Pivoting to Build a Stronger Collaborative

We welcome back members of the Healthy Food Community of Practice to hear what they learned from their multi-year collaboration and how the way they worked together changed over time.

Launched in 2020, the Healthy Food Community of Practice is a network of more than 50 organizations working toward a shared goal—that communities of color across the country can access and consume nutritious food. Through their collaboration, they came to understand that to be successful, the community of practice had to shift *how* they worked together in four key ways:

• Move from scarcity to abundance
• Move from consensus to consent
• Move from breadth to depth
• Move from “I” to “we”

These pivots were necessary for the Healthy Food Community of Practice to strengthen their network and their ability to collaborate with each other, but it wasn’t easy.

In this new podcast conversation, we talk with community of practice members Minerva Delgado (Alliance to End Hunger) and Stacey McDaniel (YMCA of the USA), and Community of Practice Facilitator Carolina Ramirez (Community Wealth Partners) about their experiences and what they learned as they made these shifts in how they worked together. They share what was most challenging and most necessary for their work to be successful.

Resources and Footnotes

• Blog: From Chaos and Competition to Clarity and Coordination: Four Pivots for Aligning Coalitions to Achieve Equity
  Resource: Targeted Universalism
  Article: Curb Cut Effect
  Podcast: Strengthening Relationships through a Community of Practice
  Healthy Food Community of Practice
  Alliance to End Hunger
  YMCA of the USA
  Community Wealth Partners

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in 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/