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Community Leadership

Given no single entity can solve a big social problem alone, Collaboratory is using our community leadership role to resource, engage, and coordinate regional coalitions of cross-sector partners aligned around shared goals to change regional outcomes and make SWFL an even better place to live, work, learn, and play.

Coalition Strategy

Our coalition approach brings people from every sector together to solve complex community challenges. 

This approach builds on what we learned through earlier collaborative work, where organizations across education, business, nonprofits, and government worked toward shared outcomes. By aligning efforts from early learning through career pathways, this work helps people gain the skills and credentials needed to improve their lives—while also strengthening the regional workforce. 

At its core, this model connects strategy, action, and learning so that ideas turn into results and progress can be measured and improved over time. 

Today, our work is aligned across three priority coalition areas—Workforce & Education, Community Infrastructure, and Health & Wellness—each anchored by three key system-level indicators that define progress and impact across the region. These indicators provide a shared framework to align strategies, measure outcomes, and drive long-term change. 

  • Leadership & Stewardship
    Provides overall direction, aligns partners around the three coalition priority areas and their respective indicators, supports shared measurement, and helps secure resources to drive system-level impact. 
  • Guiding Teams/ Leadership Meetings 
    Convene C-suite and executive-level leaders annually to evaluate progress across coalition indicators, ensure alignment with regional priorities, strengthen community buy-in, and provide strategic guidance to advance system-level change. 
  • Indicator Specific Workgroups
    Bring together cross-sector leaders and practitioners who are closest to the issue to identify root causes, co-design solutions, and implement system-level changes. These groups focus on addressing underlying barriers, aligning resources, and driving sustainable improvements that directly influence coalition indicators. 

 

In January 2026, we convened a diverse group of C-suite leaders and cross-sector partners from across the region to assess the most pressing challenges impacting our communities. Through a structured, data-informed process, participants evaluated key indicators and engaged in facilitated dialogue to identify, and stack rank the top priorities requiring immediate and coordinated action. 

This process marked a pivotal shift toward a more focused, outcomes-driven approach—ensuring that our efforts are aligned around the issues that matter most. As a result, we realigned and sharpened the focus of our existing coalition structure—Workforce & Education, Community Infrastructure, and Health and Wellness—by anchoring each in clearly defined, shared indicators to guide strategy, investment, and accountability. 

This unified prioritization strengthens regional alignment, deepens community buy-in, and positions us to drive measurable, system-level change. We invite partners across all sectors to join us in advancing these shared priorities and shaping a stronger future for our region