How can a backbone build structures and processes that can better support and retain its staff?

In this new podcast episode, we’re doing a deep dive discussion to learn about the work of United Way of Salt Lake and the Promise Partnership, a cradle-to-career initiative to support Utah youth. In this talk, we learn about the Promise Partnership’s goals and what the team has learned so far from adjusting their staffing models to build in more peer support and mentorship.

To share their experiences with this new staffing model, we hear from Marisol Pérez González, Stephanie Rokich, and Alexis Bucknam from United Way of Salt Lake. They share what they have learned so far trying out this staffing model, and what they recommend to other organizations considering new ways to support backbone staff.

Ways to Listen: Stream this episode below. You can also listen via Itunes, Spotify, Simplecast, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.

Please find a transcript of this podcast lower down this page.

 

Resources and Footnotes

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Music

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Itunes, Spotify, Simplecast, Sticher, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.

Podcast Transcript

(Intro) Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.

The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.

In this episode, we’re doing a deep dive discussion to learn about the work of United Way of Salt Lake and the Promise Partnership, a cradle-to-career initiative to support youth in Utah. In this talk, we learn about the goals of the Promise Partnership and what their team has learned so far when they adjusted their backbone staffing models to build in more peer support and mentorship.

Joining us today to share their experiences are Marisol Pérez González, Stephanie Rokich, and Alexis Bucknam from United Way of Salt Lake. They share what they have learned so far trying out this staffing model, and what they recommend to other organizations considering new ways to support backbone staff. Moderating this discussion is Collective Impact Forum executive director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s listen in.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello everybody and welcome to today’s podcast of the Collective Impact Forum network. I am Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum, and so happy to be hosting today’s conversation with wonderful leaders from the United Way of Salt Lake.

Today we will be exploring the topic of staffing the backbone role, and the folks from United Way of Salt Lake and their work on the Promise Partnership have brought a lot of creativity and are here to share some learning with us about how they have approached staffing that backbone role.

In today’s conversation I will be joined by Marisol Pérez González, Stephanie Rokich, and Alexis Bucknam to explore this conversation.

So before we begin talking about the work of the Promise Partnership and also the backbone work, I would love to meet the three of you. I will open the floor and ask if you could all introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what brought you to this work. Why don’t we start with you, Alexis?

Alexis Bucknam: Thank you. I got into this work through an interesting path. I worked in community engagement in higher education for about 20 years, and one of the things that we were beginning to examine when I left higher ed was we have had this commitment to our communities and to the public purpose of higher education for quite a long time, and we still haven’t been seeing a lot of improvement in the social conditions of the communities that we care about that are around our institutions.

And so I ran a small nonprofit focused on community engagement in higher education, and it folded in 2018, and as I was looking at jobs moving forward, I had had some colleagues through my graduate work and some courses that I had taken that had worked at United Way so I had a chance to look into working with the Promise Partnership through United Way, and was recruited to actually work in the postsecondary space around both supporting secondary students to be college and career ready and to graduate high school and then also to complete college or postsecondary.

I have grown from that role and moved into a senior director role and so have had a chance to also be more involved in the thinking about our broader organization and the ways in which we work together, and so that’s been really exciting.

One of the great things that I was able to do in that role was to recruit Marisol into the role that she’s serving in now so perhaps I’ll invite Marisol to talk a little bit about what was attractive to her and what brought her into our work and our organization.

Marisol Pérez González: Thank you, Alexis. I would say what brought me to this work, a lot of the work that I have done, things from my personal experience and work experience and my path to higher education as a first-generation student so I actually have had the opportunity to be part of different programs, projects, student organizations. From a very young age of what I see now has culminated in many of the work that is done in the Promise Partnership so after working with youth in foster care and first-generation students, in my previous job I began to look at where and how all the different work that is done to support different communities becomes the big picture

And so that’s where I have seen this work being done with the Promise Partnership and I now have the privilege to work alongside Alexis and my supervisor, Jessica Miller, to do work around postsecondary outcomes. It has been pretty exciting to see how it all culminates together and be able to see all the work that is done by different partners and how we can collaboratively come to improving outcomes for the Promise Partnership population.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Stephanie, we’d love to meet you as well.

