How Can Your Collaborative Strategy Be Both Structured and Emergent?

[MUSIC] Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast. Here to share resources to support social change makers working across sector collaboration. The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the ASPIN Institute Forum for Community Solutions. In this episode, we talk with Melissa Darnal, Heather Equalnaas, and Lucid HiMaze from the organization Co-Creative and learn how they work with collaborative to blend structured and emergent strategies when doing collective work. In this discussion, we'll explore how to navigate complex challenges by embracing uncertainty. What kinds of strategies can be used for adapting to shifting contexts, and why to make progress, one often has to face the messy, unpredictable nature within collaboration. Serving as interviewer today is Collective Impact Forum Executive Director, Jennifer Spulinski-Juster. Let's tune in. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's podcast. I'm Jennifer Juster, Executive Director of the Collective Impact Forum, and thank you so much for joining us today. To discuss the importance of bringing an emergent approach to strategy and pairing that with a structured process, we have three leaders from Co-Creative Joining Us. Co-Creative is a team of designers, strategists, and facilitators who help people come together and solve complex problems. As they say, they are specialists in collaboration and getting things done, especially the tough stuff. So with that, I would love to welcome Melissa Darnal, Heather Equalnaas, and Lucid HiMaze. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. And a place I often like to start is asking each of you to tell us a little bit about how you came to your current work. So Melissa, let's start with you. Yes, thank you so much for that kind of introduction. I would like to say just a little bit more about Co-Creative, and then I'll tell you a little bit about me. The foundation of our work at Co-Creative is really our belief in the need for shared prosperity and ecological sustainability. And for us, that means that we believe in a world where everyone has a real opportunity not just to live and eat and have shelter, but to truly prosper and to live creative and dignified lives. And so coupling that with ecological sustainability means that our children's children can enjoy the same prosperity that we do. And so we approach our work with those two lenses. And we believe that the toughest problems that we face in our communities, our country and our world can really only truly be solved when people come together across difference and create solutions together. So we do that in two primary ways, which I think we'll talk about a little bit on this call through supporting networks and also through supporting leaders who are doing this work in networks and in their communities. So I came to Co-Creative. I like to call it a career path wave, but more like a career watershed. So my background is in sociology and also social work. And I spent many years working in community organizing and doing power building and community development. And I kept bumping up against these systemic barriers or opportunities that we're having meaningful impacts on whether or not families could experience a full and healthy life. And I became more and more convinced that the conditions that we see in our world don't just happen by accident that they are the result of decisions that people have made over time. And we can make different decisions if we work together and we trust one another. And so that led me to begin to explore looking at systems and how the people who are most harmed by systems can be involved in creating solutions for different outcomes. So glad to have you here with us today. Let me turn it to Lizette. Thank you, Jen. Well, my road to co-creative. It's been it's been long. I spent more than 20 years working in systems change globally, different countries Latin America. And they are a world and other places and I particularly focus on social innovation and social entrepreneurship in through the Ashoka network. And I think that all these years of work and different cultures, I really started to notice kind of like the importance and need that are feel had around depending on capacity to collaborate and really collaborate in ways that went beyond the bilateral agreements or philanthropic grants that we all had. And in many occasions, some of us put our way like ourselves in our own way of collaborating. And so that's how I found co-creative and I invited and I said, oh, come, come join Ashoka help us understand how we can collaborate better. And through actually learning with them, I fell in love with the methodologies with the ways of holding space with the importance of facilitation. And as a holistic scientist in complex systems, whole systems and also as an integral coach. So for me, understanding and seeing holistic approaches to systems change is super important. And co-creative offer that for me. So I find that what we do help us create and activate social ecosystems that are so interdependent and we have ways in which we can really advance the way that that collective intelligence of that social ecosystem can become what they really want to see in the world. And welcome and Heather last but not least. So thanks for having us, Jen. This is Heather, Econos and I offer that my path to co-creative and also really the work of supporting collaborations for systemic change. Ben a winding road. I worked in education in both K12 and higher ed. I've worked in philanthropy in numerous community based organizations and then first and I was also really focused on more organizational development consulting work. And the through line of through all of that is I have functioned as a collaboration dola. I really like tended the space for people to build agreement on how we wanted to be together and also what we wanted to do together to create the kind of world where the communities that we cared about could really thrive. Thank you. I love that. I don't think I've heard that expression before a collaboration dola. I've just created a new career path for many people brilliant. So thank you all. We're so glad to have you here. I'm a long time admirers of co-creatives work today we're going a little deeper on how collaborative can move forward with a structured