“Collective impact is the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.”
Collective impact brings people together, in a structured way, to achieve social change. It starts with collectively defining a problem and creating a shared vision to solve the problem. It also means elevating voices, participatory action and establishing shared measurement, allowing for continuous quality improvement.
NASH serves as the backbone to drive collective impact on college completion by:
- Working with systems to develop a shared vision for success within their communities
- Establishing standard definitions and metrics to build evidence and compare results
- Centrally managing and tracking data
- Facilitating the sharing of best practices across systems
- Engaging systems in collaborative problem solving on how to address challenges
Each campus and system has their own goals and visions, and they can pursue them. However, student success and college completion is a shared goal. While, campuses can work on their targets on their own, NASH believes that the needle on college completion would only move when campuses and systems foster collaborations and communication.