We learn about the work of CoCreative and how they work with collaboratives to blend structured and emergent strategies to collective work.
What does it look like for a collaborative to balance planned strategies with new and rising needs?
In this new podcast discussion, we talk with Melissa Darnell, Heather Equinoss, and Luzette Jaimes from the organization CoCreative, and learn how they work with collaboratives to blend structured and emergent strategies when doing collective work.
Listen in as we explore:
Resources and Footnotes:
More on Collective Impact
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Have a question related to collaborative work that you'd like to have discussed on the podcast? Contact us at: https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/contact-us/
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we talk with Melissa Darnell, Heather Equinoss, and Luzette Jaimes from the organization CoCreative, and learn how they work with collaboratives to blend structured and emergent strategies when doing collective work. In this discussion, we’ll explore how to navigate complex challenges by embracing uncertainty, what kinds of strategies can be used for adapting to shifting contexts, and why to make progress, one often has to face the messy, unpredictable nature within collaboration.
Serving as interviewer today is Collective Impact Forum executive director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I'm Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum, and thank you so much for joining us today.
To discuss the importance of bringing an emergent approach to strategy and pairing that with a structured process we have three leaders from CoCreative joining us.
CoCreative is a team of designers, strategists, and facilitators who help people come together and solve complex problems. As they say, they are specialists in collaboration and getting things done especially the tough stuff. So with that, I would love to welcome Melissa Darnell, Heather Equinoss, and Luzette Jaimes. Welcome. Thank you for so much for joining us today. A place I often like to start is asking each of you to tell us a little bit about how you came to your current work. So, Melissa, let’s start with you.
Melissa Darnell: Yes, thank you so much for that kind introduction. I would like to say just a little bit more about CoCreative and then I’ll tell a little bit about me.
The foundation of our work at CoCreative is really our belief in the need for shared prosperity and ecological sustainability. And for us that means that we believe in a world where everyone has a real opportunity not just to live and eat and have shelter, but to truly prosper and to live creative and dignified lives. And so coupling that with ecological sustainability means that our children’s children can enjoy the same prosperity that we do. And so we approach our work with those two lenses. We believe that the toughest problems that we face in our communities, our country and our world can really only truly be solved when people come together across difference and create solutions together. So we do that in two primary ways which I think we’ll talk about a little bit about on this call, through supporting networks and through supporting leaders who are doing this work in networks and in their communities.
I came to CoCreative I like to call it a career pathway but more like a career watershed. My background is in sociology and also social work. I spent many years working in community organizing and doing power building and community development, and I kept bumping up against these systemic barriers or opportunities that were having meaningful impacts on whether or not families could experience a full and healthy life. I became more and more convinced that the conditions that we see in our world don’t just happen by accident, that they are the result of decisions that people have made over time. And we can make different decisions if we work together and we trust one another. And so that led me to begin explore looking at systems and how the people who are most harmed by systems can be involved in creating solutions for different outcomes.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Welcome Melissa. We’re so glad to have you here with us today. Let me turn it to Luzette.
Luzette Jaimes: Thank you, Jen. Well, my road to CoCreative it’s been long. I spent more than 20 years working in systems change globally, different countries, Latin America, the Arab world and other places. And I particularly focused on social innovation and social entrepreneurship through the Ashoka Network. And through all these years of work and different cultures I really started to notice kind of like the importance and need that our field had around deepening our capacity to collaborate, really collaborate in ways that went beyond the bilateral agreements or philanthropic grants that we all had, and that in many occasions some of us put ourselves in our own way of collaborating. And so that’s how I found CoCreative and I said, oh, come join Ashoka, help us understand how we can collaborate better, and through actually learning with them I fell in love with the methodologies, with the ways of holding space, with the importance of facilitation.
I am trained as a holistic scientist in complex systems, whole systems, and also as an integral coach. So for me, understanding and seeing holistic approaches to systems change is super important, and CoCreative offered that for me. I find that what we do helps us create and activate social ecosystems that are so interdependent and we have ways in which we can really advance the way that that collective intelligence of that social ecosystem can become what they really want to see in the world.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you. Welcome. And Heather, last but not least.
