Discover a powerful methodology for bringing communities together to uncover hidden assets and transform deep-rooted challenges.

Veteran community organizer Paul Born’s work has contributed to lowering cancer rates in Maine, improving mental health for young people in Florida, and reducing poverty rates in Canada by 20 percent. In this much-needed new book, he shares stories of how he was able to catalyze local communities and guide them to make significant progress on seemingly intractable community problems.

Born has found that the secret to success is to organize and unite around a common agenda. This is not a list of topics, like a meeting agenda, nor a strategic plan. He offers a process for bringing leaders from businesses, human service organizations, and governments together with people who have a lived experience of a specific community problem. A common agenda is a statement of shared aspirations, a map of the assets in the community, and a road map for how to work together to make those aspirations a reality.

Part I of this book describes how to identify your community’s readiness for change; form leadership, action, and strategy teams; create a common agenda; and establish plans for community engagement. Part II presents the approaches and skill sets needed to do the work described in part I.

Remarkably, enormous systemic problems such as climate change, poverty, disease, racism, housing, and many more issues can be best addressed at the local level. Communities can develop solutions tailored to their unique circumstances and can collaborate at a magnitude that can result in a truly transformative impact. This book shows how to make change happen.

Paul Born's profile page

Paul Born is the cofounder and former CEO and co-CEO at Tamarack Institute, a leading authority on the ideas and practice of community engagement, collective impact, and community innovation. He is also the founder and past CEO of Vibrant Communities, now active in over 500 municipalities with campaigns to end poverty, deepen community, build youth futures, and tackle climate change. In 2019 Born was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada; he is also a senior fellow at Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social innovators. He is the author of five books.

“Paul Born, the head of the institute, emphasizes that the crucial thing these communitywide collective impact structures do is change attitudes. In the beginning it’s as if everybody is swimming in polluted water. People are sluggish, fearful, isolated, looking out only for themselves. But when people start working together across sectors around a common agenda, it’s like cleaning the water”.
—David Brooks, from his New York Times column "Winning the War on Poverty," 4 April 2019.

“Award-winning social entrepreneur Paul Born is one of the most creative anti-poverty leaders of his generation. Unwilling to surrender to a problem many consider intractable, he brings singular commitment and expertise to the fight. In Breakthrough Community Change, he shares those insights with organizations, equipping them to collaborate, change failing systems and achieve impact at scale.”
—Melody C. Barnes, Chair, Aspen Forum for Community Solutions; Executive Director, Karsh Institute of Democracy, University of Virginia; and former director, White House Domestic Policy Council