strategy while also balancing emergence. We know co-creative has done a lot of work partnering with initiatives and you've already begun to refer to the kind of work you do. Before we dive in, it would be helpful to hear why why you think it can be helpful to take this kind of emergent approach to work. Let's just start by defining a little bit the emergence or emergent approach and an structure approach. And when we're talking about emergence, we're talking about strategies that have emerged as we work with collaborative to co-design the strategies that they want to have to achieve the systems change. And so we're only talking about our direct experience with supporting dozens of collective impact collaborations and collective impact groups often work with complex systems that have a lot of interconnected interdependent parts and that have their own properties that you know they they self organized and have very unpredictable dynamics. That's what we're looking into when we're looking at emergence. And so what happens when we're working with emergence is that we need to embrace uncertainty and fluidity and allow groups to adapt to shifting context new insights as they arise. And it encourages iterative cycles of analysis action reflection adaptation. So it makes it easier to integrate feedback and remain responsive to what's truly happening on the ground. The structure strategy actually on the other hand provides a foundation is like a clear purpose chair goals, agreed processes and it helps us align diverse stakeholders it ensures accountability. a road map for action. And so in fact, we have this a roadmap that is a process model that we share with our collaborative that help us create some sort of a container for that impactful collaboration to happen, to take place. We organize our own a shared intent, we had particular agendas, where we connect, we align, we learn, and we make and prototype together. Now, why this is helpful is because when we are engaging diversity, when we're using different perspectives and experiences and values, emergence allows us to do that, working with that. And an structure approach actually ensures that everyone has a common foundation, while the emerging approach approaches the diversity in which participants might contribute, adapt, innovate. And also, it's helpful because we are navigating complexity, and I already mentioned the unpredictability of things, so when we balance the structure with emergence, we avoid rigid plans that sometimes can become really irrelevant and chaotic in very little time. And we can find the sweet spot where adaptability helps us enhance the impact we want to have. Now, thank you for laying that groundwork, both the definitions and also further illuminating why it's so important to balance being emergent as you go into the work of the collaborative and having the structure of the process for that shared understanding and sense of how we're going to work together. What are ways that you have found in your collaborative do-low work to try to achieve this balance of valuing structure and plan planning strategy but being open to what else might come up? So Liz, I mentioned the collaborative roadmap, which is one of the open source tools that we share on our website. We would love for everybody to have a chance to take a look at it. So I want to go a little bit deeper into some specific elements of the roadmap to answer that question and highlight the structured processes that we do with a collaborative to support them in really building a shared picture of the landscape that we're operating in, the whole picture of the system that we're wanting to have an impact on and that where something needs to has been identified that it needs to shift. And we see this as something that's particularly important because we want everyone who's involved in the collaborative from systems leaders to folks who are first and most impacted by the challenge that's being experienced to have an equal role in their ability to contribute to both the analysis of what is causing disease in the system and then also be able to contribute to the solutions that the collaborative could build together. So the way that we do that is by holding a series of one-on-one conversations where we really spend time understanding the system from the particular advantage or perspective of those diversity of folks who are part of the system that Luzette mentioned a little bit ago. And then we take all of the wisdom and knowledge that comes from those interviews and we create a landscape map so that the system can see itself. And so we have a facilitated process by which we generate and we analyze what's happening in the system and we think through collectively what are the forces that are working for or against a particular change that folks want to see. And when we do this as a group or as a collaborative it really helps people to see a more complete picture and it helps open up possibilities that we might not have considered before as individuals from a particular perspective in the system. So it allows for that emergence in solutioning to take place when we have a clear shared picture of what's happening in the system. And we also use this strategy tool called critical shifts to really help groups define the problem space rather than jumping into making solutions because in our experience this supports groups in helping to generate better, more powerful and more appropriate and effective solutions. And it avoids putting forward or prioritizing someone's preferred idea about what we might need to do to solve whatever challenge we're working on. And then I think Heather's going to share a little bit more about critical shifts and what we do next. Yeah, so that question of like how do you achieve structure and emergence right on strategy? So like we'll you know support collaborations to develop usually like four or five critical shifts and then strategies for each of those. And obviously that's really based on that landscape map or that picture of the system that we've collectively you know built together. Those strategies are really a working blueprint and I say working because it's all held lightly. It's like it's our intended strategies. It's the things we think if we implement them it will create the desired shifts that we believed are necessary in order to achieve our goal. But it's held loosely. So early in the