The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of structured collective impact models including establishing backbone organisations.
Collective impact provides a structured framework for cross-sector collaboration around complex social issues, built on five conditions: a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support. The framework found ground in Australia, where it validated and gave shared language to place-based collaborative initiatives that were already underway. Collaboration for Impact (CFI) developed the Collaborative Change Cycle to contextualise the framework for Australian conditions and has been instrumental in building field-level capacity. CFI’s also produced a reflection on collective impact in Australia in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, observing that the cumulative effect of Australia’s historical, structural, and cultural context — particularly the dynamics of colonisation — means that collective impact in Australia is framed and practiced with an explicit focus on power, requiring backbone organisations and other intermediaries to develop skills to surface and navigate entrenched power dynamics. Stanford Social Innovation Review CFI’s Deep Collaboration practice, developed from 2015, has been used in the early stages of treaty readiness work with the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria and in the Just Reinvest initiative.
Australian examples of collective impact span a wide range of settings: Logan Together in Queensland (improving wellbeing of children from birth to eight), Burnie Works in Tasmania (education and youth employment, with experiments like 10 Families and Dream Big), Imagined Futures in Western Australia, Cairns South Together (with Mission Australia as backbone partner), The Hive in Mount Druitt (postcode 2770, with United Way Australia as neutral backbone), and the Greater Shepparton Lighthouse Project. The federal government’s ten-year Stronger Places, Stronger People program funds backbone infrastructure in ten regions, including Learning the Macleay in the Kempsey region.
The backbone organisation is the structural innovation that most distinguishes collective impact from other collaborative models. A backbone provides dedicated capacity for coordination, strategic alignment, shared measurement, and sustained communication across the partners in a collective through functions that are otherwise unfunded and unowned. Backbone structures vary significantly: they can be mission-oriented non-profits, public agencies, or steering committees drawn from senior leaders across sectors. Each structure carries trade-offs. Mission-oriented non-profits bring focus and entrepreneurial drive but can lack perceived neutrality; public agencies bring legitimacy and resources but face bureaucratic constraints; steering committees bring diverse buy-in but struggle with accountability and dedicated staffing. The Australian experience highlights additional considerations: backbone sustainability is the most commonly identified challenge, with funding often tied to short-term program cycles that do not match the long-term nature of systemic change. A 2020 University of South Australia study for the Local Government Association of SA, based on 36 surveys, interviews, and a roundtable, affirmed that practitioners favour guiding principles over a purist application of the collective impact framework and that the longevity of backbone funding is the single greatest constraint on effectiveness. The Australian Institute of Family Studies reached a similar conclusion, noting that while the backbone is the greatest structural strength of the model, its resourcing remains the biggest challenge. For communities considering collective impact, the critical question is often not whether to adopt the framework but whether an existing organisation such as a community foundation, an RDA, a local council, or a community-led entity can credibly hold the backbone function, or whether a new purpose-built entity is needed.
