At Sort Sol Group, we take a Collective Impact approach to create change, together.

Collective Impact is an effective framework for driving collaborative, multi-sector, and community empowered change. It requires diverse leaders from different types and sizes of social sector organizations, government agencies, businesses, and the community to work together on a common, transformative agenda.

Strong organizations are necessary, but often not sufficient to make the changes we desire. This is not a failure of the organization, but a factor of working on complex, systemic problems. Collective Impact is about mobilizing to create new solutions to complex problems, over the long term.

Bringing expertise in Collective Impact, Sort Sol Group delivers six, primary advisories that support client work at the organizational or community level.

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We help organizations and collaboratives understand how they can improve their impact and sustainability through the lens of their business model. Business models describe the rationale for how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.

We use a mission-impact oriented version of the Business Model Canvas to help leaders streamline consideration, design, and communication of how they make an impact, sustainably. This allows leaders to test, model, and shift assumptions quickly and reduce the uncertainty and risk involved in doing work differently.

Primarily employing the Technology of Participation©, group facilitation methods developed by the Institute of Cultural Affairs and perfected in organizations and communities around the world over the past 40+ years, we create a space where bold, visionary ideas and pragmatic realism can complement each other seamlessly.

These highly participatory, inclusive, engaging methods are designed to maximize the collective power of every group, organization, or community by building shared understanding, establishing consensus, and developing creative, thoughtful solutions with strong commitment to forwarding action.

Defining, describing, and analyzing the world based on a history informed by the values and experiences of white, western culture. As a result, many of the policies, practices, and interventions seen as effective within the social sector were produced through an incomplete lens. This suggests a need to reframe planning goals and shift towards JEDI practices that value the knowledge and wisdom communities bring to the process in order to adapt, redesign, and reimagine policies, strategies, and ways to allocate resources, including voices that reflect the assets and needs of those experiencing the most disparate outcomes.

We draw on our experiences and education from others, including: Barrett Values Centre, International Association for Public Participation, Racial Equity Institute, Racial Equity Tools, and the Social Transformation Project.

We help boards establish a common understanding and measured performance of their roles and responsibilities to focus on what’s critical for success. This includes the People (composition, structure, meetings), the Culture (leadership  dynamics), the Work (strategy, funding and public image, program/financial/chief executive oversight), and the Impact (board perception on organizational performance).

Our affiliation with BoardSource, the recognized leader in board research, leadership, and support, provides our clients with an extensive range of tools, resources, and data to increase their board effectiveness and strengthen organizational impact.

We believe the purpose of good leadership is to make the world a better place. Leadership is not management. It is the purposeful use of collective wisdom, awareness, creativity, and human skill, to face difficult problems, drive change, and unlock unseen potential.

Leadership is not a position but something that we do and be, together. To succeed, we must see ourselves as part of our communities and workplaces, not above them.

We leverage thought leadership from the Center for Right Relationship, Leadership Circle, Daniel Goleman, Coaches Training Institute, Arnold Mindell, and Peter Senge to deliver practical, real-world change in the most challenging environments.

We prefer to use David La Piana’s definition of strategy: “a coordinated set of actions designed to create and sustain a competitive advantage in achieving a nonprofit’s mission.” Strategy is about coordinating (and directing) all that an organization does to reach their community impact goals.

We braid several powerful planning models, practices, and thought leadership to guide our processes and integrate into our client work, including ORSC, Results Based Accountability, Business Model Canvas, Real-Time Strategic Planning, and Technology of Participation to help clients answer: “where are we going?” and “how are we getting there?”

At Sort Sol Group, we have been delivering hands-on, interactive, and effective online experiences for nearly a decade.

Our Methods

Whether in the same room, or across the globe, collaboration takes work.

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, many of our clients have pivoted to more virtual work. We are positioned to offer all of our services in a virtual space, representing the spirit of the methods and the innovation of our in-person facilitation for effective engagement.

You choose how we work together: face-to-face, virtually, or hybrid.

Our virtual collaboration and communication tools include:

“Sort Sol’s use of various platforms helped us engage in a meaningful way, way more than we had done when physically together. We hadn’t really leveraged much technology before, and were impressed with how easy it was to learn, how beneficial streamlined communications in Basecamp was, and how fun Miro was to use!”