Equity-focused Collective Impact Effort Seeking Greater Systems-level Impact

Case Study: Strategic Planning with a County-wide Collective Impact Effort 

THE OPPORTUNITY:

Build Upon 10 Years of Collective Impact to Expand Systems-Change Interventions & Strengthen the Quality of Collaboration

Cradle Kalamazoo was founded to reduce infant deaths to 3 in 1,000 and eliminate disparities for Black births in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. The effort is grounded in a systems analysis that knows racism at every level (ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and individual) is a core factor in creating and perpetuating a high infant mortality rate. Cradle is an Infant Mortality Initiative of YWCA Kalamazoo.

While the collective impact effort had been successfully moving the needle in many spaces within Kalamazoo, leaders were frustrated by a lack of transformational progress and sought a new strategic plan that would unify, anchor, and guide them to have the higher level of measurable impact they envision. They needed a consulting team who understood the opportunities and challenges of collective impact work and had a grounding in how to apply antiracism in both programmatic strategies and internal culture.

In 2022, we began working with Cradle leaders, including staff from their administrative and data backbone teams, as well as representatives from community organizational partners, to envision a new strategic direction. Through a comprehensive 9-month process, we facilitated partners to identify the levers of systems change where Cradle has the biggest opportunity for impact and developed bold strategies for taking action over the next 3 years.

OUR IMPACT:

Our collaboration included guiding them to explore how antiracism can more explicitly show up in their programmatic strategies by using a targeted universalism approach to center the Black community. We also guided them to identify strategies to target system-level root causes of problems they have long been tackling (for example, an explicit move into the housing policy space to address sleep-related deaths, which have not been (and cannot be) eliminated through safe sleep education alone). Among our key activities were focus groups, interviews, surveys, antiracism workshops on anti-Black racism and white supremacy culture, engaging with case studies from other localities, and feedback gathering sessions to develop a theory to change, three-year objectives and goals, and a scorecard for implementation. 

Cradle’s previous strategic plan did not include strategies to nurture and sustain the collective impact effort itself. Our plans always include goals related to developing internal culture and capabilities. For Cradle, this helped the group attend not only to what they want to do “out there” in the world but also what essential work they must do internally to build and sustain effective and equitable accountability, decision-making, and communication (e.g., bringing more racial healing and other antiracist practices into Cradle spaces). Dozens of strategic planning clients have taught us that without the rich soil of internal elements, the programmatic work will fail to grow and thrive.