Collective impact : operationalizing a framework to coordinate community services

Abstract

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program provides comprehensive early childhood services. Federal agencies emphasize coordination of stakeholders for systems-building. Designing a well-coordinated system is complex. We reviewed MIECHV’s literature and program documents to identify community-coordination infrastructure elements. We designed visual frameworks for each model to display infrastructure, components, and connections. In the independent point of entry model, families access services directly. In the coordinated point of entry model, a centralized intake and referral structure supports system coordination. In the collective impact model, relevant community stakeholders actively and collaboratively participate in service coordination. Visual frameworks allow stakeholders to align on process and infrastructure of their programs to facilitate planning activities, use these frameworks to identify whether the model under which they operate is ideal, and then evolve their infrastructure.