BACKBONE
ORGANIZATION
Ready for School, Ready for Life is a backbone organization — but what does that mean?
Unlike direct service providers, a backbone organization is designed to guide and support collaborative efforts among various stakeholders working towards a common goal. Instead of offering direct services, a backbone coordinates and aligns the activities of multiple partner organizations to create systemic change.
There are six essential functions of a backbone organization:
Guide vision and strategy
Supported aligned activities
Establish shared measurement practices
Build public will
Advance policy
Mobilize funding
Backbones are syncing up external partners’ individual goals to regional North Star goals
Backbones are working with partners to orient their programs and actions to North Star goals
Backbones are setting key measures aligned to the North Star goals and driving data-sharing across partners
Backbones are raising broad awareness of key issues and give community members on-ramps to contribute to North Star goals
Backbones, with their partners, are engaging public agency and government decision-makers to align their policies, resources, and practices with what matters most for the North Star goals
Backbones are raising and aligning philanthropic / other funders’ investment to North Star goals
Collective impact is when multiple groups commit to a common agenda for solving a specific problem, and work together to create population-level change, rather than working in isolation. By acting as an intermediary, a backbone organization ensures diverse groups work together more effectively, streamlining efforts and maximizing resources to achieve collective impact.
Ready for School Ready for Life serves as the early childhood backbone organization in Guilford County, working to ensure every child enters kindergarten ready for school. We are part of a network collaborating to build a system of care for Guilford County’s youngest children and their families. Our role is to convene and facilitate partner organizations that provide services to families and young children, fostering communication and coordination between these multiple organizations and the families they serve, all working toward a collective goal.
By helping families, providers, and other partners excel in what they do best, we build a stronger system of care that delivers better services for more people. In other words, the entities caring for and educating Guilford County’s children can achieve a greater impact by working together than they would on their own — and Ready Ready’s job is to make sure that cooperation happens!
Backbone Organization
A convening, facilitating organization that promotes collective impact by guiding the vision and strategy of organizations working to solve a specific problem, supporting their aligned activities, establishing measurement practices shared among them, building public will for the changes they seek, advancing policy that affects their issues, and mobilizing funding for their work.