Heather Equinoss: So, thanks for having us, Jen. This is Heather Equinoss, and I offer that my path to CoCreative and also the work of collaborations for systemic change, it’s been a winding road. I worked in education in both K-12 and higher ed. I've worked in philanthropy in numerous community-based organizations and I was also really focused on organizational development consulting work. I would see the throughline through all of that is that I have functioned as a collaboration doula. I really intended this space for people to build agreement on how we wanted to be together and also what we wanted to do together to create the kind of world where the communities that we cared about could really thrive.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you. I love that. I don’t think I've heard that expression before, a collaboration doula. I just created a new career path for many people. Brilliant. Thank you, all. We’re so glad to have you here, long-time admirers of CoCreative’s work.
Today, we’re going a little deeper on how collaboratives can move forward with a structured strategy while also balancing emergence. We know CoCreative has done a lot of work partnering with initiatives and you’ve already begun to refer to the kind of work you do. But before we dive in it would be helpful to hear why, why you think it can be helpful to take this kind of emergent approach to work.
Luzette Jaimes: Well, let’s just start by defining a little bit the emergence or emergent approach and a structured approach. When we’re talking about emergence, we’re talking about strategies that have emerged as we work with collaboratives to codesign the strategies that they want to have to achieve the systems change. And so we’re only talking about our direct experience with supporting dozens of collective impact collaborations. Collective impact groups often work with complex systems that have a lot of interconnected, interdependent parts, and that have their own properties. They self-organize and have very unpredictable dynamics. That’s what we’re looking into when we’re looking at emergence. And so what happens when we’re working with emergence is that we need to embrace uncertainty and fluidity and allow groups to adapt to shifting contexts, new insights as they arise. It encourages iterative cycles of analysis, action reflection, adaptation, so it makes it easier to integrate feedback and remain responsive to what’s truly happening on the ground. The structured strategy actually, on the other hand, provides a foundation. It’s like a clear purpose, shared goals, agreed processes, and it helps align diverse stakeholders. It ensures accountability. It creates a roadmap for action. So, in fact, we have designed a roadmap that is a process model that we share with our collaboratives that help us create some sort of a container for that impactful collaboration to happen, to take place. We organize around a shared intent. We had particular agendas where we connect. We align. We learn and we make and prototype together. Now, why this is helpful is because when we are engaging diversity, when we’re using different perspectives and experiences and values, emergence allows us to do that working with that. And a structured approach actually ensures that everyone has a common foundation while the emergent approach honors diversity in which participants might contribute, adapt, innovate. Also, it’s helpful because we are navigating complexity and I already mentioned the unpredictability, the uncertainty and the unpredictability of things. So when we balance the structured with emergence, we avoid rigid plans that sometimes can become really irrelevant and chaotic in very little time. And we can find the sweet spot where adaptability helps us enhance the impact we want to have.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank for laying that groundwork both in definitions and also further illuminating why it’s so important to balance being emergent as you go into the work of the collaborative and having the structure of the process with that shared understanding and sense of how we’re going to work together. What are ways that you have found in your collaborative doula work to try to achieve this balance of valuing structure and planning strategy but being open to what else might come up?
Melissa Darnell: So Luzette mentioned that collaborative roadmap which is one of the open-source tools that we share on our website. We’d love for everybody to have a chance to take a look at it.
I want to go a little bit deeper into some specific elements of the roadmap to answer that question and highlight the structured processes that we do with a collaborative to support them in really building a shared picture of the landscape that we’re operating in, the whole picture of the system that we’re wanting to have an impact on where something has been identified that it needs to shift. And we see this as something that’s particularly important because we want everyone who’s involved in the collaborative from systems leaders to folks who are first and most impacted by the challenge that’s being experienced to have an equal role in their ability to contribute to both the analysis of what is causing dis-ease in the system and then also be able to contribute to the solutions that the collaborative can build together.
So the way that we do that is by holding a series of one-on-one conversations where we really spend time understanding the system from the particular vantage or perspective of the diversity of folks who are a part of the system that Luzette mentioned a little bit ago. Then we take all of the wisdom and knowledge that comes from those interviews and we create a landscape map so that the system can see itself. So we have a facilitative process by which we generate and we analyze what’s happening in the system and we think through, collectively, what are the forces that are working for or against a particular change that folks want to see.
When we do this as a group or as a collaborative it really helps people to see a more complete picture and it helps open up possibilities that we might not have considered before as individuals from a particular perspective in the system. It allows for that emergence in solutioning to take place when we have a clear shared picture of what’s happening in the system.
We also use the strategy tool called Critical Shifts to really help groups define the problem space rather than jumping into making solutions because in our experience this supports groups in helping to generate better, more powerful and more appropriate and effective solutions and it avoids putting forward or prioritizing someone’s preferred idea about what we might need to do to solve whatever challenge we’re working on. I think Heather’s going to share a little bit more about Critical Shifts and what we do next.
