The Intersector: How the Public, Nonprofit and Private Sectors Can Address America's Challenges
Daniel P. Gitterman & Neil Britto
305 pages, Brookings Institution Press, 2021
Many people tend to think of the public, nonprofit, and private sectors as being distinctive components of the economy and society—each with its own missions and problems to address. Our edited collection on cross-sector collaboration, The Intersector: How the Public, Nonprofit and Private Sectors Can Address America's Challenges, describes how the three sectors can work together toward common purposes, accomplishing much more than if they work alone. Scholars from a range of disciplines discuss concepts that advance understanding of cross-sector collaboration. Practitioners and philanthropists show how cooperation among sectors is relevant to their core missions. Cross-sector collaborations and partnerships are more crucial than in the past as the country tries to recover from the economic, health, and social dislocations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a time when trust in institutions, public and private, is at an all-time low, cooperation among the sectors can be a confidence-inspiring approach to addressing public problems. It is important that Americans, including those who were most hard hit by the pandemic, believe that government can be responsive to the challenges in their daily lives. More than anything, Americans yearn for responsive governance, which demands that policy makers effectively address people’s needs.
In the first excerpt, Sonal Shah, former deputy assistant to President Obama and director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and president of the Asian American Foundation writes, “People trust leaders to solve problems. To build trust, we need to be honest about how we talk about the problems we are addressing and how we are working to bring people together to solve them.” With extensive experience in all three sectors, Sonal Shah's excerpt below reminds us how cross-sector collaboration can change lives.
In the second excerpt, Zia Khan, vice president for innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation, explains how philanthropies exist, in many ways, to drive broader collaboration. They have the capital, the expertise, and the convening powers to catalyze big collaboration between government, the private sector, civil society, and the communities they want to serve. However, Khan, in the excerpt below, “warns that well-intentioned collaborations “often go awry due to insufficient upfront attention to what specifically the collaboration is meant to achieve, and how to achieve it.”—Daniel P. Gitterman and Neil Britto
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From Chapter 10: “Creating Cross-Sector Collaborations to Change Lives” by Sonal Shah
What is cross-sector collaboration and why does it matter? In sum, it is about bringing together different groups that are working on similar problems and combining their efforts to achieve even more powerful results. Such cooperation is essential to address today’s multifaceted problems. Most people have no idea what cross-sector collaboration or the “intersector” means. When we start a sentence with the phrase “cross-sector collaboration,” people are likely to tune it out. As a result, they miss the conversation about the actual problem being addressed. Those of us who recognize the necessity of this cooperation need to be able to show our fellow citizens we are solving problems, not merely offering technocratic tools or details of a process. That is why it is important to talk about the human side of what we do—and to listen to the challenges people face in their daily lives rather than make assumptions about what they are experiencing.
To do cross-sector collaboration well requires experts and expertise, but it also requires a willingness to collaborate, learn, and iterate. From my tenure as deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation in the Obama administration, I learned three lessons about cross-sector collaborations. First, leadership at the top matters. Either the president, the secretary, or someone in senior leadership needs to make cross-sector collaboration a priority.
Second, collaboration is not just within the public sector; it requires bringing people together within and outside of government. Within government, we need both political and civil servants who can solve problems, work across agencies to make things happen, and deliver results by focusing on outcomes. Too often, the day-to-day takes over and we forget to bring other voices into the conversation. Accomplishing this requires leaders at each table to ask who else needs to be part of the problem-solving conversation. The Social Innovation Fund was a great example, as was Challenge.gov, where we brought together agencies, experts, and communities and gave people the permission to test out new ideas (in small ways). We were constantly asking: Who is doing this well? How did they do it? What can we learn? How do we scale it? It takes management, intentionality, and persistence to achieve true cross-sector collaboration, but we found that if we were committed, there were many partners eager to join us.
