Giving Compass' Take:

• MDRC's study revealed that comprehensive connections between organizations could help improve neighborhoods. 

• How can communities work to strengthen ties between organizations? Where are the spaces for collaboration? 

• Read about why nonprofits must embrace collaboration. 

Community organizations often interact with each other in different domains of neighborhood improvement.

For example, two organizations might collaborate not only to implement services at local schools, but also to beautify a local park and to influence elected officials on immigration policy. Their relationship, which spans the domains of education, public spaces, and public policy, is therefore more “comprehensive” than two groups that collaborate only on a single issue.

Social network analysis can allow researchers to understand how neighborhoods differ in terms of the level and extent of these interactions across domains — how “comprehensive” community connections are.

Public management research and community research have found that more comprehensive connections are more likely to be long-lasting because they can endure changes such as the loss of funding. But there may also be limits to how well comprehensive connections operate in practice, because work may be spread thinly across multiple areas.

This web feature measures comprehensiveness in ties between local organizations in Chicago neighborhoods, and shows how comprehensiveness can help neighborhoods work together to build needed affordable housing and improve schools.

The Chicago Community Networks study takes this concept and applies it to the number of domains in which community organizations cooperate, to understand the overall levels of connections in a neighborhood in all areas of work.

Read the full article on comprehensiveness in community partnerships by David M. Greenberg, Stephen Nuñez, M. Victoria Quiroz-Becerra, Aurelia De La Rosa Aceves, Sarah Schell, Edith Yang, Audrey Yu at MDRC