Part 1: The Quarterback Challenge: Why Convening Isn't Coordinating

Series Introduction: From Convening to Orchestrating

Over the next several weeks, I'll be sharing a framework that emerged from nearly three decades of lived experience in community quarterback work—both the successes and the hard lessons learned. This isn't academic theory. It's what I discovered by actually doing this work: living in, leading, and learning alongside a historically disinvested community through its transformation.

The "Community Quarterback Impact Architecture" addresses a challenge that practitioners across the country have struggled to articulate: How do you create coordinated, measurable impact for a defined population through partners you don't directly control? How do you move from convening well-intentioned stakeholders to orchestrating a system that actually produces transformation?

This series will walk through a five-dimension framework designed specifically for community quarterback organizations—those entities responsible for neighborhood outcomes they must achieve through coordination rather than direct control. Each article tackles one dimension while acknowledging that this isn't linear work. You'll loop back, revise, and refine. That's not failure—it's how quarterback work actually happens.

If you've ever felt the gap between "we recruited partners" and "we're producing coordinated outcomes," this series is for you. If you've wondered why convening doesn't automatically create coordination, or why good intentions don't translate to measurable results, keep reading. And if you're tired of strategic plans that look impressive on paper but can't possibly work in practice, you're in the right place.

Let's begin where most organizations discover the problem: in the gap between partnership and performance.

 Introduction

The conference call should have been routine. Seven partners gathered virtually to review quarterly progress—a school operator, two housing developers, a workforce program, an early childhood provider, a health clinic, and our community-based organization serving as quarterback. Each partner reported their numbers: enrollment figures, units developed, services delivered, families engaged.

The data looked good. Every partner was hitting their individual targets. Funders would be pleased with our collective activity report. We'd recruited strong organizations, secured significant funding, built impressive physical infrastructure. By traditional measures, we were succeeding.

Then someone asked a different question: "How many of the families in our housing are actually enrolled in our school?"

Silence stretched across the video call. Nobody knew. The housing partner tracked occupancy. The school tracked enrollment by address. But no system existed to connect the two. We'd assumed proximity would create connection. We'd hoped families would naturally access the services we'd assembled. We'd believed that recruiting good partners and getting them operating in the same neighborhood would produce coordinated impact.

We were convening. We weren't coordinating. And certainly not orchestrating.

That moment crystallized a challenge I'd been sensing but couldn't quite name through years of neighborhood development work. We had partnerships but not performance architecture. We had partners reporting to us individually but not working together systematically. We had aligned missions on paper but disconnected operations in practice. We'd built an ecosystem of services operating in proximity, each excellent within their silo, collectively producing far less than the sum of their parts.

The families we existed to serve were experiencing our work as fragments, not as a system. A mother navigating three different intake processes to access early childhood care, elementary school enrollment, and family support services. A father securing job training with no connection to affordable housing near that employment. Children experiencing mid-year moves because our housing partner didn't coordinate with our school partner about family stability needs.

We'd done the visible work of partnership—the convenings, the shared vision statements, the collaborative grant applications, the photo opportunities at ribbon cuttings. What we hadn't done was the harder, less visible work of building the systems, processes, and accountability structures that turn partnership into coordinated action that creates compounding effects across sectors.

Over nearly three decades working in and alongside historically disinvested communities, I've observed this pattern repeatedly—in my own work and in organizations across the country. Community quarterback entities claiming to orchestrate transformation when they're actually just convening partners periodically. Organizations genuinely committed to population-level outcomes but lacking the architecture to hold anyone accountable for achieving them. Strategies that look comprehensive on paper but lack operational specificity about who does what, by when, for whom, measured how.

This article begins a series exploring why this gap exists and how to close it. But first, we need to understand what makes community quarterback work distinctly challenging—and why the frameworks most organizations use weren't designed for this challenge at all.

