Collective Impact
Seeding Success believes in the power of Collective Impact—the idea that organizations can make a greater difference working collaboratively rather than alone. This is why we facilitate the collective work of multiple organizations joining together around one common outcome in order to improve it.
Four Pillars of Collective Impact
Shared Community Vision
All participants have a shared vision for change, as well as a common understanding of the problem and how they’ll work collectively to solve it.
Evidence Based Decision Making
Partnerships make decisions based on local data that shows areas of need and promising practices that are already working for kids.
Collaborative Action
Community members come together to use data to move outcomes.
Investment and Sustainability
Partnerships initiate or redirect resources (time, talent and treasure) toward data-based practices on an ongoing basis, and engages the community to ensure long-term sustainability.
Adjacent Sectors
With a broader focus on economic and social mobility as an outcome, the Seeding Success Partnership is beginning to examine the intersectionality of adjacent sectors to education as key drivers to social and economic self efficacy. Public systems have the opportunity to either mitigate or perpetuate disparities and addressing cross-sector inequities is necessary to realizing population-level mobility.
To start, Seeding Success identified two areas that had promising efforts and enthusiasm already underway:
Housing and Health
Housing
In Memphis, housing disparities steeped in historically racialized policies are critical barriers to economic and social mobility.
In neighborhoods that are majority Black in the Memphis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), homes are valued at 25 percent (or $24,000) less than comparable homes in neighborhoods that are not majority African American.
This not only represents a racial wealth gap at the household level due to institutional racism, but also result in decreased public revenue.
As nearly half of all neighborhoods in the Memphis MSA are majority Black, the potential tax revenue from property values is significantly lower, limiting the ability to fund high quality schools and other vital government services.
With limited revenue coming in, Memphis also faces substantial barriers to educating and training its citizens to compete in the global economy and access higher wage positions.
Furthermore, a child’s home environment greatly impacts their educational outcomes. Research has shown that housing instability negatively impacts:
Vocabulary development in preschool
Middle grade math scores
Student mobility/transiency
High school graduation rates
Early grade reading scores
Employment
Why is deeper collaboration across the housing and education sectors needed?
Enterprise Community Partners and Seeding Success are partnering to explore ways in which housing and education collaborations can advance economic mobility. Through this partnership, Enterprise is providing technical assistance among community partners to achieve a new level of collaboration and to move the needle on economic mobility for children and their families in Memphis.
Health
LeBonheur Children’s Hospital, Shelby County Schools, and the Urban Child Institute are partnering on a school nurse two-year pilot program through which five schools will each have a full time nurse, five days a week as well as support from other health and mental health providers as needed. The school nurses will work with students, teachers, and families to help keep children healthy, safe, and ready to learn. The intent is to keep students in school and learning.