How Do You Sustain Your Initiative Over the Long Term?

How do you sustain momentum over the long-term when doing collaborative work? For many collective impact initiatives, there can be a far horizon to see actual long-term population-level results- like 5 or 10 years for a project (or longer.) Change can take a long time, and because of that, an added challenge is just keeping people motivated, keeping partners at the table, or figuring out how to fund a long-term initiative when grant funding may not continue after a year or two. So what do you do? If these big social change goals take a long time to become reality, how do we get there? In this episode, we’re taking a deep dive discussion to talk about seven factors that can support an initiative’s long-term sustainability.

Featuring Jennifer Splansky Juster, Robert Albright, and Tracy Timmons-Gray.

Resources and Footnotes

Paper: Sustaining Community-Based Programs:  Relationships Between Sustainability Factors and Program Results by Dr. Lydia I. Marek and Dr. Jay A. Mancini

Tool: Sustaining Collective Impact Efforts (Tamarack Institute) 

Resource: Guide to Evaluating Collective Impact

Case Study: Collective Impact in Emergency Response: A Case Study of Milwaukee’s COVID-19 Civic Response Team

Podcast: Together Through Crisis: A Case Study of Milwaukee’s COVID Civic Response

Blog: The Baker’s Dilemma and the inequity of restricted funding

Blog: Managing Change During the Pandemic: Thoughts for Collective Impact and Nonprofits

Tool: The Eco-Cycle Mapping Tool

More on Collective Impact approach to collaborate for social change:

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? You can send it to our short podcast listener survey or at info@collectiveimpactforum.org.