on the challenges for governments in thinking about empowering communities in collaborative approaches in the future. These are very difficult questions; whole new frameworks for thinking about outcomes, funding, “commissioning”, risk and accountability are needed.

There is also a significant opportunity for philanthropists, whether individuals, companies or foundations, and it’s an opportunity so far largely missed (notwithstanding the leadership of the ten20 Foundation and The Search partners including the Westpac Foundation).

In my view, to have real and lasting impact, philanthropy needs to be catalytic; it needs to invest in ideas that can be system-changing.

In short, I can’t think of a better opportunity than these collaborative approaches. Where else does an investment of around $2m over a few years have such potential: to not only leverage but completely transform existing annual program funding of $100m or more?

Game-changing philanthropists: please apply.