Giving Compass' Take:

• This post from The Bridgespan Group discusses one community initiative in Milwaukee to reduce the teen birth rate, highlighting a report that examines what works when it comes to cross-sector engagement and what doesn't.

• Getting buy-in among all stakeholders and using data effectively are two things that successful collaborations have in common. How are we advancing as a sector in these areas?

• Here's how collaboration is necessary to address structural racism.

Seven years into an ambitious initiative to halve Milwaukee’s teen birth rate — once one of the highest in the nation — a collaborative of business, government, philanthropic, and nonprofit leaders faced a big choice. The 2014 teen birth data showed that it had surpassed its goal, with a 56 percent reduction since 2007. What now? Should the collaborative, as one of the initiative’s leaders asked,

Go home, or go big?

Milwaukee’s community collaborative, a cross-sector approach to addressing a community-wide problem, was among those featured in a 2012 report by The Bridgespan Group and the White House Council for Community Solutions, Needle-Moving Community Collaboratives: A Promising Approach to Addressing America’s Biggest Challenges. The report described similar communities that had worked collaboratively across business, government, philanthropy, and nonprofits to produce measureable improvement of at least 10 percent on a challenging community issue, such as a high rate of teen pregnancy, youth violence, or poor educational achievement.

We looked at a very large number of multisector collaborations to find a small number that had actually achieved this kind of measurable impact. Indeed, our research led us to the same conclusion reached by John Kania and Mark Kramer in their influential 2011 article on collective impact — namely, that examples of successful collective impact initiatives were rare.

Read the full article about needle-moving community collaboratives at The Bridgespan Group.