Who we are

Collaboration for Impact is an Australian not-for-profit organisation with a vision for an equitable and inclusive society where people, place and planet thrive.

Increasing the capacity of change-makers to think and act systemically, through:

Our systems change capacity building, consulting and learning offerings
Our free online learning platform – Platform C – that makes system change accessible, no matter what role you play or where you live.

2. Building the collaborative capacity required to address Australia’s unreconciled history of colonisation through:

Our Deep Collaboration capacity building, consulting and learning offerings
Our Deep Collaboration platform created by First Nations and other multicultural Australians – sharing their ideas, experiences and expertise freely to find a new way to work and lead together.

CFI was co-founded by Liz Skelton and Kerry Graham in 2012.

CFI has grown to be a diverse team and wider network of people across geographies, expertise and experience.

We are leaders and practitioners with decades of experience in collaborative and community-led systems change.

The initiatives we support
We work around Australia supporting people and collaborations to achieve large-scale impact through systems change.
Our support is tailored and flexible, in the short term or over many years. CFI works with systems change initiatives by:
Walking alongside them for years as an embedded capacity builder
Supporting First Nations and other multicultural leaders to find news way to lead together
Partnering to co-convene systems change
Partnering to provide intensive support at critical times
Providing coaching, learning and development
Evidencing impact
See the initiatives we support
Our partners
Collaboration for Impact is an Australian not-for-profit organisation. Our funders and partners support us in various ways to build the field, develop capacity and to share learnings and resources to achieve large scale impact through collaborative approaches to systems change.
See more about CFI partners

We’ve been building capacity for systems change since 2014. The reasons we started, still hold true now.

We see that:

The challenges facing us as a nation and a planet are becoming increasingly complex
Traditional responses do not address complex challenges because they do not change the underlying social, economic, administrative and political conditions which created the challenges in the first place.
Complex challenges will not be solved by our current ways of thinking and working

We know that, to solve complex challenges, more of us need to:

understand complexity and learn how to lead and design change in response to it
engage broadly with those who have a stake in the challenge as co-learners, co-producers and co-designers of change
Learn how to ‘see’ the system and understand the conditions that are holding complex challenges in place
learn how to work with relationships, power and mental models as core levers for change
agree shared goals and align efforts and resources over the long term to that agenda
engage in continuous, evidence-based learning, improvement and adaptation

This way of working is called systems change and focuses on:

changing relationships between different aspects of the system towards new outcomes and goals.
designing intentional processes to fundamentally alter the components and structures that cause the system to behave in a certain way.

It is what we do. We build capacity and movements for systems change.