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Computing has become an essential component of research and education for nearly every scientific discipline. Meeting the need for support staff who can help faculty make the best use of available computing resources is a significant challenge for small and mid-sized institutions. The NSF-sponsored Northeast Cyberteam is addressing this challenge by building a pool of research computing facilitators that can be shared across institutional boundaries while also developing self-service tools that reduce the support burden. The Cyberteam Portal, developed to support the Northeast Cyberteam has enabled adoption of program methods by other communities of practice and collaboration with the broader research computing community. 

Collective impact is an approach for solving complex social problems at scale. The challenge of broadening participation in computing (BPC) is one such problem. The complexity of BPC is compounded by the decentralized nature of public education, where decisions are made primarily at the state level and subject to interpretation at the district level. As such, diversifying computer science (CS) pathways across the nation requires a systemic approach such as collective impact to engage all of the stakeholders who influence CS education and whose decisions can either facilitate or hinder BPC efforts. This experience report discusses how the collective impact framework has been used to advance the work of the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, an NSF funded BPC Alliance focused on states and state policy as the unit of change. We discuss how the five essential features of collective impact (common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support) coalesce to facilitate ECEP's theory of change. The report highlights specific policy changes that ECEP states have addressed to promote BPC, the flipped accountability that results from a non-hierarchical leadership model, and the challenges of measuring systemic changes as an intermediary to BPC.