What are the leadership capacities needed to effectively lead collaborative action? How can the collective impact field create and support a pipeline of racially diverse, proximate backbone leaders? Join this session to participate in a candid discussion with elected officials and backbone leads to better understand answers to these questions. EdRedesign, located at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has been working on these essential questions in collaboration with place-based, cross-sector, cradle-to-career leaders in local communities across the country. In addition to hearing from our colleagues in the field, we will share the findings of a recently published report, Building Strong, Sustainable Backbone Structures: A Field Study of Cross-Sector Collaborative Organizations which focuses on key competencies for backbone leaders