Cross-Sectoral

The long, rich history of community-building work in low-income communities and communities of color provides a foundation of theory and practice on which today’s collective impact framework must build to achieve results commensurate with society’s biggest challenges. That foundation is equity—just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. Equity, both racial and economic, must be infused through all aspects of collective impact processes,from the deep engagement of communities to the collection and analysis of data; the design and scale of solutions; and the capacities, point of view, and roles of backbone organizations. 

The purpose of this framework is to provide a coherent structure for analyzing economic innovations. The framework encourages researchers to adopt a mixed-methods approach that involves both careful, qualitative descriptions of the structure, functions and activities of the innovation, as well as quantitative analysis of the innovation’s impacts on both its stakeholders and the larger community in which it is located. 

Two centuries of explosive economic growth have radically altered our material and ideological worlds. With human activity now the major driver of geological change, the industrial era has come to be called the Anthropocene. This inquiry instead adopts the term Econocene, underscoring its ideological foundation: economism. The concept of economism, the reduction of all social relations to market logic, often appears in critiques of political movements and neoliberal economics. Our concern here is with economism as a widely held system of faith. This modern “religion” is essential for the maintenance of the global market economy, for justifying personal decisions, and for explaining and rationalizing the cosmos we have created. This uncritical economic creed has colonized other disciplines, including ecology, as ecologists increasingly rely on economistic logic to rationalize the protection of ecosystems. More broadly, economism often works syncretically with the world’s religions even though it violates so many of their basic tenets. A Great Transition is needed to replace economism with an equally powerful and pervasive belief system that embraces the values of solidarity, sustainability, and well-being for all.