(Illustration by Hugo Herrera)
The collective impact framework has gained interest worldwide for mobilizing high-impact and lasting change on a broad array of complex social issues. As highlighted in this series, for the past decade, countless examples have validated the collective impact framework and deepened understandings of it as a field of practice. Looking ahead to the next decade, what’s next for collective impact?
One area of focus for the future is the need to forge better linkages across individual collective impact efforts to maximize their combined potential to catalyze systems change. In this context, “systems” refers to one or more larger societal systems that impact a problem or issue. These systems include federal and provincial or state policy, regulatory practices, philanthropic approaches, legal positions, organizational policies, and the adoption of promising practices. Collective impact initiatives that include systems change strategies demonstrate a capability to generate and scale solutions that successfully disrupt, and ultimately transform, the status quo.
The efforts of individual collective impact initiatives are strengthened when they are linked and loosely coordinated to advance systems change. This is much more likely to happen with the support of a unique form of intermediary organization known as a field catalyst.
The Field Catalyst: An Impact Accelerator
Intermediary organizations emerged in the 1960s to fill capability gaps in the social sector that individual, community-based change efforts could not fill on their own. These include intermediaries specializing in professional development, financial investment, research and evaluation, and advocacy. More recently, researchers with the Bridgespan Group highlighted a new type of intermediary, a field-building catalyst that deploys “different capabilities, quietly influencing and augmenting the field’s efforts to achieve population-level change.”
Field catalysts focus on the work of field building, which Social Innovation Generation defines as “connecting fragmented players in a given area of work to create an organized industry around an issue or challenge…so that…the field can operate more effectively and efficiently, tease out best practices and improve outcomes.”
Effective field building brings attention and legitimacy to an issue; increases the exchange of theory and practice across domains; identifies and disseminates promising practices; reduces inefficiencies; and creates incentives for collaboration that may not have happened organically.
In the context of collective impact, field catalysts understand and engage the broader field(s) that local collective impact initiatives operate in and play a strategic role in identifying system barriers and leverage points as well as supporting the development of systemic solutions. What makes the work of a field catalyst unique from other, more specialized intermediaries, is the diversity of their skillsets and their capacity to navigate seamlessly across them in ways that weave together the best bottom-up, local strategies with effective top-down approaches. When done well, the field catalyst’s contributions not only unite and leverage the work of individual collective impact initiatives but also connect their work to the efforts of influential system actors whose contributions are needed to implement systemic solutions.
The Field Catalyst Role in Action: Canada’s Living Wage Strategy
The concept of a field catalyst best describes the role that the Tamarack Institute has played in Canada for the past 20 years. Tamarack builds the capacity of changemakers from all sectors, within Canada and around the world. It also supports and connects local changemakers and facilitates collective action among diverse leaders to solve major community challenges including ending poverty, building positive futures for youth, deepening community, and addressing climate change.
Tamarack began in 2001 with the launch of Communities Ending Poverty (CEP), a national network of local collective impact initiatives focused on reducing poverty. At the time, no one had a community-wide plan to reduce poverty. Now, 20 years later, poverty reduction strategies exist in nearly every Canadian city, every province/territory, and at the national level as well. Tamarack’s role as a field catalyst has connected and aligned local poverty reduction efforts involving more than 6,300 changemakers into a national movement for change that has had a significant impact on changing systems. Between 2015 and 2020, the network contributed to a reduction in poverty for more than one million Canadians.
Raising people’s income to a living wage is an important pathway out of poverty. While people fall into poverty for a multitude of reasons, a lack of income often traps them in a cycle that can be extremely difficult to break out of. That is why the CEP network supports and advances a living wage strategy.
One example is the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction (HRPR), a local collective impact initiative operating in Hamilton, Ontario, and an early member of the CEP network, which coordinated a living wage strategy in its city to mobilize and align diverse people and organizations to move the needle on complex issues. While HRPR was successfully implementing a living wage strategy in Hamilton, collective impact initiatives in other Canadian cities were advancing their own local poverty reduction strategies.