Stephanie Rokich: Thank you. I came to this work in a bit different way. In 2012 I had been doing volunteer management for a small nonprofit, and I left that job to a six-month fellowship with the political campaign doing community organizing, and through it I realized how much I loved both volunteer management and community organizing, and at that time in 2012 I started working for United Way of Salt Lake in their volunteer department. Through that time I’ve kind of grown with the organization and all of the changes that we’ve had in our collective impact approaches over the years, and now I manage our community engagement work which includes our volunteer program. It includes the grassroots leadership program and also community school work so I’m able to kind of meld all those passions of mine together.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Nice, great. So you’ve all mentioned the Promise Partnership work a little bit so far. Could you tell us about the overall goal of the Promise Partnership and what kind of community partners are engaged in the work?

Alexis Bucknam: I will kind of kick us off but I welcome Marisol and Stephanie to chime in. I think one thing that’s important to understand about the Promise Partnership is that it’s a fairly large footprint. We actually have six school districts that are part of the Promise Partnership, and our goal that we’ve developed with our Promise Partnership regional council is that we work so that all Utah kids are ready for school, better in school, and successful in life. We’re very committed to the results-based accountability framework, and so we definitely sort of see that as our North Star of what we’re– at each cradle to career outcome so kindergarten readiness, third grade reading proficiency, eighth grade math proficiency, high school graduation, postsecondary readiness, postsecondary completion, health, and financial stability just so everyone knows what those outcomes are. We’re very interested in developing results for each of those outcomes but that they all feed into that larger result that all kids and families are really thriving is maybe another way we like to think about it.

So in terms of the partners that we engage, we really want to be truly cross-sector in our approach to the work and so we have obviously nonprofits. We have government agencies. We have businesses, and of course schools and school districts that we partner with. I would say the area that we’re really recognizing as an area for growth is to bring in more grassroots organizations who maybe aren’t as established 501(c)(3) nonprofits but are really generated from the interests of community members who are most impacted by the wicked social problems that we’re all trying to address, and we’re also interested in thoughtfully engaging youth and families into our network that work with all of those outcomes.

So Stephanie’s team, particularly the grassroots team, is really engaging in thought partnership with the network function which is where I sit to examine how to do that effectively.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Correct me if I’m wrong. The work is—there is sort of a collective impact effort that is at the Greater Salt Lake scale, and then there are also partnerships that are happening in specific neighborhoods or parts of the community. Is that right? I’m trying to picture sort of the scale at which all of this is operating. We see nodding, yes. OK, thank you.

What are some of the accomplishments that you all are most proud of in the work of the Promise Partnership?

Alexis Bucknam: One of the things, and Stephanie can certainly speak to this because she’s been with the organization for 10 years at this point but when United Way of Salt Lake really made the intentional decision to become a collective impact backbone organization and convened the Promise Partnership regional council, they elected to start at the beginning of the cradle to career pipeline. They focused on early childhood and kindergarten readiness.

One of the great successes related to that was actually getting an assessment for kindergarten readiness that is actually being applied statewide now, and that was done through policy advocacy at our organization too so that we would actually know, have a sense of what sort of kindergarten readiness students had coming in, and then they’re also assessed at the end of kindergarten. So that’s been huge.

Because that was the space that we started in, we’ve also had some successes in getting funding to support cross-organizational pilots to try and test out interventions related to early childhood, and those grants currently have been disbursed and we’re waiting for the results of that so we’re excited about that.

Actually today, February 28, 2022, we have a bill that is—we have a 45-day legislative session in Utah so it goes very quickly, and so this is the last week, and we have a bill up on the Hill that is seeking to have funding for full-day optional kindergarten for any family that would like to have full-day kindergarten. In Utah where kindergarten is not required, it’s optional, and most of the kindergarten in our state is half day, which can be very difficult for families to try and navigate. One of our goals for this session is to get this bill passed so that not only are families supported in the child care aspects that they’ve been struggling with but then the youth have more time in the classroom to really get comfortable being in school and hopefully achieve their goals.