Key Point #1: The Unique Challenge of Accountable Orchestration

Community quarterback organizations occupy territory that existing frameworks don't adequately address. Understanding this unique position is essential because it explains why traditional approaches to strategic planning and theory of change development consistently fail these organizations.

Neither Provider Nor Pure Convener

Most organizational development frameworks assume you're one of two things: either a direct service provider who controls implementation, or a facilitator who brings diverse stakeholders together around shared goals.

If you're a direct service provider—a school, a clinic, a housing developer—your theory of change is relatively straightforward. You directly deliver specific services to specific people, and you can be held accountable through traditional management approaches. Your strategic plan focuses on improving your operations, expanding your reach, and demonstrating your impact.

If you're a pure collective impact backbone, your theory of change centers on creating conditions for alignment. You bring diverse stakeholders together around a common agenda, establish shared measurement systems, facilitate mutually reinforcing activities, enable continuous communication, and provide backbone support. The collective impact framework explicitly describes the intensive work required: facilitating dialogue among partners, building public will, advancing policy, supporting aligned activities through ongoing coordination, establishing shared measurement practices, and monitoring progress to adjust strategies.

Community quarterbacks typically start in this convening space—they bring the community together, create a vision and plan, recruit partners. But then something happens that neither framework adequately addresses.

The Two Paths Quarterbacks Actually Take

After the initial convening and planning, community quarterbacks tend to follow one of two paths—neither of which looks like the frameworks would suggest.

Path One: The Project Manager Drift

Many quarterbacks find strong partners—a charter or partnership school, a mixed-income housing developer, an economic development entity—and then shift into what I call "project manager" mode. They check in periodically with partners, but most of their attention moves to what's most visible, time-consuming, and frankly, most "sexy": the development deals. Real estate transactions. Construction timelines. Financing structures. Ribbon cuttings.

Years pass. Buildings rise. Partners operate. The quarterback reports success: "We recruited excellent partners and they're performing well by their own metrics."

Then, often many years down the road after the major development projects are complete, the human impact questions emerge—sometimes forced by the data, sometimes by community pushback. The school partner hasn't been producing prepared students. The neighborhood is no longer affordable for legacy residents. Families can't even get close to accessing the new housing units being built. The workforce program placed people in jobs, but not jobs that allow them to afford the neighborhood anymore.

The quarterback suddenly realizes: We convened, we recruited, we developed—but we never designed the accountability architecture ensuring partners actually served our target population or created the cross-sector integration that produces compounding effects.

Path Two: The Program Gap-Filler

Other quarterbacks take a different turn. When they see gaps in the service ecosystem, they start filling them directly. They create a workforce program when none exists for their population. They launch an afterschool initiative when the school partner doesn't offer one. They develop a family support services operation when no partner provides it.

They become hybrid organizations—part convener, part direct service provider—but never quite doing the hard work of designing and maintaining a tightly knit ecosystem that supports a specific population through coordinated partner performance. They're too busy running their own programs to build the systems ensuring partners coordinate with each other. They've inadvertently become competitors with some partners while trying to coordinate others.

What Community Quarterbacks Actually Are

So community quarterbacks are neither solely direct service providers nor pure collective impact backbones in practice. They're something more complex and more challenging:

They typically possess real structural power—they own buildings that partners need, control funding that partners depend on, hold community legitimacy that partners seek. Yet they depend on those partners to deliver the services that create change for the target population.

They're accountable for population-level outcomes—funders, community members, and boards expect results, not just partnership activity. Yet they don't employ the educators, health providers, housing managers, or workforce trainers who directly serve families.

They must orchestrate excellence across multiple independent partners, ensuring not just that each partner performs well individually, but that they work together to create compounding effects for a defined population. This requires more than periodic check-ins or quarterly meetings. It demands ongoing coordination, shared data systems, clear performance expectations, capacity-building support, and accountability processes when partners underperform or drift from serving the target population.