As a field catalyst, Tamarack amplified the living wage campaigns of the HRPR and other local collective impact initiatives by facilitating a national dialogue about the living wage. Some of the specific activities Tamarack undertook included hosting a virtual Community of Practice with six Canadian cities in the CEP network to share the learnings from several local living wage strategy prototypes, researching promising practices from other jurisdictions to inform a Canadian living wage strategy, and disseminating information about this work within and beyond the CEP network.
As the living wage dialogue expanded over time, Tamarack’s role as a field catalyst evolved. Tamarack undertook additional activities to catalyze the field and build momentum for the living wage, including: engaging researchers to deepen and enhance the credibility and legitimacy of living wage strategies and engaging leading system actors with lived experience, as well as those in policy, government, and business to strengthen living wage advocacy efforts. The group identified two possible implementation pathways, with Canadian examples, to advance the living wage strategy, launched a “Living Wage Canada” website, certified itself as a living wage employer, and profiled other certified employers on the Living Wage Canada website.
A pivotal moment in the advancement of Canada’s living wage strategy came when Tamarack and its CEP Network collaborated with others to create a national methodology to calculate living wages. This, in turn, provided momentum to local living wage champions like Hamilton’s to recruit employers to their cause.
A national methodology to calculate living wages is essential in a country as diverse as Canada that has many variations in the cost of living. The methodology helps to build unity and consistency across the movement, strengthens credibility, and simplifies implementation for large national and/or multinational companies.
Canada’s national framework for calculating a living wage is determined by the hourly rate of pay required for a household of four, with two income earners, to meet its expenses. A strength of the framework’s formula is the inclusion of government transfers, deductions, and taxes into this calculation, thereby recognizing that employers, governments, and communities all play a role and share responsibility for paying a living wage. The framework’s methodology is sensitive to changes in both the market and in government policy that affect people’s incomes. This fair and balanced approach has been a significant attribute in the success of communicating and marketing the case for a living wage.
Supported by Tamarack’s efforts as a field catalyst, the HRPR and other local collective impact initiatives in the CEP network have used the momentum of the living wage strategy to broaden conversations about income in Canada to include adopting a universal basic income. In fact, between 2017 and 2019, Hamilton was one of three communities in Ontario to host a basic income pilot. Although the pilot was cut short when the provincial government changed, it had a profound impact on the lives of its participants. Individuals leveraged the income to pay down debts, get better jobs, and upgrade their qualifications. Most recently, the longer-term impact of this change can be seen in the Government of Canada’s Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit, which provides $2,000 per month in income support to individuals impacted by COVID-19 job losses as well as a recently announced $15 minimum wage in federally regulated workplaces, which goes into effect December 29, 2021.
Tamarack and its CEP network are certainly not the only contributors to Canada’s living wage movement. However, Tamarack’s unique leadership of the CEP network illustrates the contributions that field catalysts make and the important value-added role they play in assisting individual collective impact initiatives to achieve lasting systems change.
Four Value-Added Contributions of Field Catalysts
Local collective impact initiatives know the unique context of their community, which allows them to develop community change strategies that are highly effective. In the case of HRPR’s successful local living wage strategy, the roundtable engaged individuals with lived experience, the business community, academia, and public sector players to craft and promote a compelling local case for change that included specific recommendations to support effective city-wide implementation. The HRPR also provided ongoing support to ensure that local implementation of its living wage strategy was successful.
However, a challenge for local collective impact efforts like HRPR is that their individual successes alone are often insufficient in terms of addressing a complex, systemic issue of poverty. Local collective impact efforts understand that even a significant win in one—or even a handful—of cities is a small victory in the longer-term, broader efforts needed to have systemic impact. To leverage and scale HRPR’s living wage success beyond the city of Hamilton requires financial stimulus, political support, technical assistance, and other resources from multiple sectors, as well as the engagement of provincial and national entities. Field catalysts like Tamarack play an important role in addressing this challenge.
