11. CPH Domain 6: Community Engagement, Collective Impact
After this lesson you can
- Apply the nine principles of community engagement and place scenarios on the engagement continuum
- Name the five conditions of collective impact and spot the missing one in a stalled partnership
- Distinguish a coalition, a collective impact effort, and a community advisory board
- Contrast asset-based community development with needs-based assessment
- Classify coalition measures as structure, process, intermediate outcome, or long-term outcome
Video coming soon
Scheduled for release on November 26, 2026.
The second Domain 6 lesson, covering task statements 5, 6, and 7. It teaches the nine principles of community engagement and the five-level engagement continuum, coalitions, collective impact and advisory boards, organizing and asset-based approaches, and how to evaluate whether a coalition works, using Harbor County's 40-member diabetes coalition as the case.
Questions and answers
Questions a learner would ask about this lesson. Think through your own answer before you open each one.
- What is the community engagement continuum?
Show answer
From the CDC/ATSDR Principles of Community Engagement, 2nd edition (2011), the continuum has five levels of increasing community involvement, impact, trust, and communication flow: outreach, consult, involve, collaborate, and shared leadership. Outreach is one-way communication, consult gets feedback while the organization still decides, and shared leadership means final decisions are made together. The lesson's test for placing a scenario is to ask who can change the outcome.
- Which engagement principle does the exam tend to test as the "humility answer"?
Show answer
Principle 8: be prepared to release control of actions or interventions to the community. When a scenario pits the agency's plan against the community's priorities, the answer that gives the community authority is usually correct. Principle 7, identify and mobilize assets and develop capacity, previews asset-based development.
- What are the five conditions of collective impact?
Show answer
Kania and Kramer (2011) name a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a backbone organization. All five must be present. The backbone is a separate organization with dedicated staff that provides planning, support, facilitation, data, and communications, and without it the lesson says collective impact does not happen.
- How is a coalition different from collective impact?
Show answer
A coalition is a formal, long-term collaboration of diverse organizations that keep their own identity and agree to work toward a common goal, and its structure varies. Collective impact requires all five conditions, including shared measurement and dedicated backbone staff. Every collective impact effort is a partnership, but not every partnership is collective impact.
- How do I evaluate whether a coalition is effective?
Show answer
The lesson uses four categories of measures. Structure measures describe what the coalition is made of (membership, bylaws, staffing), process measures describe how it functions (attendance, satisfaction, decision-making), intermediate outcomes are system changes (policies adopted, resources leveraged), and long-term outcomes are population health changes such as prevalence. Because long-term indicators move slowly and have many causes, a coalition should report process and intermediate outcomes as its own accomplishments and treat long-term indicators as context it contributes to.
Practice quiz
- Question 1"Be prepared to release control of actions or interventions to the community" is which of the nine principles of community engagement?
- Question 2A health department holds a listening session to gather residents' feedback on a draft plan, then makes the final decision on its own. On the engagement continuum this is:
- Question 3Which collective impact condition calls for collecting data and measuring results consistently with a short common set of indicators across all participants?
- Question 4A coalition helps get a new referral policy adopted by two member clinics. In the lesson's coalition evaluation categories, this is:
- Question 5A coalition reports that it has written bylaws, a steering committee, and a defined decision rule. These are:
- Question 6A coalition has a shared goal and many members, but no organization has dedicated staff to coordinate the work, keep the data, and follow up. Which collective impact condition is missing?
- Question 7Before planning anything, a team lists the skills of local residents, the neighborhood associations, and nearby institutions it could build on. This approach is:
- Question 8According to the lesson, a good issue for community organizing is one that is:
- Question 9Harbor County's adult diabetes prevalence is 11 percent, and its coalition runs on a two-year grant. How should the coalition report its results?
- Question 10In the lesson, community health workers are best described as:
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