By definition, the concept of “place” evokes a sense of geography – a neighborhood, a city, a region. But  more abstractly, “place” or “place-based” can mean how larger systems affect people in a community.  Consider the impact a federal policy change on college completion may have on a locale. While the policy is enacted at the federal level, its implementation most certainly happens in the community. Beyond affecting local institutions of higher education and their ability to retain students – particularly students from low-income families and minority populations – the policy change also affects the local school district, local businesses, workforce development boards, and social service organizations. What’s more, each community feels the reverberations of this policy change differently, due to particular cultural and contextual nuances and traditional power dynamics. Thus, as evaluators, our “place-based” approach requires us to examine how policies and, potentially, practice changes affect systems, organizations, and individuals in a community.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Community Partnerships portfolio offers an excellent example of place-based efforts in action. The Gates Foundation invested in seven cities and eight affiliate sites, to understand how the national focus on college completion influenced the ability of communities to achieve postsecondary success goals. We discuss key lessons from this investment, and provide examples from the different sites, in our Community Partnerships Issue Briefs Series.

Our work with the Community Partnerships portfolio supports much of the early writings and research on place-based initiatives – particularly those that emphasized changing “systems” and measuring the influence of coordinated action, contextual influences, and organizational dynamics on large scale community challenges.  The Community Partnerships work also complements a newer body of literature focused on the “Collective Impact” model. In each site, individual and organizational partners coalesced around a unified goal to advance a postsecondary completion agenda, informed by a rigorous use of data and a concerted strategy to build public will for their efforts.

With its grounding in the early literature, and its alignment with Collective Impact, Community Partnerships has added value to the field of place-based investments. Yes, it takes a variety of partners, acting in a coordinated, deliberate way, to identify and create change. But that’s just the starting point. While collective emphasis is critical, the role of individual interests and action is a powerful asset for partnerships. While an individual institution may have decision-making authority over a particular policy decision, the successful implementation of a policy change often depends on, and benefits from, action across a wide range of partners.

Furthermore, place-based partnerships must be diverse – “going deep” within organizations and in the community to include individuals whose voices are not often heard, and to engage them in a meaningful way. We can change systems only when collective efforts authentically acknowledge the culture, context, and social/political dynamics of the specific community.  In short, the same strategies, designed by the same faces, yield the same poor results.

And finally, given the pivotal role of individual self-interest, and the importance of stakeholder diversity, the reality is that place-based investments can be messy. That’s not a bad thing, as partnerships can harness that complexity through actions such as establishing public metrics, sharing data, and holding public events. These activities can offer structure to the partnership, and bring more accountability to the work.

So the “sweet spot” of the Community Partnerships place-based model is the balance between complexity and structure, and individual interest and coordinated action. Through our evaluation, we found that when communities balance those tensions, they can more effectively drive their postsecondary completion agendas and, ultimately, demonstrate that place does matter.