Our next collective impact initiative convening is April 8 from 9:30-11:30 a.m. Preregistration is required and security measures are in place. We are postponing the April meeting due to a variety of scheduling conflicts. We also hope some folx will be available in May who were not during the Spring Semester at ETSU.
Our Common Agenda (What we aspire to do)
We center the emotional and sexual health of all people by:
Increasing access to knowledge and constituent-focused resources.
Promoting trauma-informed approaches.
Actively opposing stigma and bias to reduce shame and fear
A little hype music to get us going—Let’s Get It Started!
At this meeting we will plan how to begin the actual work of the initiative—moving from formation to action! We will talk about backbone functions and develop working groups.
If you know of others who might be interested in working toward systems change around emotional and sexual health, please pass this information on to them and invite them to the meeting.
There is a new tab for our Collective Impact Initiative on the RISE website. It includes information and notes from past meetings as well as Collective Impact for Emotional and Sexual Health events and member events related to the initiative.
What to Expect
Introductions
Announcements
Creating Initial Working Groups—We have identified a variety of areas we could address. We will pick a couple and get going on them!
Breakout sessions based on interest
Some areas we might choose to address with working groups are;
Developing more constituent-centered language in surveys, intake forms, etc. and asking useful questions across our membership
Promoting trauma-informed sex ed to help public schools more effectively educate their students, and encouraging all schools to provide sexuality education whether or not the state requires it.
Advocating for justice and intentionally respectful, equitable medical care for people of color, LGBTQ+ folx, people with disabilities, and people with economic insecurity.
Ensuring that regional sexual assault, human trafficking, and intimate partner violence responses are constituent centered and trauma-informed across responding organizations.
Ensuring we hear from all the constituents we need to hear from.
Reaching out to community partners who cannot come to meetings.
These are some of the possible projects that have come up in the last few months. We will not begin working groups for every item right now. Rather, we’ll pick some low-hanging fruit to get started with as we work out our organizational kinks.
Collective Impact in a Nutshell
The Collective Impact Action Summit takes place online April 27-29. We are very excited to see that Dr. William J Barber (Poor People’s Campaign) and Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is not an Apology) are among the keynote speakers. It’s not too late to register.
Collective impact involves cross-sector cooperation as well as empowering individual participation from stakeholders who have information and perspectives to share. From nonprofit organizations to law enforcement, university departments to local businesses, health care and mental health professionals to government agencies, we are better when we work together.
According to the Collective Impact Forum, collective impact brings people together in a dynamic, structured way, to achieve systems change. It starts with a common agenda, coming together to define issues and create a shared vision for addressing them. It establishes shared measurements so the initiative can track its progress and improve on its work. It fosters mutually reinforcing activities to maximize end results. It requires continuous communication to build trust and coordinate efforts. And it has a strong backbone, an organization or team dedicated to orchestrating the work, as well as an active steering committee and shorter term working groups.