life of a network we like to socialize this pattern that we think of as like checking back. And I'll sort of describe what I mean by that. There's this community organizing principle at least in the tradition that I was trained up in which is the action is in the reaction. And so when networks strategies go to pilot or implementation we like to place an emphasis on sort of learning our way forward. So some of the intended strategies that we design they fail fast and others are successful. But the real value in them is like bringing the learning from that experience back to the collaboration. So that's the checking back that I was referring to. So once we start to implement you know the planned strategies we like to check back against our critical shifts like is what we're implementing actually contributing to the shifts we said we're going to be required. We also check back against the landscape. So our analysis is what we believe to be true actually true. What's changed in the landscape since we've done some work together. And importantly what's needed now. And so it's that sort of process of building a collaborative culture and muscle memory that really values this shared analysis to action continuous learning that iterative cycle means we can be nimble and aware and create the space for like those new solutions or new ideas to emerge. So we get the best of both. I'm a little bit about how long that arc often takes for a network. So you come together maybe it's a newer network. You do those one-on-one interviews and the landscape and you identify four or five critical shifts that would be helpful. Then folks start to take action. Tell me about like the timeline that we're thinking about here for doing learning, reflecting, circling back and adapting. I'd offer it highly dependent because many of the networks the works we support work at different scales. So some of them are hyper local. You know it's a small region in a state. Sometimes it's statewide. Sometimes it's national. Sometimes it's international. Sometimes it's not placed based at all and it's you know working within a supply chain. So the scale and the varies a lot. However I would say like when when we pull together a network for the first time, sometimes that happens in person. Sometimes it's virtual. If it's in person we can support a you know we've experienced networks being able to sort of do that landscape analysis to devising intended strategies in like a day and a half in person. The pre-work of like all those interviews and stuff that's obviously a longer timeline before we ever arrive in a room together in person or virtually. And then the implementation that also varies after. Yeah and can you give me like one or two specific examples of a group where you've gone through a process with them and how this approach has impacted their work? So one example I would offer is this is from several years ago. We supported a school district on an equitable grading initiative. It's a district of about 20 schools. The district includes you know elementary middle school and high schools and there's about 14,000 students in that district. At the time that they started this work they were facing a really big challenge. They had about 59% of their middle school and high schoolers that had one or more F. And if you drilled into the data, there were significant disparities. I think it was around like 60% of male students had at least one F, 40% of females did. And if you were male and an English language learner, you're likely to have having at least one F, it shot up to over 80%. So there's like more data, but you can get the picture. And research, why that's important is like research shows that even one failing one core class could absolutely derail your timely graduation from school. So this, they decided to hold a collaborative design sprint. It was with teachers, administrators, it included union reps. And along the way, they consulted with parents and caregivers, students, and different community advisory councils that existed within the district. Their goal, which they co-developed, was to have an equitable and clear grading system that supports students' emotional well-being, increased motivation, and would reduce achievement in completion gaps across race, across gender, home language, socioeconomic status. So that was their goal. And through the process, they identified five critical shifts that they believe were gonna be necessary to achieve a big goal like this. So one was around measuring learning. So right now in many schools across the United States, particularly grades aren't necessarily reflective or primarily reflective of evidence of student learning. There's like lots of stuff that gets thrown in or factors into grades, things like attendance or behavioral compliance in the classroom. But their future state that they believe was necessary was one where grades were based on evidence, like clear evidence of student learning and mastery of content. A second shift was around making sure that recovery was possible. So it's never too late for students to be able to really demonstrate their learning. And for that to be reflected in their grades, so that if a kid had one low test score, it wouldn't permanently sink their grade and therefore kill motivation. There were several more critical shifts. But in addition to the shifts, the collaboration identified really specific strategies they wanted to implement. And so through that implementation, learning, assessing and checking back, it helped create the space or the opening for new needed strategies to emerge in surprising ways. So they are able to organize themselves in flexible ways to bring people together that had participated in that original design sprint, but also folks that hadn't. They could bring those together, those folks together at different choice points in smaller teams that could nimble design and pilot solutions. So whether it was like they recognized, once they got into the work, like, hey, we need to actually develop a whole new IT solution for a radically different gradebook system. Or we actually needed to pull together smaller groups of teachers to develop proficiency scales. Or once it became really clear that what really helped teachers make this shift was having one-on-one instructional coaches. So they could scale and deepen that strategy. And by staying responsive to the challenges that