We have identified four, interconnected roles that field catalysts play to amplify systems change efforts:
- Understanding the field and engaging system actors: In the living wage example, this work included recognizing the need to scale local living wage initiatives to ensure system impact, researching solutions from other jurisdictions, and building interest in the issue with a diversity of system actors.
- Strengthening the capacity of local collective impact initiatives: In the case of the living wage strategy, Tamarack hosted a virtual Community of Practice to share learnings from local living wage initiatives, provided input to a national living wage calculator, and offered technical assistance to expand local experimentation which made the collective impact initiatives’ work simpler, easier, and more effective.
- Making the work of collective impact initiatives more visible, coherent, and robust: Tamarack’s efforts included profiling local living wage strategies at work within the CEP network, creating and maintaining a living wage website to build public awareness, and promoting the use of the living wage calculator, and developing additional resources to support and simplify the implementation of local living wage campaigns.
- Nudging systems to catalyze systems change: Field catalysts help individual collective impact initiatives move beyond the incremental improvements of traditional approaches in favor of solutions that challenge existing paradigms and generate significant impact. In the case of the living wage, Tamarack worked with local collective impact initiatives in the CEP network to facilitate 33 community conversations that informed Canada’s first-ever national poverty strategy, Opportunity for All, as well as provided leadership to broaden the dialogue about a living wage to encompass an increase to the minimum wage and creation of a universal basic income.
While field catalysts require capacity in all four roles, their greatest value is their ability to move fluidly between these roles as circumstances change. To do this well, field catalysts must have the capability to recognize and seize opportunities to advance systems change, identify promising strategies as they emerge, translate promising strategies into practical actions that can be disseminated, and convene system players to build and maintain a commitment to action over several years. Like communities themselves, this work is dynamic and ever-changing, and therefore requires the field catalyst’s role to be continuous and iterative.
Looking Ahead: Emerging Challenges for Field Catalysts
Having a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted work of the field catalyst has enabled Tamarack to better appreciate the contributions that this role has brought to the practice of collective impact in Canada over the last 20 years. As Tamarack embarks on its third decade—and the practice of collective impact begins its second—new challenges are emerging for collective impact that should inform how the role of the field catalyst evolves.
Managing Tension Between the Field Catalyst’s Leadership and Support Roles
Managing the tension between leadership contributions (such as mobilizing partners and seizing opportunities to advance systems change) and the commitment to support the capacity building of local collective impact initiatives in creative ways can be difficult. It is not always clear how to simultaneously fulfill both roles when that is needed. Further experimentation and learning are required to enable field catalysts to navigate across their four roles more skillfully to better support systems change.
Facilitating and Demonstrating Strategic Agility
Communities increasingly struggle to keep pace with the speed, complexity, and interconnectedness of the issues confronting them. At the same time, the significance of these issues—social justice, racial equity, climate change, pandemic recovery, and advancing the work of Truth and Reconciliation, for example—heightens the urgency to find ways to meaningfully address them. This also increases pressure on collective impact initiatives to generate impact and raises demand for field catalysts to provide better frameworks and tools so that collective impact initiatives can remain agile and able to adapt their strategies in response to changing dynamics.
Coordinating Multiple Local Collective Impact Initiatives
As the number of collective impact initiatives increases, there is a growing need to foster better alignment and synergy between them. Field catalysts are uniquely positioned to identify and facilitate opportunities for coordination among complementary collective impact initiatives. Done effectively, this has the potential to achieve high-impact change on a common issue and accelerate systems change efforts. Further exploration and learning are needed to identify promising processes and tools that effectively facilitate this.
Tamarack has had the privilege of acting as a field catalyst throughout its history, and we recognize the essential contributions that field catalysts can provide to individual collective impact initiatives and their work implementing systemic solutions. Our hope is that by making the field catalyst’s role more explicit and better understood, its contributions to the work of collective impact can be better leveraged to increase the likelihood and ease with which lasting systems solutions become a reality.
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Read more stories by Sylvia Cheuy, Mark Cabaj & Liz Weaver.