We believe the collective is more effective. Collective work can be difficult, messy, and take a long time—but the results of collaborative work tend to be far more effective and long-reaching than work at the individual scale. We’ve seen community members dream big dreams, but not find the traction or the means to be able to realize a dream on their own.
When they change course and work with others, we’ve seen remarkable results, including new state parks open, new street lighting installed, millions in funding acquired for downtown redevelopment, and new friendships form where people used to be adversaries. People often find that it is more fun and more effective to work together to make a dream a reality than it is to work on their own.
In our work at Dialogue + Design Associates, we have worked with several long-term, large-scale collaboratives over the last two decades, through which we have learned a lot about what it takes to create successful and sustainable networks and collaborative efforts. In this blog, we share our lessons learned and 10 key elements that can help you build successful and sustainable collaboratives. We expand more on these elements in episode 48 of the Yes! We Rise podcast.
Creating successful and sustainable long-term collaboratives
At Dialogue + Design Associates, we define “collaborative” as a group of people working together for a common vision or purpose, often with the shared belief that the collective is more effective to reach a shared vision and goals. We use the terms collaborative and network interchangeably. A great example of a strong long-term collaborative is the Middle and Upper James Riparian Consortium, a collaborative based in central and western Virginia focused on increasing water quality through streamside forests. The James River Association is the Riparian Consortium convener, and Dialogue + Design Associates serves as facilitator and has worked to support its development, growth, and sustainability since 2019. Learn more at the James River Consortium website.
A successful and sustainable network is one that can continue to survive and to work toward a shared vision and mission even through shifts, changes, stressors, and crossroads. A successful collaborative will work to articulate where they want to go—what north star the group will focus on over time, often articulated in the group’s vision and mission statements, along with goals and actions.
The group will frequently share leadership, have clear decision-making processes, check in on their progress over time, adapt how they are functioning and what they are doing based on feedback, and keep the pulse on how the relationships and trust of participants are evolving—the two key ingredients to creating a network with real impact. At a granular level, Dialogue + Design uses a core pattern or template to guide our work with successful long-term, large geographic scale collaboratives, outlined below in the 10 key elements.
To build sustainable networks and collaboratives, big picture considerations include these three domains:
- Collaboration: Establishing governance and structure, including decision-making processes; building relationships and trust; engaging participants; determining how the collaborative works; identifying the mission, vision, values, and goals, and how they shift; evaluating and iterating; and building team culture, capacity and peer learning.
- Action: Implementing the work of the collaborative; coordinating actions; sharing ideas and resources; bringing new ideas in; and implementing actions across teams and groups.
- Funding: Identifying long-term sources of funding from multiple streams, including the potential for self-generation of revenue, innovation, and creative partnerships.
Across these three major considerations, we have developed 10 key elements to help build strong, successful, and long-term, large-scale collaboratives. Depending on your collaborative’s scope, location, audience, size, budget, or timeline, these 10 key elements can be scaled up or down in relation to the need and context of a group. For example, if a community wants to build a new dog park, they might have fairly informal committees and a shorter-term timeframe of a year for meetings and fundraising until the dog park has been created. However, if a region is working to create a 50-mile outdoor, multi-modal recreation corridor, they will likely have several years of collective efforts with community meetings, formal teams or committees working to implement goals, and a more in-depth funding and resource identification process than what it would take to build a dog park.
10 key elements, functions and roles in successful and sustainable long-term collaboratives
- Identify the change that the collaborative is trying to make through developing a shared mission, vision, goals and actions. For example, The Middle and Upper James Riparian Consortium is a regional collaborative with the shared vision of “Growing partnerships to create healthy streamside ecosystems for clean water in the James River today and tomorrow,” and a mission to “support a network of partners to raise awareness, build workforce capacity, and increase implementation of riparian forested buffers across the Upper and Middle James watersheds through collaboration.”
- Create a planning team that meets every other week or once a month to guide the planning, logistics and prioritization of ideas at the center of meetings, events and gatherings.
- Create a steering committee that meets monthly to make decisions by consensus about the overall growth and direction of the collaborative.
- Develop shared community agreements, values or guidelines for the collective work.
- Hold quarterly larger meetings and gatherings that engage the wider network community.
- Create action teams where prioritized ideas are implemented with network participants. This is where the rubber meets the road, and plans are captured in action planning worksheets for each team.
- These groups function independently of the larger steering committee or collaborative meetings, and they track their ideas and focus on implementation.
- Action team leads share their ideas, cross-pollinate ideas, and gather new ideas for collaboration and implementation, often at steering committee meetings.
- Develop an action plan, i.e., an external-facing document that captures the vision, mission, values, goals, and high-level actions for each action team.
- Create a guiding document, or an internal-facing document that shares information within the network about how decisions are made, a description of different committees, any communications information or style guides, other documents such as financial procedures, potentially an equity plan or a communications plan, and other key internal-facing elements.
- Commit to evaluation and implementation, and make sure this is an iterative process that is connected to the theory of change the collaborative has developed.
- Not only is it important to track outcomes, collect key data, and conduct regular (annual or biennial) evaluation, it is critical that the collaborative respond, adapt, and shift its actions and/or focus in response to evaluation results.
- Have an open budget process shared at the steering committee level with ongoing planning for developing a sustainable funding base.
In our experience, fulfilling each of these elements sets long-term collaboratives and networks up for both resilience and success. Collaboratives with these elements in place are well-situated to shift, adapt, and persist in the face of stressors such as leadership changes and funding constraints. We hope this provides a guide for you and the groups you work with!
To learn more, check out episode 48 of the Yes! We Rise podcast around building resilient networks and sustaining long-term collaboratives with Christine Gyovai.
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Christine Gyovai is a professional facilitator, coach, and expert in building resilient communities. She also teaches yoga and meditation. Through her 20+ years of work as the principal of Dialogue + Design Associates and host of the Yes! We Rise podcast, she guides civic leaders, changemakers, and community members to envision a more sustainable future and come together to make that vision a reality. The granddaughter of a coal miner and a firefly scientist with a master’s in environmental planning from the University of Virginia, Christine loves sailing, yoga and paddleboarding, and lives near the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia with her family and lots of blueberry bushes.
Philippa Belsches is a project manager and consultant with Dialogue + Design Associates. With a background in strategic partnerships, public policy, and communications, Philippa loves bringing groups together to foster collaboration, build sustainability, and create a positive impact.
About the EDR blog: Hosted by the Wallace Stegner Center’s Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) program, the EDR blog shares ideas, tools, and resources to cultivate a culture of collaboration and help readers be more skillful in working through conflict. Read additional blog posts at edrblog.org.