came up and learning from them and also being attentive to the wins, so they could deepen them, they were able to do this dance between intended and planned strategy and emergent strategy. And the thing that helped anchor this collaboration was the critical shifts remained the guiding stars. And it supported the healthy emergence of lots of new strategies that they couldn't have anticipated out the game. - Now that's great. And the concrete example really kind of drives home what this looks like in practice. So thank you for sharing through that Heather. I'm wondering if Melissa or this set you'd like to add in an example from your bodies of work? - Yes, so this is Melissa. Another example that I could offer relating to checking back comes from a collaboration that we have been supporting that is working on building institutional capacity for inclusive learning at the college level for the introductory science experience. And so specifically, what the funder and the folks who are involved in the collaborative were experiencing is that schools have done a pretty good job of getting historically excluded groups, first gen students, older students, students from historically marginalized communities in the door to introductory science courses. But they were not seeing the same percentage or proportion of students in that level of diversity graduating with their two year or four year degrees. And they wanted to understand why this was happening and what are the institutional shifts that need to happen within academia that can support these STEM students and persisting in their academic careers. And so this particular collaborative, when they first started, they wrote what they called a framing question for their work. And the question started with the words, "What would it take to?" And it was big and flowery and it had lots of adjectives. And the question was very interesting to read. And it was so big that after a while, the members of the collaborative kept getting stuck because they didn't have agreement on how to prioritize potential solutions that they could move forward together. Essentially, the question was so large that literally anything that they wanted to do fit inside that box and they can't do everything all at the same time. And so recently what has happened is the network has really embraced the idea of checking back. And they did it by leveraging the opportunity to revisit their framing question and develop that instead into a goal statement that is measurable. It is audacious. It is specific. It is time bound. And they have incorporated everything that they have been learning together to get really clear about the scale and the scope and the focus of their work. So for me, this is an excellent example of being open to emergence and iteration, even on where the collective is going at any particular given time. And the importance, as Heather was sharing, about having these foundational pieces that aren't prescribing solutions per se, but that are helping orient a clear and powerful galvanizing commitment to the work that points everyone in the same direction. It forces people to think and act at scale when they're developing and testing solutions. And they can check back against their intent as they are bringing things to testing and to pilot and to scale. Thank you, Melissa. I appreciate the distinction of the different places where this practice can come into play, right? Like checking back at the very most macro-freeming for the work of the network or the collaborative all the way to the specific strategies folks are taking on. And it's this practice of circling back and reflecting and learning and adapting. And the culture that that takes. Lucette, do you want to jump in as well? Yes, I like that. And also, in this case, I would like to bring up an example that is not necessarily a network yet, but it's a collective because we work a lot with groups that are looking into collaboration and there are many ways to collaborate, not only networks. But in this case, we don't know, it could become one. The point I want to share here is that we are working with this collective. It's a few organizations and a network. And they individually work on narrative and mindset shifts. And now they're exploring, in the context that we find ourselves, we're exploring how they could advance together mindset shift, particularly around individualism and the servingness to support health equity. And so here we're looking at more than the sum of the parts and the impact that coming together could create in the larger social ecosystem. And these also keeping in mind that these are very diverse organizations that work across the political scope that some focus on narrative, some focus on mindset or frameworks. And so there is diversity and difference. And so what we have been holding on from is creating a long-term theory of change together, which tend to outline linear step by step pathways a lot of the time and can feel too rigid in these settings. And we believe that it most likely will not work due to the complexity and the change that is happening fast and the scale of the problem and the nuances. And so what we are doing together is creating consistent structures, conversations, feedback loops for learning, like the examples that we've been doing. both Melissa and Heather has shared. And we're holding gatherings, intentional gatherings, and creating a spaces where we connect and deepen our relationships, to deepen the trust that is so needed in diverse groups, to be able to come to a moment of non agreement, perhaps even disagreement, and common agreement. Right? We're also creating intentional spaces for learning, and learning as a tool for collaboration. So for example, we have invited them to discover areas that feel important to them, similar to the critical shifts, but not as critical shifts, but something that is really important for them as individual organizations, but that they feel like the feel needs it. And so we have now four learning labs working within this collective that are looking each looking to like a big, big vision, and we're going to start, we're starting to prototype together. And so we, the bottom line of these examples that I'm giving is that a lot of the tools that we provide can be customized to the particular needs of that collective or that group that we're working with. But ultimately, we want to create