Heather Equinoss: That question of like how do you achieve structure and emergence around strategy, so we’ll support collaborations to develop usually like four or five critical shifts and then strategies for each of those, and obviously that’s really based on that landscape map or that picture of the system that we’ve collectively built together. Those strategies are really a working blueprint and I say working because it’s all held lightly. It’s our intended strategy. It’s the things we think if we implement them, it will create the desired shifts that we believe are necessary in order to achieve our goal but it’s held loosely.
So early in the life of a network we like to socialize this pattern that we think of as checking back. I’ll sort of describe what I mean by that. There’s this community organizing principle at least in the tradition that I was trained up in which is the action is in the reaction, and so when networks’ strategies go to pilot or implementation, we like to place an emphasis on sort of learning our way forward. Some of the intended strategies that we design, they fail fast and others are successful but the real value in them is bringing the learning from that experience back to the collaboration so that’s the checking back that I was referring to.
So once we start to implement the planned strategies, we like to check back against our critical shifts like is what we’re implementing actually contributing to the shifts we said were going to be required? We also check back against the landscape, so our analysis. Is what we believed to be true actually true? What’s changed in the landscape since we’ve done some work together, and importantly what’s needed now? And so it’s that sort of process of building collaborative culture and muscle memory that really values this shared analysis to action, continuous learning. That iterative cycle means we can be nimble and aware and create the space for those new solutions or new ideas to emerge so we get the best of both.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Tell me a little bit about how long that arc often takes for a network. So you come together, maybe it’s a newer network, you do those one-on-one interviews and the landscape and you identify four or five critical shifts that would be helpful, then folks start to take action. Tell me about the timeline that we’re thinking about here for doing learning, reflecting, circling back and adapting.
Heather Equinoss: I’d offer it’s highly dependent because many of the networks we support work at different scales so some of them are hyperlocal. It’s a small region in a state, sometimes it’s statewide, sometimes it’s national, sometimes it’s international, sometimes it’s not place based at all, and it’s working within a supply chain. The scale varies a lot. However, I would say when we pull together a network for the first time, sometimes that happens in person, sometimes it’s virtual. If it’s in person we can support—we’ve experienced networks being able to sort of do that landscape analysis to devising intended strategies in like a day and a half in person. The prework of all those interviews and stuff, that’s obviously a longer timeline before we ever arrive in a room together in person or virtually, and then the implementation, that also varies.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Can you give me one or two specific examples of a group where you’ve gone through a process with them and how this approach has impacted their work?
Heather Equinoss: So one example I would offer is this is from several years ago. We supported a school district on an equitable grading initiative. It’s a district of about 20 schools. The district includes elementary, middle school, and high schools, and there’s about 14,000 students in that district. At the time that they started this work they were facing a really big challenge. They had about 59 percent of their middle school and high schoolers that had one or more Fs, and if you drilled into the data there were significant disparities. I think it was around like 60 percent of male students had at least one F, 40 percent of females did, and if you were male and an English language learner, your likelihood of having at least one F, it shot up to over 80 percent. There’s more data but you kind of get the picture. Why that’s important is research shows that even one, failing one core class could absolutely derail your timely graduation from school.
So they decided to hold a collaborative design sprint. It was the teachers, administrators. It included union reps, and along the way they consulted with parents and caregivers, students, and different community advisory councils that existed within the district. Their goal which they codeveloped was to have an equitable and clear grading system that supports a student’s emotional wellbeing. It increased motivation and would reduce achievement and completion gaps across race, across gender, home language, socioeconomic status. That was their goal and through the process they identified five critical shifts that they believed were going to be necessary to achieve a big goal like this.
One was around measuring learning. Right now in many schools across the United States really, grades aren’t necessarily reflective or primarily reflective of evidence of student learning. There’s lots of stuff that gets thrown in or factors into grades, things like attendance or behavioral compliance in the classroom but their future state that they believed was necessary was one where grades were based on evidence, clear evidence of student learning and mastery of content.
A second shift was around making sure that recovery was possible so it’s never too late for students to be able to really demonstrate their learning, and for that to be reflected in their grades so if a kid had one low test score, it wouldn’t permanently sink their grade and therefore kill motivation. There were several more critical shifts but in addition to the shifts, the collaboration identified really specific strategies they wanted to implement, and it was through that implementation, learning, assessing, and checking back, it helped create the space or the opening for new needed strategies to emerge in surprising ways.
