“Five years ago, an article by FSG’s John Kania and Mark Kramer sparked a nationwide wave of interest in collective impact—a new model of collaboration among public, private, and nonprofit actors that emphasizes a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and ‘backbone’ support organizations,” write the authors of this article in SSIR. “At Columbia University’s Teachers College, we’re in the midst of a three-year research project commissioned by The Wallace Foundation to investigate collective impact and cross-sector collaborations for education more generally. We’ve released an extensive literature review and a nationwide scan of the websites of 182 collaborations, and we have three major case studies (in Buffalo, New York; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Portland, Oregon) and five smaller case studies underway.”