ABSTRACT
State policy manuals are replete with significant policy changes gathering dust on the shelf, never having a real impact on the systems they were passed to improve. Sustained and long-term supports for policy change, implementation, and preservation are unlikely to come from traditional political entities, given the high rates of turnover and the unprecedented degree of partisanship infecting twenty-first-century politics. Expecting the sustained, long-term commitments necessary for policy change, implementation, and assessment of impact to come from the sector is unrealistic. Policy entrepreneurs can operate locally, within a state, and across multiple states. The work of policy entrepreneurs to date reflects many of the principles of good collective impact practices. Policy entrepreneurs should play a role in gaining cross-sector network commitment to shared measurement. In short, local and regional collective impact initiatives can help set the policy agenda for policy entrepreneurs operating at a state or federal level.
