Collaboration a Must, and Yes, With Other Nonprofits in Our Community
As amazing as it sounds to me, nearly 20 years ago I was in the midst of a professional and personal decision as to whether to leave a job that I loved to take a position in a new organization which was full of challenges. Yes, that new job was in my home city and near my family, but I genuinely loved where I was at the time.
As a part of that discernment, I talked to an old family friend who is a community leader. Because I had been gone from Omaha for a number of years, his counsel was incredibly important because it allowed me the opportunity to hear what was going on today in a world that I hadn't been a part of for a while. It was one thing that he said that's stuck with me and still does to this day.
To paraphrase, he said that the leading philanthropists in the community were tired of all of the different nonprofits, many of whom do remarkably similar things, beating each other up and not working in concert when they requested financial support from Omaha’s leading philanthropists. Basically, they didn't work together.
In a recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the challenge that was expressed to me many years ago was being acted upon in different cities across the United States. Citizen’s University, an organization founded a decade or so ago, brings thought and nonprofit leaders together to talk about the greatest challenges within a particular community. The idea is that together, and not in isolation, nonprofits can better serve the needs of their community. Better outcomes. Lesser expense. Deeper more appropriate engagement with philanthropist. Thus far just a couple of communities have embraced the concept, including Atlanta, Chicago, Lexington, and Wichita. There's been a similar effort to bring together at a much greater level, all of Arizona as well.
All too often, I see nonprofits fighting for their own. It doesn't make them bad organizations. They are attempting to solve a community's problems and challenges. But the individualized nature of the planning and outcomes limits the totality of what might be possible if you put more nonprofits and their leaders together attempting to solve bigger issues. I heard someone once say that the efforts of nonprofits are to solve enormous societal issues, but their organizations are small in nature. But if you put enough nonprofits together, it becomes an exponential growth and impact opportunity.
Key to all of this, according to the article is trust. A realization that there's too many silos in a community. There are many who want to accomplish the same goal, but the limitation in collaborative efforts splits dollars and hurts the overall effort because of individual organizational needs or goals.
There's no question that it will take a new sense of leadership, from our boards and our executives, to put down their own pride and be willing to listen to others who have similar goals. While philosophically that might seem easy, in application in the real world, that is an epic challenge. But as our communities continually need more from nonprofits, without engagement, trust, and a collaborative sense of strategy, we will fail upon our most important edict: to make the world a better place.
