Unincorporated area
An unincorporated community is one general term for a geographic area having a common social identity without municipal organization or official political designation (i.e., incorporation as a city or town). There are two main types of unincorporated communities:Due to differences in state laws regarding the incorporation of communities, there is a great variation in the distribution and nature of unincorporated areas. Unincorporated regions are essentially nonexistent in seven of the northeastern states. All of the land in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, and nearly all of the land in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont, is part of an incorporated area of some type. In these areas, types (and official names) of local government entities can vary. In New England (which includes five of those eight states, plus the less fully incorporated state of Maine), local municipalities are known as towns or cities, and most towns are administered by a form of direct democracy, such as the open town meeting or representative town meeting. Larger towns in New England may be incorporated as cities, with some form of mayor-council government. In New Jersey multiple types exist as well, such as city, township, town, borough, or village, but these differences are in the structure of the legislative branches, not in the powers or functions of the entities themselves.
Collective impact
Hank Rubin (author of "Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships for Communities and Schools", Corwin press, 2009) and Leonard Brock (director of the Rochester NY Anti-Poverty Initiative) offer a practical description of collective impact by contrasting it with collaboration: “Collective impact really is much more than collaboration! Collaboration happens when we meet together; collective impact is what we do when we’re alone … Collaboration happens when we choose to sit in the same room and work together on the same project because we share an interest in accomplishing a shared goal … On the other hand, collective impact focuses on change inside each partner organization. It begins when we, as a community, agree to a set of shared outcomes … and then, individually, go back into our home organizations, work with our staffs, boards, and volunteers to figure out what we – individually and organizationally – can best do to achieve those shared goals and then choose to make changes to accomplish this. When each of our organizations chooses to shift and align our own work and priorities in this way, we set changes in motion in all portions of our community. And these changes will last a long time.”