They were able to organize themselves in flexible ways to bring people together that had participated in that original design sprint and also folks that hadn’t. They could bring those folks together at different choice points in smaller teams that could nimbly design and pilot solutions so whether it was like they recognized once they got into the work like, hey, we need to actually develop a whole new IT solution for a radically different gradebook system or we actually needed to pull together smaller groups of teachers to develop proficiency scales or once it became really clear that what really helped teachers make this shift was having one-on-one instructional coaches so they could scale and deepen that strategy.
By staying responsive to the challenges that came up and learning from them and also paying like being attentive to the wins so they could deeper them, they were able to do this dance between like intended and planned strategy and emerging strategy. The thing that helped anchor this collaboration was the critical shifts remained the guiding stars, and it supported the healthy emergence of lots of new strategies they could have anticipated out of the gate.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great, and the concrete example really kind of drives how this looks like in practice so thank you for sharing through that, Heather. I’m wondering if Melissa or Luzette, you’d like to add in an example from your bodies of work.
Melissa Darnell: Yes, this is Melissa. Another example that I can offer really into checking back comes from a collaboration that we have been supporting that is working on building institutional capacity for inclusive learning at the college level for the introductory science experience.
So specifically what the funder and the folks who were involved in the collaborative were experiencing is that schools have done a pretty good job of getting historically excluded groups, first-gen students, older students, students from historically marginalized communities, in the door to introductory science courses but they were not seeing the same percentage or proportion of students in that level of diversity graduating with their two-year or four-year degrees, and they wanted to understand why this was happening and what are the institutional shifts that need to happen within academia that can support these STEM students in persisting in their academic careers.
So this particular collaborative, when they first started they wrote what they called a framing question for their work, and the question started with the words what would it take to, and it was big and flowery and had lots of adjectives, and the question was very interesting to read and it was so big that after a while the members of the collaborative kept getting stuck because they didn’t have agreement on how to prioritize potential solutions that they could move forward together. Essentially the question was so large that literally anything that they wanted to do fit inside that box and they can't do everything all at the same time.
So recently what has happened is the network has really embraced the idea of checking back, and they did it by leveraging the opportunity to revisit their framing question and develop that instead into a goal statement that is measurable, it is audacious, it is specific, it is time bound, and they have incorporated everything that they have been learning together to get really clear about the scale and the focus of their work.
For me this is an excellent example of being open to emergence and iteration even on where the collective is going at any particular given time, and the importance, as Heather was sharing, about having sort of these foundational pieces that aren’t prescribing solutions per se but that are helping orient a clear and powerful galvanizing commitment to the work that points everyone in the same direction. It forces people to think in active scale when they’re developing and testing solutions, and they can check back against their intent as they are bringing things to testing and to pilot and scale.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you, Melissa. I appreciate the distinction of the different places where this practice can come into play, right? Like checking back at the very most macro framing for the work of the network or the collaborative all the way to the specific strategies folks are taking on, and it’s this practice of circling back and reflecting and learning and adapting and the culture that that takes. Luzette, do you want to jump in as well?
Luzette Jaimes: Yes, I like that, and also in this case I would like to bring up an example that is not necessarily a network yet but it’s a collective because we work a lot with groups that are looking into collaboration and there are many ways to collaborate, not only networks. But in this case, we don’t know, it could become one.
The point I want to share here is that we are working with this collective, it’s a few organizations and a network, and they individually work on narrative and mindset shifts. Now they’re exploring, you know, in the context that we find ourself, we’re exploring how they could advance together mindset shift particularly around individualism and deservingness to support health equity. Here we’re looking at more than the sum of the parts and the impact that coming together could create in the larger social ecosystem. Also keeping in mind that these are very diverse organizations that work across the political scope, that some focus on narrative, some focus on mindsets or frameworks, and so there is diversity and difference. What we have been holding on from is creating a long-term theory of change together which tend to outline linear a step-by-step pathway a lot of the time and can feel too rigid in these settings, and we believe that it most likely will not work due to the complexity and the change that is happening fast and the scale of the problem and the nuances.
So what we are doing together is creating consistent structures, conversations, feedback loops for learning like examples that both Melissa and Heather have shared. We’re holding gatherings, intentional gatherings, and creating spaces where we connect and deepen our relationships to deepen the trust that is so needed in diverse groups to be able to come to a moment of nonagreement, perhaps even disagreement, and common agreement, right? We’re also creating intentional spaces for learning and learning as a tool for collaboration. For example, we have invited them to discover areas that feel important to them similar to critical shifts but not as critical shifts but something that is really important for them as individual organizations but that they feel that the field needs it.