A couple other things that I would raise. I actually directly work on a partnership with one of our local high schools and one of our corporate partners. We’ve been able to get the corporate partner to commit to a $500,000 commitment to the high school over five years, and we’re working on both a community hub where basic needs are being addressed such as like a food pantry. They have laundry facilities, etc., and we’ve also been working with the corporate partner to develop a career and technical education pathway that focuses on the industry that they’re in which is transportation, and we’re hoping to be able to scale that to a statewide career and technical education pathway. That’s been really great.

One other thing I would share is we were part of a multiorganization partnership that included the American Cancer Society and the University of Utah as well as—those were the three groups, and then we received some funding from Robert Wood Johnson, and we used that to do a statewide survey of food insecurity for postsecondary students, so that includes both degree-seeking students and technical college students. First of all, we’re just really excited to have that baseline data because the different institutions had been doing surveys but there was no consistent dataset across all of the system of higher ed institutions but the other piece we’re really excited about is that now the institutions and the system of higher ed can use that information to really identify specific interventions that can support students on those campuses.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: You all have been incredibly busy. Congratulations on all of those accomplishments, Alexis. Thank you for sharing that. I want to also ask Stephanie or Marisol, is there anything you would like to add to that since I know you are all bringing difference vantage points in?

Stephanie Rokich: One project that we kicked off in response to the pandemic was called Stay Safe, Stay Connected, and our goal is really to respond to the needs that students were having being at home, trying to learn, not always having access to devices and internet. We were able to do a few different things with that initiative including giving devices out to the community to members who needed it, getting several hundred families connected to a low-cost or free internet access.

And we also did a lot around tutoring. We piloted a virtual tutoring program which was very interesting and I learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work tutoring over Zoom but that was really great, and now we’ve been able to expand that and offer that to more of our school partners who want to engage in virtual tutoring.

Those were just a couple of the things we were able to do as well as just providing a lot of information in multiple languages about ways that families could access rental insurance and other needs that were exacerbated by the pandemic, and many of those pieces are still continuing today.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: And, Marisol?

Marisol Pérez González: The other program that I was also able to work on when I joined United Way was the FAFSA impact and improvement network, and that is something that I believe Alexis had led previously. That work is a partnership with some of the local high schools to do some continuous improvement approaches to improve the number of completed FAFSA applications for those high schools.

This year for about six months and we’re actually closing on that process for this school year. We partner with two high schools composed of teams where they have their vice principals, counselors, college advisors, to look at different approaches on how to improve those rates of completion for their schools. Those rates are historically low in Utah, and with the pandemic it has also not helped with those rates but I know Alexis had shared that in the last year, West High School was one of the high schools that actually improved their rates by four percent when many of the other high schools were actually struggling because of the pandemic so that has been pretty awesome to see and improve those completion rates.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, congrats. The pandemic makes it all so much more—the hard work so much more challenging even so that’s great.

One of the things I alluded to at the start of the conversation was the unique way that you all have been staffing the backbone support, the facilitation, and the coordination for this partnership work. So could you tell us a little bit about how you are staffing the backbone which sits within staff at the United Way?

Alexis Bucknam: I’ll kind of kick us off and then we can have a more open dialogue but I’ll start by saying we’ve had the network director role to work with our different partnerships and especially our networks related to the cradle to career outcomes for several years.

To be totally candid, we had seen a fair amount of turnover in that particular role, and I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One is this is adaptive work. It’s really hard. You have to have a disposition where you’re comfortable with that so I think sometimes people come into the role and just identify that it’s not a good fit for them.

I think when the pandemic hit and we went all virtual for essentially two years, it also felt isolating because it was like you were doing the work with your network, and we would have staff meetings and things like that but you weren’t having the same amount of interaction that we would have had previously when we were physically located in an office.

We had some turnover last year and our organization is really committed to and I highly encourage any organization to actually have exit interviews and to capture the experiences of folks, and then to have that fed back to the supervisors and the leadership that worked with those individuals.