This is accountable orchestration—and most quarterbacks have neither adopted the frameworks nor built the infrastructure this role actually requires. They've defaulted to project management or program provision because those roles feel more tangible, while the harder work of designing accountability architecture for coordinated performance remains undone.

What This Means in Practice

One  neighborhood development organization that I worked with had recruited a high-quality school operator and provided them with a renovated building. On paper, they'd succeeded—strong partner, excellent facility, growing enrollment. But two years in, they discovered that only thirty percent of enrolled students actually lived in their target neighborhood. Families from across the city were accessing a school they'd intended for neighborhood children. Meanwhile, neighborhood families struggled with the enrollment process or didn't know the school existed.

By traditional measures, the school was successful. Test scores were strong. Families were satisfied. The operator was meeting the terms of their lease. But by the measure that should have mattered most—advancing outcomes for their target population—they were failing. They'd assumed recruiting a good operator was enough. They hadn't designed accountability for actually serving who we existed to serve.

When they tried to address this, they discovered they lacked the systems to do so effectively. They had no shared enrollment process with our housing partners. They'd never specified that seventy-five percent of students must come from the neighborhood. They had no data connecting housing residency to school enrollment. They'd structured the partnership around facility use, not population impact. They were landlord and tenant, not orchestrator and coordinated partner.

This happens because organizations default to frameworks designed for different organizational types. They use logic models meant for direct service providers, not realizing these don't address coordination complexity. Or they adopt collective impact language without building the intensive backbone infrastructure that approach requires. They create strategic plans focused on their own activities rather than on the partnership architecture needed to orchestrate collective performance.

The gap between partnership and performance grows invisible precisely because we lack language and frameworks for this distinct organizational challenge. Organizations can claim to be "coordinating partners" or "ensuring alignment" without specifying what that actually means operationally. Funders can appear satisfied with partnership metrics—number of partners recruited, meetings convened, collaborative initiatives launched—that don't measure coordinated impact. Communities can sense that something isn't working without being able to articulate exactly what's missing.

The Cost of This Gap

The consequences of operating without appropriate frameworks aren't merely inefficiencies. They're profound missed opportunities for the populations these organizations exist to serve.

For families navigating fragmented systems: Services remain disconnected. They complete multiple intake processes for programs that should be coordinated. They experience transitions as barriers rather than bridges. The potential for compounding effects—where stable housing enables educational success, which opens workforce pathways—goes unrealized because no one designed the system to create those connections.

For partners trying to do excellent work: Even capable organizations operate in silos without clear expectations or coordinated processes. They duplicate efforts in some areas while leaving gaps in others. They lack the data and feedback loops needed for continuous improvement. They don't experience the benefits of genuine cross-sector collaboration because the quarterback never built the architecture that makes collaboration operational rather than aspirational.

For quarterback organizations themselves: They remain unclear on their unique value proposition beyond "we brought partners together." They cannot articulate to funders how they create impact. They struggle to know whether failure stems from partner underperformance, inadequate coordination systems, or flawed theory of change. Without frameworks designed for accountable orchestration, they drift between multiple priorities, responding to the loudest voices or newest funding opportunities rather than maintaining strategic focus on population outcomes.

For the field of community development: Lacking frameworks for this organizational type, the sector continues to conflate convening with coordinating, assumes alignment happens organically, and fails to build the accountability architectures that enable measurable, sustained transformation. Each generation of quarterback organizations reinvents approaches from scratch rather than building on accumulated wisdom. Failures are attributed to insufficient partnership commitment or inadequate funding rather than to predictable design gaps that appropriate frameworks could prevent.

Why Traditional Frameworks Fall Short

The frameworks most readily available to community development organizations fall into two categories, and neither adequately addresses the quarterback challenge.

Direct Implementation Frameworks

These frameworks—including most logic models and results-based accountability approaches—assume the organization developing the theory of change directly implements the critical activities. The logic flows straightforwardly: We will do X activities, which will produce Y outputs, leading to Z outcomes.