So we have now four learning labs working within this collective that are each looking to a big vision and we’re starting to prototype together. The bottom line of these examples that I’m giving is that a lot of the tools that we provide can be customized to the particular needs of that collective or that group that we’re working with but ultimately, we want to create a space for diversity and difference to be embraced and to inform the solutions we’re creating.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I just want to pick up on one of the threads that you mentioned, Luzette, around building trust. I’m hearing that that is unsurprisingly an important piece of what it takes for these kinds of groups or networks whether they’re formal or informal to work in this way. So picking up on that, what are some of the ways of working that are helpful for groups to hold as they're doing this work?
Luzette Jaimes: There’s something that I’ve learned through the years is that partnerships develop at the speed of trust. We can have collaboratives that do not work if that doesn’t exist so we really need to create spaces where through emerging a strategy we’re welcoming unexpected ideas and feedback and insight so we create spaces where, for example, we are all working together in a big wall with paper adding concurrently so everyone is doing the same effort and we’re not only having the person that speaks the most or has the most power in the room putting all their ideas in front so we work concurrently often.
We come in with a lot of information from the interviews that we’ve spoken about earlier like the understanding of the map and we spent a lot of time together with the collaborative or the collective or the group we’re working with into understanding what is it that the landscape is looking like so we can get to a common agreement of what we are seeing together. That type of tools help us foster open communication that encourage openness, transparent conversations. Participants feel more comfortable voicing concerns, and advocating what they want to see, what they want to also feel.
One of the things that we do when we are building the collaboratives, we’re very selective in order to be inclusive because open invitation for everyone to join a collaborative doesn’t usually work because usually just the usual suspects will come but if we are selective and we look at those members of the system who are probably the most affected and impacted by the system need to be part of this collaboratives, and when we have that, when they are there we can together develop a sense of co-ownership not only of the problem but the solutions.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great so not only the usual suspects but being very proactive in cultivating and curating the folks to come together. Would anyone else like to share some considerations around the ways of working that you have found helpful in this work?
Melissa Darnell: I love what Luzette said about developing trust within the collaborative, and I think I want to add that in my experience we found that it’s very important to be able to develop the intuition and the awareness to be able to trust one’s self, particularly if you are the one who is supporting or facilitating a group through some of these processes. For me that means being really attentive to my own preferences about the ways that the work gets done, knowing what those are and then analyzing them to make sure that I’m in alignment with whatever is needed with the group at that time.
So, for example, I can say with confidence that I know that on a spectrum between being highly facilitative or being highly leaderly, I very much prefer the space of being facilitative and sometimes that’s not what a group might need particularly if they’re asking me directly what I think should happen when we’re designing an agenda or something like that. It can clog things up or make things messier or not give the directionality that my experience can bring to the group, right? So attending to our own preferences and being really aware and trusting of our own intuition, in our own ability to sense into what the collaborative might need at a particular juncture in the life of the work I think is really powerful.
The other thing I would add is that oftentimes we have a tendency and I have a tendency to privilege the thinking part of me in the work, and there are many different ways of knowing or accessing knowledge and that includes our feeling selves, our somatic selves, our intuitive selves so being open and being present to other ways of knowing or accessing information from a facilitator’s perspective and holding space for the people in the collaborative to have access to those other ways of knowing and trusting their intuitions and their feelings and responses can be so powerful in creating the spaciousness for what is creative and possible and powerful to emerge in the group.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Very exciting and I imagine not always easy so I’d love to hear about some of the challenges that you typically run into or surprises that have presented themselves.
Luzette Jaimes: Yeah, we kind of get away from this actually and sometimes challenges become opportunities too but sometimes when we’re working with emergence and also structure, in particularly with a network, we can see a tension between the backbone team that is holding kind of like the coordination of what is happening with the members and the rest of that network because there is this. The backbone wants to bring some accountability to the wider collaboration to do implementation of the strategies they cocreated together but sometimes that can become a little bit rigid and inflexible for the members themselves and sometimes the members as they are doing their work, they're also seeing new possibilities of opportunities here and there so kind of like having a coherent flow that allows for both sides to meet their needs in order to advance the network is super important.