A third and important lesson regarding effective cross-sector collaboration involves strategy: start small and prove it can work, replicate, and scale. There is pressure in the federal government to do everything and make big change quickly. However, effective change requires clarity about the problem being addressed and prioritization of achievable goals. For example, First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy food initiative started small, with something everyone could identify with: a “garden.” That led to a larger conversation about healthy food, eating, and exercise. The first lady brought students and families to the White House to help with the garden. Soon communities and schools around the country started their own gardens. Then, she expanded the conversation about access to healthy food, diet, and exercise. As the initiative grew in popularity, she partnered with companies, nonprofits, and sports organizations like the NFL. In sum, she started with her commitment and brought a country community together. Solving big problems requires starting with small steps and a commitment to keep doing more.
One of the government’s greatest assets is the ability to bring people and groups together and cultivate an “ecosystem”—a network or interconnected system—by putting the spotlight on what matters and on the things that can be done. For example, when we created the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), we started conversations with communities across the nation, including foundations, nonprofit organizations, and social entrepreneurs, about how to design a new fund and how it could make a difference in the communities. The final design of the SIF required local match funding from cities, philanthropies, nonprofit organizations, and individuals. This created a sense of community and mutual commitment: it was not just government doing the problem-solving. The success of this one cross-sector collaboration inspired other agencies to think about how to build other models of cross-sector collaboration in their own areas.
Companies and philanthropies also are important to create effective cross-sector collaborations. One example I witnessed while working with Google.org was the creation of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) in 2009. At the time, there were many funders interested in growing and scaling small and medium size businesses globally (before it was called impact investing). In response, the Aspen Institute initiated conversations that led to ANDE, a network that taps into impact investing to support small businesses. But ANDE has done even more by sparking another set of conversations to support entrepreneurs and communities, not just with micro finance but with actual finance to help people grow their businesses. ANDE has helped create an ecosystem. It was a bottom-up approach, not a top-down one. Groups of entrepreneurs and networks came together, saying, “There are the things we need.” It was an important investment in developing the Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SME) ecosystem. Sometimes it requires creating an organization that can foster an ecosystem and cross-sector collaboration.
To truly address this crisis, we must bring everyone to the table, including companies, philanthropies, and nonprofits, to work with communities. Consider the example of contact tracing to stem the spread of COVID-19 and other diseases. The government can take the leadership, provide clarity of direction and access to data, and build public trust. Philanthropies can support local organizations to get data and information for effective delivery. This also can be a global conversation, as mayors and counties across the country and government officials around the world face similar challenges. For instance, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, through Bloomberg Philanthropies, has taken leadership in bringing together mayors globally to address climate change at local levels. Having worked for Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign as national policy director, I have an even greater appreciation for mayors who already are taking on crucial leadership. We need to bring mayors and county officials to the national table to take on significant leadership, and spotlight them when and where they are making a difference. They are doing the essential bottom-up work.
Solving some of our toughest challenges requires working together. We need new models of partnership, we need commitment to clear goals, and we need to operate differently within government and outside government. However, to achieve success requires the right people: people who can translate between sectors, and people who know how to pull together partnerships that deliver results for people. This is more than public relations; it needs to be about outcomes for people and for society. We need to attract people who can move between sectors, pull partnerships together, and inspire confidence in a new generation of leaders to create transformational change. Let us begin that work together.
From Chapter 12: “Challenges in Cross-Sector Collaboration and Learning from Doing” by Zia Khan
The clamor for cross-sector collaboration is often deafening across the non-profit and philanthropic worlds. Tackling a challenge in unison, goes the thinking, always beats doing it alone. And it often does. Nevertheless, there is good reason to scrutinize this premise, and pause before leaping in. Philanthropies, especially large ones like the Rockefeller Foundation, exist, in many ways, to drive broader collaboration. They have the capital, the expertise, and the convening powers to catalyze big collaboration between government, the private sector, civil society, and the communities they want to serve.
However, well-intentioned collaborations often go awry due to insufficient upfront attention to what, specifically, the collaboration is meant to achieve and how to achieve it. Creating the right blend of different groups’ organizational capabilities is essential for collaboration to be an impact multiplier rather than a tax. This is particularly true concerning the softer aspects of each group’s makeup: its internal culture, its networks, and the motivations of its members. Teams can have more impact when they resist the pressure to deliver quickly on a collaboration’s promised outcomes and, instead, invest time in designing and building mechanisms that consider those differences and transform them into advantages for the cross-sector collaboration.
