Week 2: Lessons From Vanilla Ice: Collaborate

In last week’s post, I discussed how three words at the beginning of Vanilla Ice’s Ice, Ice Baby provide an important message for government leaders. (Bet you never thought you’d read that sentence.) In that post, we discussed creating a Stop Doing List. Now, I will outline a model to Collaborate.

As government leaders, we all know that we cannot effectively further our mission alone. Collaboration and partnerships often hold keys to our success. One model of collaboration that intrigues me is Collective Impact. If you are not familiar with the model, then I encourage you to check out the articles at the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

To summarize, the collective impact model convenes a variety of stakeholders – government, nonprofit, and private companies – to identify a common agenda, share measurement, mutually reinforce activities, continuously communicate, and have a backbone organization with staff dedicated solely to supporting the process. Then the stakeholders coordinate their work to further the agenda, creating alignment, reducing redundancy of efforts and ultimately increasing efficiency and effectiveness, many would say. Sounds great, huh? My challenge to you this week is to learn more about the collective impact model, referencing the links provided and doing your own research.

What’s been your experience with collective impact? What are the areas where more meaningful collaboration with external and internal stakeholders could further your mission? What could this look like? I would love to read your thoughts in the comments below.

In the meantime, here’s Parks and Recreation’s Adam Scott explaining the lyrics to Ice, Ice Baby on Conan, in case you need a mental health break this afternoon.

Meredith Benton is part of the GovLoop Featured Blogger program, where we feature blog posts by government voices from all across the country (and world!). To see more Featured Blogger posts, click here.