Another challenge that I would say I see is that sometimes people have different understandings of the structures and the meaning of a structured approach and an emerging approach. We could have, for example, a funder that is expecting a detailed roadmap with measurable outcomes. Usually philanthropy works a lot in like a one-year program that has these short-term outcomes while collaboratives actually need a little bit more flexibility and iterative learning and adapting and way more engagement of the community through relational engagements for example so those tensions happen there.
I’m trying to think what else like maybe in terms of positive surprises. Sometimes I’ve seen unexpected synergies. Sometimes because we are allowing for checking back or for people to contribute according to what we see is emerging, then somebody might say something, an unrelated comment with an open-ended session, and then all of a sudden, we have a breakthrough, an idea for advancing actually a structure, critical shift that we had agreed upon. That is really positive and is what helps pivot the strategy should we need to.
I think the last thing I’ll say is that these really help us also deepen relationships in unexpected ways because we need to work with those who prefer the structure approach and work with those who prefer the emergent approach, and we need to kind of like create ways for these to be accessible to the two of them so if there is conflict sometime or difficulty, then we have to hold processes for people to go more into a more intimate conversation for growth and that enhances relationships.
Heather Equinos: I feel like another place where it seems like it’s sometimes surprising to different collaborations we’ve worked with is that the strategies happen at multiple levels of the system. Sometimes we’re talking about like intended strategy and emerging strategy at a whole collaboration level. It’s like here’s the things we’re going to work on together but we also see it unfold in many other ways. Sometimes there’s a couple of organizations within the collaboration that it prompts new emerging strategies amongst them, more like bilateral kind of partnerships. Sometimes it’s what emerges inside of organizations based on their participation inside of a collaboration or sometimes we’re sending signals out into the wider system that’s creating shifts within the system outside of the network itself. It’s also like attending to and paying attention to and also celebrating or giving visibility to these different impacts, sort of like the ripple effects, the ways in which the work gets done too.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, that’s a great point. We know systems are nested and fractal sometimes folks will refer to them as so we can see these patterns. I appreciate you naming them. We can see these patterns at many different levels and in many different places in the network. So I’m curious if you have any specific recommendations for folks that can help them prepare themselves to bring some of this emergent approach into their work.
Melissa Darnell: One of the things I would offer is that we really think it’s deeply important to invite our full humanity into the work and that means all of who we are and not trying to deny or minimize or reduce any part of ourselves when we are either leading or supporting collaboratives or for the folks who are involved in our collaboratives themselves. Again it means doing what we can to ensure that we are holding space for the individual and collective intuition and feelings and somatic parts of ourselves to come forward, and that might mean that people need a space to express anger or frustration or grief or joy, and that we understand all of those things are part of the human experience and having access to all of those helps us show up as our most productive, most powerful selves so holding on and not denying or minimizing any of those things is something that I think is really important.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: This has been a great conversation and I just wanted to ask if there is anything that we haven’t touched on yet that you want to make sure to uplift for folks listening today.
Melissa Darnell: I guess the last thing I want to leave listeners with is that oftentimes innovation is perceived as this neat and orderly process. We have this thing called a roadmap which implies something linear and a step-by-step path towards systemic change but it’s actually really messy and unpredictable, and a desire for it to be orderly or predictable can block us from the learning and innovation that we need to be successful in our work together.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Melissa, that is a really important point to emphasize and uplift and to leave us with today so I am so grateful to Melissa and Heather and Luzette for coming into this conversation with us, and for folks who are interested in following and learning more about your work, where should they head?
Melissa Darnell: So we would love to invite folks to visit our website. It’s wearecocreative.com. It’s where we share all of the open-source tools that we have produced and other thought pieces about collaborative strategy design. You can also subscribe to our newsletter there which is a great resource where we share some of what we’re learning, new tools that we’re developing, and also a scan of what’s emerging across the field of collaboration and systems change.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, I definitely encourage folks to sign up for your newsletter and echo or underscore the shout out to many great tools that you all have created and have hosted and made available for the public so thank you. Thank you all and thank you for those who have listened and wishing everyone a wonderful rest of your day.
And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for our 2025 fall workshop series titled "Essentials for Collective Impact.” This is an online workshop series that covers core practices to support collective impact and place-based collaboration, including what it means to serve as a backbone, how to do systems change work, and exploring tools to better engage your partners.
You can register for individual workshops or register with a full series pass and get all four workshops for the price of three. You can find out more about the Essentials workshop series in the events section of our website at collectiveimpactforum.org.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.