The Impact Pathway is designed for cross-sector teams committed to improving community outcomes using data, collaboration, and the proven Communities of Excellence Framework. The five-milestone journey equips teams to make measurable, sustainable progress on shared priorities. Built on the Communities of Excellence Framework, the Pathway provides a clear developmental arc—from forming a cross-sector team to achieving long-term systems change.
Each milestone builds upon the previous one, aligning people, data, strategy, and action toward a common goal: lasting, equitable improvement in quality of life.
The milestones meet communities where they are, allowing for customized pacing and support and reflects the core principles of process improvement, cross-sector collaboration, and results-based learning. This approach reinforces a continuous learning cycle: insights gained from implementing and refining strategies feed back into future planning and team formation.
Download a pdf of the Five Milestones
Milestone 1: Build Your Team for Long Term Success - Starts October 7th
Three-month live virtual education program with optional coaching.
Based on their readiness score, some already formed teams may move directly into Milestone Two.
What This Milestone is About:
This is the starting point for lasting, cross-sector collaboration. In this milestone, your team will come together around a shared purpose, begin building trust, and set a clear direction for your work. You’ll identify who needs to be at the table, why this work matters, and how you’ll move forward together. It’s not about jumping into action, it’s about laying the groundwork: forming the right team, defining what success looks like for your community, using data to drive decisions from the start, and getting aligned on your community’s most pressing needs and opportunities.
Why This Milestone Matters:
Big change starts with the right team. This milestone gives your work a strong foundation by helping you build trust, align your purpose, and clarify how you'll work together. When cross-sector teams skip this step, they often struggle with confusion, turf issues, or misaligned priorities later on. A strong start sets the stage for lasting collaboration and real progress.
What You’ll Advance:
- Cross-Sector Team
Form or grow a team whose membership reflects your community’s priorities and diversity of perspectives. - Living Team Plan
Draft or refine your shared mission, vision, and values; clarify each member’s roles and responsibilities; and agree on how you’ll communicate and make decisions. - Case for Change and Goal Statement
Clarify your team’s “burning platform” — the urgent reason for acting together — and draft a long-term goal that captures the impact you hope to make. - Readiness Assessment Insights
Complete the CollaborACTION Readiness Assessment and identify 2–3 priority areas for improvement. - Baseline Community Scorecard
Generate a customized digital scorecard of key community measures using our COE Common Community Scorecard. - Partner Pitch Deck
Create a concise slide deck to explain your work, rally stakeholders, and secure early buy-in.
Optional: Community Results Statement
Develop a concise summary of the population-level quality of life outcomes your community is working to improve.
Milestone 2: See the Whole Picture - Starts October 7th
Five-month live virtual education program with optional coaching.
What This Milestone is About:
Now that your team is formed, it’s time to take a deeper look at what’s happening in your community by examining what’s working, what’s not, and why. You’ll gather data, listen to residents, and bring together different perspectives to create a shared picture of your current state. This milestone is about replacing assumptions with understanding, ensuring early goals are informed by the systems, stories, and lived experiences shaping your community today.
Why This Milestone Matters:
Understanding your community’s current state—through both data and lived experience—helps your team make better decisions collectively. This milestone ensures you’re not working from assumptions or jumping into quick fixes. It builds a shared view of where your community is now, what’s working, what isn’t, and why that matters, especially for those who’ve historically been left out of the conversation. It’s time to celebrate your new community understanding.
What You’ll Advance:
- Community Profile
Document your community’s key characteristics, assets, challenges, and history—drawing from data, lived experience, and team insight. This living document builds shared understanding and informs future priorities. - Resident and Stakeholder Insight
Gather input through interviews, focus groups, or surveys to understand what matters most to residents and key partners. Use these insights to strengthen your Community Profile and clarify your focus. - Root Cause Analysis Summary
Explore the deeper conditions influencing outcomes like housing access or chronic disease. Document key insights in a visual or written format that highlights systemic drivers, disparities, and opportunities for change. - Customized Community Scorecard
Refine or expand your digital scorecard to reflect baseline data and additional measures aligned with your emerging priorities. - Refreshed Mission, Vision, and Values
Revisit and revise your team’s guiding statements based on new insights, ensuring they reflect what you’ve learned and what you’re committed to achieving. - Community Asset and Stakeholder Map
Create a visual inventory of key organizations, networks, and assets tied to your priority areas. This helps identify gaps, overlaps, and opportunities for collaboration. - Working Team Structure
Establish a simple, shared structure for how your team will communicate, make decisions, and stay aligned as the work progresses.
