Giving Compass' Take:
- One Earth Future and Partnerships for Social Change has been working with UN agencies to develop guiding principles for effective partnerships for cross-sector collective impact.
- Why is collective impact effective in global development projects? What role can donors play in these innovative partnerships?
- Read how collective impact can lead to impactful philanthropy.
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We need new processes to unlock the potential of multisector coordination. Over the past several years, our organizations, One Earth Future and Partnerships for Social Change, have been working with UN agencies and other groups to develop a model called Innovation in Partnerships. Used in the recent UN75 Global Governance Forum, it led to 20 new partnerships to support progress toward the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It identifies partners and engages them in dialogue that leads to commitments to action, and is based on three guiding principles: shared goals, open acknowledgement of differing incentives, and collective impact strategies that reduce or remove hierarchy and centralized strategy. In practice, organizations have to manage achieving all of these simultaneously while maintaining an emphasis on action to move the goals of the partnership forward. This can be a challenge when the demands of the different principles collide, but it’s nevertheless possible.
As we mentioned at the beginning, it’s important to balance the multiple, competing priorities that emerge from these principles with a bias toward action. Partners should work to resolve tensions between the different principles as they go, and—while maintaining an emphasis on network structures—ensure that there is some form of accountability tied to next steps.
The Partnership Dialogue for Connectivity—a project emerging from the recent UN75 Global Forum that we facilitated and that aims to improve the ability of people everywhere to access broadband connectivity—offers a good, step-by-step example of how to implement the process.
- Identify a project lead and an initial project scope.
- Identify and solicit participants.
- Suspend planning to allow for shifting participants.
- Hold a second meeting that culminates in a formal agreement.
- Execute the plan.
- Accelerate, broaden, and scale.
Read the full article about building resilient cross-sector partnerships by Conor Seyle & Maureen Connolly at Stanford Social Innovation Review.