We identified some different elements related to the things I just described that we really were interested in solving for, and so we elected to sort of like—some people may be familiar with the consulting model where you have a senior consultant and a junior consultant, and so what we’ve elected to do is have a lead network director and a network director who work hand in hand on all of the aspects of the collective impact backbone work together, so planning agendas, meeting with partners.

And what it’s allowed us to do so far and I’ll certainly let Marisol chime in but my observation is to bring in some really great talent who we might not have hired before because these jobs can be so demanding and it requires a certain level of experience but because we have this paired model, we’re able to invite folks who have all of the qualities and the qualifications that lend themselves to this work but just need a little more time doing it to build their competency and so that’s the model that we’re using to really hopefully build a talent pipeline that allows us to promote individuals in that network director role into lead network director positions.

Marisol is in that network director role so I’d love to hear her observations and experience because she was in our first cohort of people that we brought in with this new model so it’s been really interesting to explore it together.

Marisol Pérez González: Yes, indeed. I joined United Way when this new model was implemented so that was in July of last year, 2021.

My first impression was that the onboarding was pretty helpful to be able to join alongside three other network directors where we’re all experiencing the same onboarding process and be able to rely on each other for questions and areas of improvement where it’s not just one of us taking on this role and trying to navigate it alone but rather having an entire team who is experiencing all the things together.

That was very helpful and I’ve actually found the partnership that was created with my lead supervisor and me to be extremely helpful. I’ve gotten to work with Jessica Miller and Alexis is Jessica’s supervisor, and we get to rely on each other for what Alexis was mentioning with the different networks getting feedback from each other, navigating gaps that we may be seeing, and bringing the broad experience that we both bring from our different backgrounds. It has been very interesting where I can rely on Jessica for mentorship and support.

One thing that we have talked about and I think one of the other pairings of network directors also expressed is that it would have been maybe also nice to have our lead network director join before we did just to provide some time for them to be more able to respond to questions that we both may be having because there are some of those instances but outside of that, it has been helpful and also just when one of us is not able to attend meetings or be there, the other one is always in the loop of what’s going on and can continue forward with any of the network. It has been overall a very learning experience for me I can say.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Stephanie, how about from where you sit more from the angle of the community engagement team?

Stephanie Rokich: The other piece of the new model is as Alexis and Marisol described thinking about our work in portfolios, and then our community engagement team can plug into those different bodies of work, and that’s really helped just with collaboration and moving a lot of important work forward.

For example, Alexis and Marisol have their portfolio of work. They might have internally a volunteer team member sit on the monthly or so meetings that they have with them, and if they have a grassroots fellowship project going on, they might have the grassroots fellow sit in on that too so that it really is everyone working, bringing their expertise and their skills and resources toward that same portfolio of work. That’s just really helped to bring clarity and direction and make sure we are all kind of working to our one body of work, and that the people who need to be in those decision-making spaces are part of those spaces.

I think before we were doing some great alignment at the leadership level of our department but now, we’ve been able to do more alignment all throughout the department as well.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Just a pause to help people kind of visualize the backbone team that’s supporting, it’s not a single—often when we talk about collective impact there’s a steering committee and then three or four or five workers working on some projects.

Just to give people reference of the scale, you’re talking about, yes, there is the regional work and then many sub-partnerships, and so tell us a little bit more about the size of the backbone team and how much work you all are coordinating across the region because I think it’s a lot bigger than a lot of the work that we often are thinking about when we think about collective impact efforts.

Stephanie Rokich: I can start. So I think last I counted we have 20-something or so staff, and that includes some parttime, some temporary, and then mostly fulltime so we definitely have been able to build up a large backbone staff.

We kind of have some overlapping frameworks that we utilize and so as you mentioned, we do have that regional network and the network team has a mix in their portfolio of those outcomes like eighth grade reading, third grade—or excuse me, eighth grade math, third grade reading, different outcomes that they’re working toward, and then we also have portfolios with schools that we work with through a community school model and really supporting at the school level, making sure every student has those wraparound services and those academic supports at that level.

Then there also is kind of work at the city level so it really depends on where those different pieces of work are ripe for really happening right now and who’s engaged in the work.