a space for diversity and difference to be embraced and to inform the solutions we're creating. Yeah, and I just want to pick up on one of the threads that you mentioned this set around building trust. And I'm hearing that that is an unsurprisingly and important piece of what it takes for these kinds of groups or networks, whether they're formal or informal to work in this way. So trust, you know, picking up on that, what are some of the ways of working that are helpful for groups to hold as they're doing this work? Yeah, I mean, if there is something I have learned through the years is that partnerships develop at the speed of trust. And we can have collaborative that do not work if that doesn't exist. And so we really need to create a spaces where through emergent strategy, we are welcoming unexpected ideas and feedback and insight. So we create a spaces where, for example, we are all working together in a big wall in with paper, adding positive concurrently. Not so everyone is doing the same effort. And we're not only having the person that speaks the most or has the most power in the room, putting all their ideas in front. So we work concurrently often. We come in with a lot of information from the interviews that we've spoken about earlier, like the understanding of the map. And we spent a lot of time together with the collaborative or the collective of the group we're working with into understanding what is it that the landscape is looking like. So we can get to a common agreement of what we are seeing together. And so that type of tools help us foster open communication that encourage honest, transparent conversations, participants feel more comfortable voicing concerns and advocating what they want to see, what they want to also feel. And one of the things that we do when we are building the collaborative, we're very selective in order to be inclusive. Because open invitation to, you know, everyone to join a collaborative doesn't usually work because usually just the usual suspects will come. But if we are selective and we look at those members of the system who are probably the most affected and impacted by the system need to be part of this collaborative. And when we have that, when they are there, we can together develop a sense of ownership, not only of the problem, but the solutions. Yeah, that's great. So not only the usual suspects, but being very proactive in cultivating and curating the folks to come together. What anyone else like to share some considerations around the ways of working that you have found helpful in this work? I love what Luza said about developing trust within the collaborative. And I think I want to add that in my experience, we found that it's very important to be able to develop the intuition and the awareness to be able to trust oneself. And particularly if you are the one who is supporting or facilitating a group through some of these processes. And for me, that means being really attentive to my own preferences about the ways that the work gets done, knowing what those are and then analyzing them to make sure that I'm in alignment with whatever is needed with the group at that time. So for example, I can say with confidence that I know that on a spectrum between being highly facilitative or being highly leaderly, I very much prefer the space of being facilitative. And sometimes that's not what a group might need. Particularly if they're asking me directly what I think should happen when we're designing an agenda or something like that, you know, it can clog things up or make things messy or not give the directionality and that my experience can bring to the group, right? So attending to our own preferences and being really aware and trusting of our own intuition and our own ability to sense into what the collaborative might need, any particular juncture in the life of the work, I think is really, really powerful. And the other thing I would add is that oftentimes we have a tendency and I have a tendency to privilege like the thinking part of me in the work and there are many different ways of knowing or accessing knowledge and that includes what the our feeling selves are somatic selves or intuitive selves. And so being open and being present to other ways of knowing or accessing information from a facilitator's perspective and holding space for the people in the collaborative to have access to the other ways of knowing and trusting their intuitions and their feelings and responses can be so powerful in creating the spaciousness for what is creative and possible and powerful to emerge in the group. It's very exciting and I imagine not always easy. So I'd love to hear about some of the challenges that you typically run into or surprises that have presented themselves. Yeah, we cannot get away from this actually and sometimes challenges become opportunities too, but sometimes when we're working with emergence and also structure, in particularly with a network, we can see attention between the backbone team that is holding the coordination of what is happening with the members and the rest of that network because there is this the backbone wants to bring some accountability to the wider collaboration to do implementation of the strategies they co-created together, but sometimes that can become a little bit rigid and inflexible for the members themselves. And sometimes the members, you know, as they are doing their work, they're also seeing new possibilities of opportunities here and there. So kind of like having a coherent flow that allows for both sides to meet their needs in order to advance the network is super important. Another challenge that I would say is that sometimes people have different understandings of structures and the meaning of an structure approach and an emergent approach. And like we could have for example a funder that is expecting a detailed roadmap with measurable outcomes usually philanthropy works a lot in like a one year program that has you know these short term outcomes while collaborative actually need like need a little bit more flexibility and iterative learning and adaptive and way more engagement of the community through relational engagements for example. So those tensions happen there and trying to think what else like maybe in terms of positive surprises sometimes I've seen unexpected synergies. So sometimes because we are allowing for checking back or for