Giving Compass' Take:

• Petr Skvaril offers insights into partnering for the SDGs to maximize impact and drive progress toward the global goals. 

• What organizations could you partner with to improve your efforts and theirs? 

• Learn about evaluating progress towards the SDGs. 

Partnerships between organizations and networks across industries and sectors are a necessary ingredient for achieving the SDGs. It’s obvious that no one organization can really address any of the SDGs in isolation. The question really is: How to partner effectively?

It usually takes a great deal of resources to partner, and most of the time it is not a very straightforward process. Any partnership needs to be worth the effort, and to generate more impact than the combined investment of everyone involved.

How can you partner as a network?

Networks are powerful and growing forms of organizing people and organizations around causes, but how do they partner with more traditional types of (centralized) organizations? And how can two or more networks partner up in ways that are relevant (and owned) locally and impactful globally?

What seems to be working

  1. Balancing perspectives in the design phase: As with any other partnership, all parties need to take time to arrive at a shared understanding of the collaboration’s purpose and ambition. They also need to clarify complementary ways of achieving that ambition jointly (you may find the P-ACT tool of MIT D-Lab helpful for example).
  2. Providing clarity while encouraging local innovation: Networks can deliver programs or projects consistently across various locations/markets, but their real strength is in their inherent ability to address specific contexts of each location, community or market.
  3. Moving from a relationship of a few to a cross-cutting network of many: Partnerships between organizations or networks often start with a trusting relationship between a few individuals that see an opportunity in working together. This initial group is essential in the early years of a partnership but over time, the relationship needs to become independent from its initiators.
  4. Listen, measure and tell the story: Promoting engaging stories, data-driven insights and lessons learned from joint activities via channels that are effective in each respective party is key for future growth and evolution of the partnership.

Read the full article about partnering for the SDGs by Petr Skvaril at Impact Hub.