Then as far as the community engagement team, we do have about five different fellows who are doing six-month fellowships with us where they’re doing community-based research that’s really informing and supporting the work that the networks are doing. We also have a few volunteer team staff members so we have thousands of volunteers every year to serve as tutors and mentors and any kind of other support that a school might need, reading with kids, serving food at a food pantry, etc.

We’re able to offer that resource because we have invested in that piece of our work, and then we have some other people working specifically with administrators and teachers helping to align some curricular support to outside like with an afterschool program for example. That’s just at a glance some of the different pieces but I’m sure I missed some things so I’ll let Marisol and Alexis weigh in.

Alexis Bucknam: That was pretty comprehensive actually.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: I might have heard some collective jaws drop when you said the backbone team is 20 people when you’re looking out there at collective impact efforts across the country.

But one of the things I just want to draw, a lot of what you’re saying is really relevant regardless of the size of the team, helping people, building the talent pipeline in the community for people doing this work, looking for folks who are really interested in adaptive leadership and adaptive challenges and what that looks like when you’re supporting facilities in collective impact work, helping people not feel like they’re in isolation when they’re playing this role because regardless of how big the backbone team is, if you’re sort of based externally trying to facilitate work without the support of colleagues and peers, that’s really hard work, and so finding ways to find that kind of peer mentorship and connection either in the backbone team or with others in the community I think is really, really important.

There are many other lessons probably but those are some that are really bubbling up for me regardless of the size of the backbone team, some things that are very transferable to all folks doing collective impact work.

I’m curious if there are other things that come up for you around maybe like onboarding and building capacity of new folks joining the backbone team or surprises or lessons that you’ve learned that you’d like to talk about.

Marisol Pérez González: I can speak to that from my experience with the onboarding process. It was really helpful to set goals for each of us when we came on board, and those goals are some of the ones that we work towards for the different milestones throughout the year.

Within those milestones there’s some key components of developing an understanding of the different collective impact methodologies and tools that support the networks so from the very beginning there’s been trainings around what collective impact is, results-based accountability, results-based facilitation, continuous improvement, and more recently we’ve been doing some design training. With all those trainings we get to do together and also with the entire collective impact as a whole.

I’ve noticed with folks who may have already gone through those trainings as well so all of that seems to provide a really good structure for all the different tools that are useful to become aware to be able to take on the work that we do, and also understanding the different ways in which our work may intersect with each other and seeing how the bigger picture of all the different network structures come together.

I think those have become more clear for me recently especially I’ve just had the opportunity to sit on and facilitate different networks and see how their network directors lead on their work and be able to see how it relates to some of the work that I get to do as well. Overall, a lot of tools and a lot of trainings that really provide the structure for what this work is about.

Alexis Bucknam: I’ll just add very quickly that based on I mentioned those exit interviews and some of what the feedback we received and so we were very intentional about changing our onboarding process as we need to transition to really provide much more rigorous support to all of the network directors, whether they be lead or network directors that were coming on board, and specifically the other piece that we’ve just begun is now that we’ve completed that training, doing mock facilitations together so like a segment of the meeting as a group. So, we get assigned roles and things like that and then we give that person feedback and support them in terms of building their facilitation skills so really making it a priority to support one another in gaining those skills and those competencies collectively so that we all feel comfortable doing, like I said, this challenging adaptive work with cross-sector partners who often say or do things that are surprising in our meetings, and then part of our neutral facilitator role is to navigate that and support the group to collective action.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: I trust that many people listening will be well familiar with those curveballs and surprises that can show up in real time in meetings for sure.

Is there anything else that you have learned so far, surprises along the way that you would like to reflect on?

Stephanie Rokich: I’ll just add that like with anything, you never know what’s going to happen until you try something new so I think we’ve gotten pretty used to identifying what needs tweaks and making sure that everyone who will be involved in those tweaks is involved in figuring that out but also knowing that- I think we took time to say let’s try this for three months and do a check-in, let’s check in at six months, and the continue to innovate if we’re feeling like we’re not quite where we want to be yet, and knowing that we’ll probably never get there, we just want to keep that continuous improvement mindset.

