Straight from the Community: Stories about Building Collective Impact in Colorado

Abstract Information: Community Organizing for Prevention (COFP) is a statewide initiative in Colorado that takes an upstream shared risk and protective factors approach to creating equitable systems change and preventing substance misuse and violence among youth. There are 34 communities in Colorado that are organizing their local communities to implement primary prevention initiatives, through funding from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). In partnership with CDPHE and local Colorado communities, evaluators at the Colorado School of Public Health’s Injury and Violence Prevention Center conducted key informant interviews in three communities, each from different geographical and cultural areas in Colorado (n=20) during the winter of 2023. The goal of these interviews was to understand how these communities are leveraging collective impact, an approach that organizes a network of stakeholders including community members, a strong backbone agency, and other community groups to make systems-level changes by continually communicating, setting common goals, aligning work plans, and using shared measurement to evaluate progress. Using a collective impact approach in prevention work helps communities reach more equitable and impactful solutions and achieve social change. To understand collective impact efforts among these coalitions, we partnered with community members who lead the local coalitions to co-create the qualitative evaluation. In this partnership, community members informed the direction of the evaluation, helped create the interview guide to ensure it would be accessible to communities, and identified individuals who could provide the most insight about the local collective impact efforts. By using key informant interviews, we have been able to effectively draw out the voices and stories from these communities about how they are building and strengthening local collective impact efforts to reach a shared vision for their community. Qualitative approaches allow for a more robust and comprehensive story about the nuanced experiences of community members in building collective impact across cultures and geographies. What is also important in our work is not only highlighting the stories from community members but also centering power in communities around the dissemination of findings. The research and evaluation community has an unfortunate history of extracting data without appropriately returning it to communities. Our evaluation approach allows communities to decide how they would like to receive their data back, whether through infographics or facilitated discussion circles, to ensure the community stakeholders are prioritized and the findings are easily accessible. As a part of the product development we also consider how communities might use the results for their own advocacy, leveraging their own data to advance their efforts, and sharing practical lessons learned with other communities. The story told by local communities about collect impact has the powerful potential to strengthen collective impact efforts across communities and advance prevention structures and systems that can achieve equitable and sustainable social change.

Relevance Statement: Evaluation plans and research, especially academic research, often aren’t created and implemented in partnership with the communities that are most impacted by the topics being evaluated. The evaluation team with the Colorado School of Public Health’s Injury and Violence Prevention Center are implementing practices in their evaluation of the Community Organizing for Prevention (COFP) Grant that center around the participating communities. This qualitative project evaluates how Colorado communities are using a Collective Impact approach to help create systems-level changes in their primary prevention efforts to reduce substance use among youth. Community Mobilizers, who lead local COFP coalitions, were involved in all of the phases of the evaluations. Mobilizers not only collaborated with evaluators to decide the direction of the qualitative research project, but they also helped develop the questions and reviewed the reports with the findings before they were finalized. Collaborating to this degree not only helps to create shared ownership of the evaluation but it also ensures that the research will be more relevant and accessible to communities. Outside of the processes that centered on partnership with community members, the aspect of Collective Impact is important to organizing a network of stakeholders including community members, a strong backbone agency, and other community groups to make systems-level changes by continually communicating, setting common goals, aligning work plans, and using shared measurement to evaluate progress. Often times with prevention efforts there is research about why approaches like Collective Impact are important but often there isn’t any information on what it looks like in practice. The findings from this research project shares the stories of three different communities in Colorado, each in different phases of their Collective Impact journey. It is through the community-centered approach that this evaluation was able to be done in a way that increases relevance and accessibility of the research findings. These stories have the potential to help not only the participating communities, but other communities who are working to make a collective impact in their efforts.