Message from The President
"Collective Impact,” the latest buzz words penned by John Kania and Mark Kramer in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2011) are on the lips of many foundation teams. As opposed to “isolated impact,” when competitive forces dictate whose organizations get and do what, CI has five conditions of collective success: common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations. At The Ford Family Foundation we are inspecting our own programs to see if we recognize the five conditions in some of our work. As one of the six foundation partners in the Chalkboard Project, we created a separate backbone organization, Foundations for a Better Oregon, to help us tackle systemic issues in Oregon’s K-12 education system of interest to the partners and all of the stakeholders. Likewise, the Ford Institute for Community Building practices all five conditions in its pursuit of “Community Vitality” across rural Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. We invite you to learn more about these and other programs on this site and to join with us in the pursuit of Collective Impact.