I think that’s helped us a lot to know this isn’t the way that it’s going to be moving forward necessarily, and that has helped us be really adaptable as new challenges have arisen.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great, bringing that continuous improvement into the backbone, not only how you’re facilitating the work of your partners but how you’re reflecting on your own work as well. That’s terrific.

Alexis Bucknam: I would just add quickly that one thing that has shown up because we did do like a feedback session a few weeks ago is that there’s a real hunger, even though we’ve got these groups that are coming together around the different networks in our work portfolio, there’s still a real hunger for what Marisol was describing, that big picture of how everything fits together.

So we’re working with—especially the network function but I’m sure community engagement is doing this as well to think about our monthly meetings and how we can facilitate that learning amongst ourselves in a way that’s productive and that helps us see those intersections but we haven’t found the perfect solution to that so it’s really great to have this great group of individuals who are steeped in this work to be thought partners around how to effectively do that together that meets their needs but also allows us to be as effective as possible to improve the conditions that are affecting our communities that we care about.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Great. Is there any advice that you’d have for others around the backbone role, the staffing of the backbone function, or anything else you’d like to share with listeners today?

Alexis Bucknam: I would say one that that we even with as many staff as we have as you alluded to, Jen, we have a lot of things that we’re doing and sometimes we do feel spread too thin so I would definitely encourage partnerships to examine what their staffing is or what their resources are and be really intentional about what they’re focusing on.

Sort of like I described at the very top, when we first started we focused on kindergarten readiness and early childhood, and then scaled from there so I would just invite folks to—because we recognize not everyone has the resources we have and might not be able to do this structure of having folks work together but how are you intentionally focusing your efforts in a way that moves towards results, and how are you providing all those things that we sort of surfaced around peer support, onboarding, all of those pieces that regardless of the size of your staff are really going to be important to the success of your collective impact effort.

Stephanie Rokich: I will add too to think creatively about any parttime positions or even temporary positions that could have the support and training to play that role.

So we have one of our grassroots team members, she’s done a couple fellowship cycles with us, and is a community member, a parent, lives right in the area where a lot of the schools that we work with is, and they’re taking on a lot more of some of the network function and actually facilitating some meetings and doing some of that work too, and having that additional training around being a backbone staff so I think there are some other options if you don’t just have all fulltime permanent positions, to think creatively about tapping into the resources especially with community members who are really passionate and thinking about that talent pipeline that can be built.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s very helpful. I can recall some other examples in many different parts of the country that would, for example, pay the co-chairs of work groups because they didn’t have enough backbone—they didn’t make the choice to staff up their backbone but rather to compensate people for doing some of the facilitation work that were, for example, chairs of their work groups so I appreciate that bridge to thinking about other ways to provide that backbone capacity as well as not only having to be fulltime staff all housed under the same roof so thanks for that addition.

This has been very, very helpful to unpack the work of the Promise Partnership that’s being facilitated out of the United Way of Salt Lake. I really want to thank Stephanie, Alexis, and Marisol for joining today. We are so grateful to be able to learn from you and for you to take the time to share this really innovative experience with folks in the Collective Impact Forum network so thank you very much. I wish everyone a good evening.

(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes of this podcast. And if you’re like me, and were curious about what happened with the all-day kindergarten bill, and if it passed in the Utah state legislature, it sure did, and was signed by Utah’s governor in March 2022.

We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the pasts, present, and futures of these tribes.

The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.

And for those interested in learning together, registration is closing soon for our virtual Collective Impact Action Summit that will be held on April 26-28, 2022. The Action Summit is our biggest learning event of the year, with over 25 virtual sessions focusing on topics like culture and narrative change, shifting power, data, and sustainability.

And a big plus for being virtual is that we’re recording many of the sessions and sharing those recordings with attendees after, so you’ll be able to plan a schedule that fits best with you, and watch other sessions later.

We hope you can join us later this month. Please visit the Events section of CollectiveImpactForum.org to learn more about this year’s Collective Impact Action Summit.

This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast host. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, we hope you are safe and well.