“Collective impact requires a separate organization and staff with a very specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative.” (Kania and Kramer, “Collective Impact”, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011.)
At Eastside Pathways, we are fortunate to have an exceptionally dedicated volunteer staff that puts in a lot of time and effort to support our mission of ‘mobilizing the community to support every child from cradle to career’.
Some of our dedicated volunteers. Sitting, left to right: Monika Steen and Betsy Johnson.
Standing, left to right: Susan Sullivan, Cathy Habib, Chris Enslein,
Our facilitators are community citizens who support the collaborative work by being the liaison between Eastside Pathways the backbone and our community partners. This corps of unpaid staff is essential to the sustainability of the backbone because they are the mainstay of the collaboratives. They put in a lot of hours to make the work process flow as smoothly as possible. They work with partners and coordinate and manage meetings where they bring into focus the needs of the community and work collaboratively with the participants to achieve progress on a common goal.
And they volunteer for different reasons. For some it is about applying or expanding their professional skills to a range of social challenges; for others, it is about relationship-building; sometimes the greatest takeaway for them is learning something new.
For Lisa Hart, the Transitions Collaborative facilitator, it fulfills her personal commitment to give back to the community. “I feel connected to other people involved in community engagement and public service through the common purpose we all share.” She finds the work challenging, but that is what motivates her to continue to learn and grow in this field. Chris Enslein, the School Readiness facilitator, says that this has been “an opportunity to learn about early learning from folks on the front lines. Bellevue is lucky to have such a large, caring community dedicated to the well-being of our youngest members.”
The one thing they all have in common is a firm belief in what Eastside Pathways does – that working collaboratively will do more for the community than working individually. We thank Megan Kennedy, Monika Steen, Lisa Hart, Betsy Johnson, Chris Enslein, Cathy Habib, Susan Sullivan, and Kristin Isaacson for their commitment and time to the work of the Eastside Pathways backbone.