Milestone 3: Plan for Impact - Starts February 2026
Three-month live virtual education program with optional coaching.
What This Milestone is About:
With a strong foundation in place—a committed team, shared purpose, and deeper understanding of your community’s current state—your team is now ready to sharpen its focus. In this milestone, you’ll prioritize the issues that matter most, refine early ideas into clear, measurable goals, and build a practical, multi-year strategic plan. You’ll define how to coordinate across sectors, and how to manage change and align partners and resources for shared success.
As part of this process, some teams may also begin taking focused action on one or more high-priority needs—testing early ideas or pilot strategies that can inform and strengthen the plan. These initial steps can build momentum, surface valuable insights, and create a feedback loop that sharpens your direction. This is where the groundwork comes together, translating insight into strategy—and strategy into action.
Why This Milestone Matters:
A strong plan isn’t just a document — it’s a tool for shared leadership, coordinated action, and measurable impact. Planning together keeps your work aligned, focused, and achievable. It’s not just about making a to-do list, it’s about setting measurable goals that matter, identifying roadblocks, and creating a plan to reach them together. This milestone ensures your team is equipped to manage cross-sector decision-making, navigate conflict, and make lasting change.
What You’ll Advance:
- Prioritized Needs and Opportunities
Identify the most critical issues or opportunities to address, based on data, lived experience, and stakeholder input gathered in earlier milestones. - Shared Community Goals
Convert early aspirations into formal, measurable goals that reflect your team’s priorities and define success in clear terms. - Multi-Year Community Strategic Plan
Shape a multi-year plan that outlines your goals, strategies, key actions, partner roles, and timing. This plan will continue to evolve in later milestones. - Updated Community Scorecard
Align your digital scorecard with your strategic plan by refining your goals, adding new measures, and improving clarity on how progress will be tracked. - Team Coordination Plan
Create or refine a practical plan for how your team will stay aligned, communicate, and maintain momentum during implementation. - Initiative and Resource Alignment Map
Develop a visual map or summary that shows how existing programs, initiatives, and resources support or connect to your strategic goals. - Refreshed Messaging Tools
Update your pitch deck and shared messaging to reflect your refined goals and strategic direction—helping you build clarity and support among partners and stakeholders. - Early-Stage Actions or Pilots (Optional)
Begin testing or implementing limited-scope actions aligned with your prioritized needs to generate quick wins, gather insight, or build momentum for your plan.
Milestone 4: Put Your Plan Into Practice - Starts February 2026
Three-month live virtual education program with optional coaching.
What This Milestone is About:
It’s time to put your plan into action. In this milestone, your team will begin implementing selected strategies from your Community Strategic Plan. You’ll test ideas, manage partnerships, and track your progress using your scorecard. It’s also about learning as you go—adjusting your approach based on feedback, data, and what’s working on the ground using time-tested process improvement methods.
Why This Milestone Matters:
Even the best plans hit bumps in the road. This milestone helps your team stay adaptive and focused as you move to action. It creates space to reflect, learn, and improve so you can strengthen your strategies, build momentum, and stay aligned with your shared goals.
What You’ll Advance:
- Early-Stage Strategy Implementation
- Launch early-stage strategies from your Community Strategic Plan, focusing on actions that can build momentum and demonstrate feasibility.
- Scorecard-Based Tracking
Use your updated community scorecard to monitor progress, identify trends, and share updates with your team and partners. - Team Reflection and Learning
Conduct regular learning sessions to reflect on what’s working, where adjustments are needed, and how to improve implementation efforts. - Process and Role Adjustments
Make practical updates to roles, communication processes, or strategies based on what your team is learning through action. - Documentation of Results and Insights
Capture early outcomes—both quantitative and qualitative—to support learning, storytelling, and future planning. - Expanded Partnerships
Identify and engage new partners or sectors needed to support implementation, fill gaps, or extend your reach.
