Collaboration coordination and collective impact

Our Collective Impact model relies on a coordinated effort. In the Partnerships Team, without the personal experiences, knowledge and expertise of our Delivery Partners, we wouldn’t be able to bring together the whole community in creating our programme. First articulated in 2011 by John Kania and Mark Kramer in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, one of the conditions of success for collective impact should be ‘Continuous Communication’ and we do this in our team by joining up the relationships between our Delivery Partners and schools.

I remember the ripples of excitement at school when lessons were cancelled because we had an external workshop, or guest speaker attend. When you’re in school all day every day it was an event when someone from the ‘outside world’ came into school. Why was that so exciting? I think it was perspective. We would discover a glimpse of what the world was like outside of the classroom and hear other people’s experiences and learning. They were the moments that made an impact on me, and why our Delivery Partners (social/emotional, academic, confidence-based and wellbeing support) are so key to each child’s journey at West London Zone.

Managing the logistics of a bespoke, personalised programme for each child can pose a challenge: the programme is being adjusted and refined after each term with a young person, their parents and carers and key school staff. How can we ensure that as we work with more young people and with more communities, the insight and experience of our community Delivery Partners is not lost? Something that our Delivery Partners also brought to life for me at our recent Delivery Partner Learning Group. We have this meeting every four times a year, as a way to connect our partners with each other.

At the most recent meeting, we broke into groups to discuss the barriers to collective impact and share ideas and success stories with each other. It was also an opportunity for Delivery Partners to meet the other organisations we work with and learn from the experience, skills and local knowledge the Delivery Partners represent. Through these facilitated conversations, it was inspiring to hear the resounding collective goal: making a difference in children’s lives.

One Delivery Partner remarked that the model enabled: “a collection of people sharing responsibility”.

By running several of these facilitated learning groups in-school across the year, and bringing together a diverse range of local experience, skills and knowledge, we can build the WLZ programme with and for our community. Through our regular quality assurance meetings with Delivery Partners, debriefs with

facilitators after Delivery Partner sessions with our Link Workers, and identifying and connecting with potential new Delivery Partners already working in the Zone, we are working collectively to achieve positive change for children. It’s by mobilising our Delivery Partners, staying connected, and communicating constantly that we can ensure that our community remains at the heart of our collective impact model.

Kate Welsh, Head of Partnerships

Learn more about our Delivery Partner programmes here.