Curing social ills requires teamwork

Hawaii’s vibrant network of nonprofit social service agencies plays a huge role in improving the lives of the state’s most vulnerable, disenfranchised people. When it comes to tackling complex social problems, these nonprofits can be most effective when they work in sync, targeting their individual resources and expertise toward common goals.

This logical approach — a philosophy known as collective impact — is not yet standard practice in the nonprofit realm or in the government sector, but it should be. Too much focus remains on interventions by individual organizations and agencies, known as isolated impact. The mindset is slowly shifting, though, in Hawaii and nationwide, as seemingly intractable problems persist in the absence of solutions that are well coordinated across the private and public sector.

With a new governor promising a tight hold on the purse strings and seeking greater efficiency, including through appropriate public-private partnerships, now is a good time to highlight the progress of fledgling collective impact initiatives here, and to urge that the federal, state and county govern- ments, nonprofit organizations and the business community act in concert to further their good aims.

A coalition led by the nonprofit service providers Catholic Charities Hawai‘i, Child & Family Service, Goodwill Industries of Hawaii Inc., Lanakila Pacific and Partners in Development Foundation helped galvanize the movement in Hawaii, as their leaders were inspired in part by research published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

While the ideas of collaboration and public-private partnerships are not new, successful collective impact initiatives are distinctly different, coalescing around five conditions "that together produce true alignment and lead to powerful results," according to the research. Those conditions:

» A common agenda.

» Shared measurement systems.

» Mutually reinforcing activities.

» Continuous communication.

» Backbone support groups.

Hawaii’s integrated approach to homelessness is a good example of the approach, embodied by the Hui Kupa‘a initiative. Nearly 40 nonprofit providers and government agencies that help the homeless now use a common assessment form to gauge each individual’s needs; city and state contracts for Housing First placements are aligned; and referrals are coordinated through a single entry point.

Since March 1, of 2,100 homeless households on Oahu, 340 have been permanently housed, and nearly half (270) of the 590 homeless households identified as the most vulnerable and chronically homeless have been linked to a permanent supporting housing program and are in the process of being assessed or are searching for housing, according to PHOCUSED, the backbone support group.

As harsh as those numbers remain, they mark an improvement from the earlier era when many important players were not on the same page.

This is not rocket science. And yet there remain impediments to widespread adoption of this common-sense approach, which maximizes scarce resources, relies on consistent, comparable data to gauge outcomes and can "move the needle" on entrenched issues such as homelessness, child welfare, improving public education and protecting Hawaii’s natural resources.

Funders, whether in the government or private sectors, tend to reinforce the silo of isolated impact by granting funds to single organizations. Grant-making individuals, foundations and institutions, including government agencies, should remove barriers to shared grants. Some nonprofits resist, content in their own easily controlled spheres. Working in isolation, though, pits nonprofits against each other in the funding scramble and drives up the overall cost of social services.

No single, simple solution exists for our most entrenched social ills. Achieving lasting, meaningful progress requires many different players to change their behavior. The idea of collective impact can spur the necessary paradigm shift.