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An old African proverb says, “If you want to go quick, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
Collaboration has long been seen as a powerful tool for advancing causes. Philanthropists have long sought to find ways to help not-for-profit and social-good actors come together to further their mission. Philanthropists have used their financial and convening power to help collaborations. But how can philanthropists, foundations and corporations go beyond money to develop healthy collaborations among not-for-profits that lack resources to do this themselves?
A recently concluded three-year project, the Community Collaboration Initiative of the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, sought to answer this question. The CCI was funded by the Chicago-based WF Fund and is a community-based participatory research project. The project successfully brought together 22 Muslim-led U.S. not-for-profits to collaborate and solve common problems.
The project’s level of participation shows that organizations are eager to come together to work for a common cause. The organizations believe the CCI project helped them advance their causes to a larger audience, allowing them to share resources and focus on their specific competencies. However, some participants fear that self-interested organizations might be unwilling to open their boundaries and focus on the collective good.
Qualitative and quantitative findings show that organizations are highly successful in coming together to select and work on small projects that help them develop mutual trust. COVID, which required that participants’ interactions occur mostly through Zoom, also affected collaboration, as participants could not forge bonds as they might in personal interactions.
On the other hand, COVID provided them with a way to share vulnerabilities, as people in the groups could bond strongly through the problems they faced. Moreover, this situation led to innovative interactions, including virtual visits to one another’s organizations and mosques. Also, COVID and the George Floyd protests increased recognition among the organizations about the need to be more racially and ethnically diverse and to act as allies for other minorities.
The CCI project structured the collaborations by providing administrative support, trained third-party and neutral facilitators, and assistance in determining short- and long-term goals. Instead of using financial capital in the form of grants, the project relied upon social capital, or trust. Despite little financial incentive, CCI not-for-profits had near-perfect attendance in meetings and successfully executed collaborative projects each of the three years. Ultimately, these organizations collaboratively competed and successfully were awarded the Muslim Collaboration Prizes at the end of the project.
However, future interventions in collaborations require resolving possible challenges that might hinder collaboration. First, collaborations require additional capacity, and most not-for-profits are already doing a great deal. Furthering their capacity to collaborate might better make such interventions successful. Second, not all organizations have the equal capacity, willingness and/or ability to collaborate. Trying to determine how to find organizations that have similar abilities and willingness to collaborate might also further collaborations. Third, CCI found it is easier to build new social capital than to rebuild trust that was broken. In a polarized society, this might be an important future intervention by philanthropic foundations.
The project suggests that collaborations that rely upon social capital rather than financial incentives work if you use trained, third-party/neutral facilitators and develop strong administrative structures to facilitate collaborations.•
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Siddiqui is assistant professor and director of the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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