Milestone 5: Sustain, Celebrate, and Scale What Works
Three-month live virtual education program with optional coaching.
What This Milestone is About:
As your work matures, it’s time to think beyond the next project. You’ll explore how to embed your work in existing systems, secure resources, and expand your impact to new areas or issues. It’s also a time to reflect on your progress and celebrate what you’ve accomplished — reinforcing momentum and strengthening community trust.
Why This Milestone Matters:
Long-term change requires staying power. This milestone helps your team think about what it takes to sustain progress—not just in funding, but in people, systems, and culture. It supports your team in sharing success stories, building ownership across sectors, and planning for the next phase of growth and learning.
What You’ll Advance:
- Sustainability Planning
Develop a plan for sustaining your work, considering funding, partnerships, ongoing team leadership, staffing, and integration into local systems. - Scaling and Adaptation Strategy
Identify opportunities to replicate, expand, or adapt successful strategies to new issues, sectors, or neighborhoods. - Team Reflection and Self-Assessment
Complete a structured team reflection to assess your growth, collaboration, and progress throughout the Pathway. - Storytelling Tools and Case Materials
Use templates and examples to begin crafting your team’s narrative—highlighting successes, lessons learned, measurable results, and your community’s unique journey.
What’s Included With Every Milestone:
Live Learning and Peer Exchange:
- Live, expert-led virtual sessions that include peer learning, facilitated discussions, and practical exercises for each milestone.
- Connections to other communities through our national network and milestone-based cohort groups.
- Monthly webinars on topics like storytelling, community engagement, systems thinking, and data-informed decision-making.
Tools and Resources:
- Access to our custom Learning Management System (LMS) with session recordings, downloadable resources, and milestone-specific guides.
- Ongoing access to our online Resource Library, featuring tools, templates, and promising practices from other communities.
Data and Scorecard Access:
- Use of the COE Common Community Scorecard, which includes seven census tract–level indicators across health, education, economy, housing, built environment, natural environment, and social connection—available via a customizable digital platform for your community.
Community and Visibility:
- Opportunities for visibility and recognition at our Annual Conference, held this year on October 14–15, 2025, in Denver, Colorado.
Coaching Support Options
In addition to milestone programming, communities have the option to add customized coaching support. Our trained coaches provide expert guidance to help your team apply what you’re learning, work through challenges, and accelerate progress. Coaching is tailored to your goals and can include support for:
- Team development and group dynamics.
- Applying the Communities of Excellence Framework.
- Interpreting and using community data.
- Strategic planning and execution.
- Strengthening cross-sector collaboration.
- Preparing for recognition and storytelling opportunities.
Coaching packages can be added to any milestone and are also included at higher tiers of our Community Engagement Packages. Whether you’re looking for a few key sessions or sustained support over the year, our coaching options are designed to meet you where you are.
To learn more about coaching or request a proposal, please contact us at info@communitiesofexcellence2026.org or 619-719-1045.
About the COE Common Community Scorecard
The COE Common Community Scorecard is a shared measurement tool designed to help communities track progress on outcomes that matter. It includes nationally available census tract–level data across seven domains: health, education, economy, housing, social connection, built environment, and natural environment. The digital platform allows for community-specific customization over time and benchmarking opportunities. Most importantly, it provides a common starting point and a shared language for cross-sector work.
Alumni Network: Continued Learning and Support
After completing Milestone 5, teams are invited to join our national COE Alumni Network—a space for continued learning, peer support, and shared progress. The Alumni Network includes monthly virtual alumni sessions with facilitated discussion and community spotlights as well as ongoing access to the LMS, resource library, and updated tools.
Next Steps
Schedule, Pricing & Packages
We offer flexible schedules and pricing for:
- Individual Milestones
- Pathway Bundles through our Community Engagement Packages
- Coaching and Custom Support
Flexible engagement packages are available for teams, organizations, and full communities. Explore the options to see what fits best for you.
Ready to Get Started?
Complete the short interest form or contact us directly at info@communitiesofexcellence2026.org or 619-719-1045.