people to contribute according to what we see is emerging then somebody might say something and unrelated comment with an open ended you know session and then all of a sudden we have a breakthrough an idea for advancing actually a structure critical shape that we had agreed upon. And that that is really a positive and is what helps pivot the the strategy should we need to. I think the last thing I'll say is that this really helps us also deepen relationships in unexpected ways because we need to work with those who prefer the structure approach and work with those who prefer the emergent approach and we need to kind of like create ways for these to be accessible to the two of them. So if there is conflict sometime or difficulty then we have to hold processes for people to go more into a more intimate conversation for growth and that enhances relationships. I feel like another place where it seems like it sometimes surprising to different collaborations we've worked with is that like the the strategies happen at multiple levels of the system. So like sometimes we're talking about like intended strategy and emergent strategy at a whole collaboration level. It's like here's the things we're going to work on together. But we also see it unfold in many other ways. Sometimes you know there's a couple of organizations within the collaboration that like it prompts new you know emergent strategies amongst them more like bilateral kind of partnerships. Sometimes it's you know what emerges inside of organizations based on their participation inside of a collaboration or sometimes we're sending signals out into the wider system that's creating shifts within you know the system outside of the network itself. So it's it's also like attending to paying attention to and also celebrating or giving visibility to these different the impacts or sort of like the ripple effects of the ways in which the work gets done to. Yeah that's a great point we know systems are nested and fractal sometimes fossil refer to them as and so we can see these patterns. I appreciate your naming and we can see these patterns at many different levels and in many different places in the network. So I'm curious if you have any specific recommendations for folks that can help them prepare themselves to bring some of this emergent approach into their work. Yeah one of the things I would offer is that you know we really think it's deeply important to invite our full humanity into their work and that means like all of who we are and not trying to deny or minimize or reduce any part of ourselves when we are either leading or supporting collaborative or for the folks who are involved in our collaborative themselves. And again it means doing what we can to ensure that we are holding space for the individual and collective intuition and feelings and somatic parts of ourselves to come forward and that might mean that you know people need a space to express anger or frustration or grief or joy and that we understand that all of those things are part of the human experience and having access to all of those helps us show up as our most productive most powerful selves. So holding on and not denying or minimizing any of those things is something that I think is really important. So this has been a great conversation and I just want to ask if there is anything that we haven't touched on yet. Do you want to make sure to uplift for folks listening today? So I guess the last thing that I want to leave listeners with is that oftentimes innovation is perceived as like this need and orderly process and we have this thing called a roadmap which implies something linear and a step by step path towards systemic change but it's actually really messy and unpredictable and a desire for it to be orderly or predictable can block us from the learning and innovation that we need to be successful in our work together. Melissa that is a really important point to emphasize an uplift and to leave us with today. So I am so grateful to Melissa and Heather and Lucette for coming into this conversation with us and for folks who are interested in following and learning more about your work where should they head. So we would love to invite folks to visit our website. It's wearecocreative.com. It's where we share all of the open source tools that we have produced and other thought pieces about collaborative strategy design and you can also subscribe to our newsletter there which is a great resource where we share some of what we're learning new tools that we're developing and also a scan of what's emerging across the field of collaboration and systems change. Yes I definitely encourage folks to sign up for your newsletter and echo or underscore the shout out to many great tools that you all have created and have hosted and made available for the public. So thank you. So thank you all and thank you to those who have listened and wishing everyone a wonderful rest of your day. And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you're interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you're enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform and share your favorite episodes with colleagues. We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unseated traditional lands of the coasts Salish people, including the Duwamish, Sequoamish, Stillquamish and Muklshu tribes. We honor a gratitude to the land itself and the past, present and futures of these tribes. The intro music for this episode is composed by Rafael Crooks and our outro music is composed by Kevin McLeod. In forum news we're excited to share that registration is open for our 2025 Fall Workshop series titled Essentials for Collective Impact. This is an online workshop series that covers core practices to support collective impact and place-based collaboration, including what it means to serve as a backbone, how to do systems change work and exploring tools to better engage your partners. You can register for individual workshops or register with a full series pass and get all four workshops for the price of three. You can find out more about the Essentials Workshop series in the event section of our website at CollectiveImpactForum.org. This is Tracy Timon's Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening and we look forward at connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let's keep working towards collective impact.