There’s an old adage that states “no man is an island”. The same can be said for nonprofits and charities.

With the thousands of organizations working for the betterment of Canadian society, it would be folly to think a lone institution could achieve success at its given social mandate without the help of others. Which is why collaboration is not only necessary in today’s voluntary sector, it’s a workplace imperative.

Regardless of whether you want to work with a sister organization inside the sector, with various government representatives and committees, or with businesses in the for-profit sector on joint charitable ventures, learning what works and what doesn’t in collaborative practices is a first step to successful programming.

Tamarack, Tamarack, I love ya…Tamarack

One of the leaders in collaborative mechanisms and training in this country is the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement, based in Waterloo, Ontario. Their mission statement encapsulates their raison d’etre nicely: advancing the work of communities collaborating. In fact, they’re a virtual repository of available collaboration knowledge that is provided freely to more than 5,000 organizations monthly.

And the charity is funded and aided by sector heavyweight players the Maytree Foundation, the McConnell Foundation and the Caledon Institute of Social Policy.

According to Kathleen Kevany, director of Tamarack’s Vibrant Communities, a Pan-Canadian program that has engaged 15 major communities across the country to impart collaborative techniques in an effort to reduce poverty, collaboration skills are fundamental to any organization.

She took time out to list four key reasons why collaboration is so important, and commented on each for the benefit of the CharityVillage audience and all sector organizations interested.

1. It adds value to an organization. “The ability to gain strategic focus around solutions to complex problems is enhanced when we share our information and research and participate together in planning, priority setting, evaluation and learning. Collaborations are often able to leverage resources more effectively than individual organizations, as well as having a stronger voice when it comes to advocacy and policy or systems change initiatives. With greater influence, from the collective strengths that emerge in a collaborative process, results may be advanced further along the path.”

2. It gathers a variety of skill sets to any one mandate: “For example, bringing business persons to the table requires of the group a greater concentration on tasks, outcomes, and cost-effectiveness than might be the case without this point of view expressed at the table.”

3. It’s a capacity-builder: “In bringing more views together, in attempting to be more representative of the community or of an issue, this affords the collaboration the opportunity to tap into greater skills and new capacities needed for the tasks at hand; it expands synergies.”

4. It allows groups to become more influential: “It enables collaboration members to both enlarge their sphere of influence by leveraging the strength of the others, as well as increase a sense of empowerment and also of responsibility. Through this process, the risks become more widely distributed and ease the strain that a small number might have had to absorb through their eagerness and willingness to take bold decisions and strive for significant changes.”

That being said, there’s a flip side that organizations and individuals need to be aware of when collaborating, namely, a reluctance to share that unique “helping high” that can often result from a job well done.

When collaborations go sour

“Collaborations can cause some to feel their unique contribution to the community may be eroded through the sharing of their mission with others or through others assuming tasks or responsibilities they considered their domain,” Kevany says. “In this way, collaboration can arouse fears of loss or threaten a group’s turf – resulting in battles for resources, power, information and legitimacy.”

Tamarack has discovered some additional potential flashpoints from collaboration, such as cultural barriers between groups, uncertain frames of reference, and vastly different “operating modes” from organization to organization, among others. All of this can lead to roadblocks in collaborative efforts.

“There is often the lack of an institutionalizing mechanism to manage interconnections and interdependencies on an ongoing basis, making it easy to slip back into old ‘siloed’ approaches,” she explains.

But there are ways to mitigate those effects.

Expand your mind…and your point of view

Kevany suggests that, often, people can become institutionalized within their respective organizations. This can lead to intractable attitudes that scream the equivalent of, “it’s my way or the highway,” as the saying goes.

But there are ways to learn and grow outside of preconceived methodologies to help break down barriers to collaboration. Kevany lists several to contemplate.

“To introduce a group of people who speak different organizational languages and, who come from different cultures, there is a cross-cultural orientation needed,” she says. “This is not unlike the learning needed in welcoming newcomers from other countries. We need to teach and pass on skills like…”

• Developing mutual respect
• Acknowledging and suspending judgment and our own biases and assumptions
• Appreciating and valuing, and not merely tolerating difference
• Communicating across boundaries
• Communicating for impact
• Understanding group process and task orientation
• Learning how to get things done…in new ways
• Effective collaboration requires some facilitation and ‘ground rule’ development.
• Everyone has things to give, gain and must be willing to ‘give up’ some things too

See? Easy.

You’re not alone

Of course, Tamarack isn’t the only organization with knowledge and expertise to share on collaboration in the sector. Looking around, one can find helpful research and/or tools at a myriad of national and local institutions like the Centre for Voluntary Sector Research and Development and Imagine Canada, or the Canadian Federation of Voluntary Sector Networks, which has local affiliates in cities from coast to coast. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “There is incredible interest and many attempts at collaboration in the sector, but training opportunities and support from professionals skilled in the area are sorely lacking. Businesses, too, are becoming very interested in talking to communities and being more collaborative,” Kevany says. “Through forms of deliberate democracy and community engagement, governments too are reaching out to all sectors for their input and collaboration. All sectors have been seeing some gains through collaboration. Our prediction: collaborations will increase and will be ever more effective through some facilitation and ‘ground rule’ development.”

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.