Unfortunately, cross-sector collaboration has become more of an end goal than a means. This is the first common flaw of most failed cross-sector collaborations. It is hard to argue against the spirit of partnership and the advantage of leveraging each other’s resources. People want to collaborate and to be collaborative. Given that measurable change is often a long way off when confronting intractable social challenges, people start to focus on near-term process accomplishments as a proxy. That leads to the risk of the launching of cross-sector collaborations becoming the measure of success, rather than being simply a fit-to-purpose organizational structure for accomplishing a goal.
The second common flaw is incomplete design for collaborative structures that overemphasizes the formal over the informal elements of organization. Sometimes these are called the “hard” and “soft” sides of an organization, but those terms are not ideal because the informal elements are the hard ones to get right. Thinking about “rules” and “rituals” is perhaps more helpful.
I wrote about the distinction a few years ago, exploring how to drive systems change using results-based funding. Any system built to achieve an outcome is inevitably a mix of rules and rituals. Goals, strategies, processes, etc., comprise the formal part of the process, the rules most easily scribed onto paper as organizers lay out a planned collaboration. Leaders like this formal side of the system because it is rational and easy to communicate.
The rituals, on the other hand, are the informal part of the system, the values and traditions and personal networks built up within an organization. They are the organization’s sources of pride. Rules speak to the head, and rituals speak to the heart. Our behaviors are driven by both. Most results-based funding tends to focus on the rules. The people driving the process produce thoughtful reports steeped in the logic of incentives, financial flows, and desired outcomes. They tend to come from very “head-driven” backgrounds in policy, finance, and strategy. But if others from more “heart-driven” fields were pulled in—people like marine drill sergeants, call center managers, and schoolteachers, who speak to people’s emotions to create commitment and motivate behaviors—a lot more questions about the tactics likely to work best to motivate the players throughout the process to assure the desired outcome would be heard.
Attention to the rituals matters even more in cross-sector collaborations, where there can be big differences in people’s backgrounds, organizational cultures, and motivations. This is especially important when the collaboration is designed to last for years, well beyond a foundation’s early involvement, and to tackle far-ranging challenges. However, whether the collaboration is short term or long, foundations can be uniquely suited to identify and overcome these differences from the outset and help in the design and launch of successful cross-sector initiatives.
It is generally assumed that the main role for foundations is to fund activities that are collectively important but hard to resource by other actors. That is certainly true. Nevertheless, beyond money, their power comes from the special abilities they can use to convene and amplify the powers and ideas of others, as illustrated by previous the stories.
In 2020, regular convenings became very difficult due to the pandemic. People turned to video convenings; first simply having meetings online and then, increasingly, incorporating the unique attributes of virtual technologies into convening design. Convening has long been a part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s approach, particularly through the Bellagio Center in Italy, which was forced to close due to the early COVID-19 outbreak in that region. The foundation took a step back to build out convening methodologies, leveraging the latest thinking in meeting design, behavioral science, and virtual technologies. After significant research and testing, they developed specific convening methodologies that can be catalytic to helping cross-sector collaborative.
These include:
Discovery: Shape new ideas and approaches from a group’s collective creativity.
Direction Setting: Help groups strategize and align around an agenda.
Bridge Building: Overcome intractable challenges to collaboration and collective results.
Launch: Build partnerships and commitment to get a collaborative action underway.
Note that each sector has different practices and norms for each of these kinds of convenings. For example, businesses often will be more analytical and objective in direction setting because they are usually optimizing for quantitative goals. Government, on the other hand, will think about direction setting through the lens of political agendas and narrative. As a result, the design of cross-sector convenings needs to sort out the implicit norms from different sectors and explicitly craft a common language and approach for participants. It is rare that any convening will be a pure breed of one single methodology, as the methodologies are building blocks that are packaged together either within a convening or as ingredients for a series of convenings that are part of a longer strategic journey.