Nonprofit Adviser

Getty Images

Solving complex challenges like the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and systemic racism requires collaboration. Yet organizations often struggle to work together in ways that lead to greater impact. When partnerships are effective, there usually isn’t a simple blueprint to replicate what worked.

In The 5 Essentials of Successful Collaborations, Debi Blizard and Zoë True, consultants at Intentional Futures, a firm that helps leaders create strategies to solve social problems, share guidance on how nonprofits can make the most of partnerships and maximize impact. Their advice is based on interviews with more than 30 experts, including family foundation leaders, impact investors, and philanthropic advisers to identify key elements that help or hinder collaboration.

For example, focus on creating strong relationships among those collaborating, they say. Building social bonds will foster trust and a shared commitment to the effort, which makes it easier to tackle challenges as a team.

And ensure that your team includes diverse perspectives. “True innovation requires uniting those who might not normally join forces,” the authors say. “By empowering teams to collaborate across organizational, social, and hierarchical divides, teams can tackle bigger challenges, faster.”

Read the full article to get more insights, and download a worksheet Blizard and True provided to help you apply their advice.

Have a good week,
Lisa Schohl
Senior Editor, Professional Development

Tip of the Week

To ensure your vacation is really time off from work, coordinate carefully with others in your office. Plan your vacations around the schedules of colleagues who can cover for you effectively to keep ongoing work on track, says Stephanie Reyes, former chief operating officer of the Greenbelt Alliance, an environmental organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. “The two people who can most likely fill in for me are not going to be on vacation when I am,” she says. And of course, never take a vacation at a time when a scheduled major event will make it impossible for you to unplug. Read our advice article for more tips. And don’t forget to consult our advice section for more than 1,150 articles and tools.

New Grant Opportunities

Your Chronicle subscription includes free access to GrantStation’s database of grant opportunities. GrantStation is on hiatus, but we’ll share the latest listings when it returns.

War on drugs. Good Green is dedicated to fighting back against the war on drugs and its devastating impact on Black and brown communities. It provides support to nonprofits working in affected communities in three areas: education and career training; ensuring that employment opportunities in the cannabis industry are accessible to those most impacted by discriminatory cannabis laws; and advocacy for clemency toward all nonviolent cannabis offenders. Five grants of at least $60,000 will be provided in 2021. The application deadline is August 18.

Learning loss due to Covid. The TD Ready Challenge, a TD Bank Group effort, supports nonprofits in the United States and Canada that address predicted learning loss in math and reading for students in grades K-12 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Grants will range from $325,000 to $1 million for U.S. organizations and $375,000 to $1 million for Canadian organizations. The application deadline is August 26.