These frameworks work well for organizations that control their implementation. They fail for community quarterbacks because they don't address how to hold partners accountable for performance you don't directly control, what happens when partners' organizational interests conflict with collective goals, how to ensure cross-sector coordination rather than parallel service delivery, or what leverage and influence the quarterback has and how to use it appropriately.

Collective Impact Frameworks

The collective impact framework provides valuable methodology for community quarterback work. It emphasizes five conditions essential for coordinated action: common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support.

The challenge is not with the collective impact framework itself but with how community quarterbacks typically implement it - if at all. Most quarterbacks adopt the language of collective impact without building the infrastructure it requires. They convene partners around shared visions and establish common agendas, but then fail to fulfill the intensive backbone functions that make collective impact work.

In practice, community quarterbacks can often focus on the visible convening activities—hosting meetings, facilitating planning processes, building relationships—while neglecting the harder operational work of backbone support. They create shared outcome frameworks but don't build the data systems or analytic capacity to monitor collective performance. They identify mutually reinforcing activities but don't actively facilitate the coordination required to make them happen. They celebrate "collaboration" at quarterly meetings without testing whether it's producing measurably better outcomes for the target population between those meetings.

The result is organizations claiming to practice collective impact while actually just convening partners periodically—not understanding the real capacity required to advance collective outcomes. They have no systematic processes for continuous improvement, no rigorous monitoring of collective success, no structured methodology for testing assumptions and addressing obstacles, and no clear approach for using whatever leverage they possess to influence partner actions when alignment breaks down.

This represents a failure of implementation, not a failure of the framework. Collective impact requires significant backbone capacity—dedicated staff for ongoing coordination, data systems for shared measurement, facilitation expertise for collaborative problem-solving, and resources to support partner alignment. Most community quarterbacks either don't recognize the full scope of what backbone support requires or substantially underinvest in it, treating coordination as a part-time function rather than the intensive orchestration work the framework describes.

Community quarterbacks desire the coordinated outcomes collective impact promises but too consistently fail to build the organizational infrastructure it requires. They adopt the aspiration without adopting the methodology. They make assumptions of progress instead of testing those assumptions alongside their partners.

What's Actually Missing

Neither framework adequately addresses several critical elements:

The distinction between coordination and orchestration. Coordination is bringing people together. Orchestration is actively using leverage, building capacity, monitoring performance, problem-solving barriers, and ensuring the system functions as designed.

Partner-level performance requirements. Traditional frameworks might say "partners deliver services" but not "partner must achieve 75% enrollment from target population, 85% readiness benchmarks, and 60% transition rate to next program." Further, there is rarely an answer to the question "what if they are incapable of producing the necessary outcomes?"

Cross-sector integration requirements. They might acknowledge the need for "mutually reinforcing activities" but not specify how partners must interact, what information must be shared, what joint processes must exist, or what creates compounding effects.

The quarterback's accountability architecture. They don't specify how the quarterback monitors partner performance, provides capacity-building support, facilitates collaborative problem-solving, or enforces consequences when partners underperform.

The leverage-trust balance. They don't address how to use structural power—asset ownership, funding control—to establish clear expectations while simultaneously building trust through co-creation and collaborative learning.

Capacity requirements for orchestration. They don't specify what organizational capabilities, data systems, coordination processes, and resources the quarterback needs to fulfill an orchestration role versus a convening role.

Reality-testing of assumptions. They don't force organizations to test hidden assumptions about what it takes for partners to perform well individually and create compounding effects collectively.

This is the gap the Community Quarterback Impact Architecture framework addresses. Over the coming weeks, we'll walk through a five-dimension process that tackles each of these missing elements—not as abstract theory but as operational design work that separates implementable plans from elaborate fantasy.

The journey begins with the most uncomfortable question most organizations have been avoiding: Who exactly do you exist to serve? Not "the neighborhood" or "the community"—but specifically, who? That's where we'll start in the next article.