Giving Compass' Take:

· Collaborative efforts are changing the lives of youths everywhere. Here, Ridgway White, president of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, uses his experience in Flint to explain how partnering for progress promotes community engagement and leads to meaningful change.

· How is collaboration an effective approach to philanthropy? How does it create meaningful change? 

· Learn how collaboration is opening doors for adolescents in India.

“It seems to me that every person, always, is in a kind of informal partnership with his community.”

Those words, written by Charles Stewart Mott more than a half century ago, get right to the heart of the Mott Foundation’s grantmaking in our hometown of Flint, Michigan, and around the world. From our earliest days, we’ve helped people and organizations to step forward, engage with their communities and create meaningful change.

This approach has never been more crucial — or its impact more evident — than in the wake of Flint’s water crisis, when public, private, nonprofit and philanthropic partners collaborated to rapidly expand access to early childhood education in the city.

This has been an enormous undertaking — one that requires the strong spirit of collaboration that exists in Flint. And while I had the honor of accepting the Secretary’s Award on behalf of these extraordinary partners, it is the community of Flint that will win because so many organizations and agencies willingly jumped in, worked faster and stretched farther than anyone thought possible — all motivated by a single goal: helping Flint children to achieve their full potential.

Read the full article about partnering for progress by Ridgway White at Council on Foundations.