Illustration by Adam McCauley 

Social and organizational researchers are studying new models for addressing large-scale, complex challenges through cross-sector collaborations. Online platforms, in particular, have enabled greater participation in projects by organizations and people from different sectors and parts of the world.

Professors Anne-Laure Fayard and Beth Bechky of New York University studied a two-year development project that brought two different groups together via an online platform. Their research revealed critical weaknesses around the interests, expectations, and power dynamics of the initiative’s collaborators that offer lessons for such partnerships.

The project sprouted from a program that aimed to increase collaboration for large-scale international aid using human-centered design, which seeks to design solutions with end-users, rather than simply for them. AIDIA Social Impact, the nonprofit arm of AIDIA, a design and innovation consultancy, issued an innovation challenge in 2014 on its open-innovation online platform. The challenge focused on women’s safety and invited human-centered design solutions to empower women and girls in low-income urban areas.

A team comprising a US-based university student organization called Change Makers conceived of the winning idea, “Women’s Co-op,” which would create a “community concierge” to help connect women within a community and with other communities and keep them informed. Their idea, however, needed a partner on the ground. So they teamed up with a Nepal-based NGO called Women Empowered that had had some difficulty funding their program for widows in the slums. (All individual and organization names used in the study are pseudonyms.) The two groups connected on the challenge’s online platform.

Over several months while communicating at a distance, the teammates appeared to share common interests in community-based action, training, and the human-centered design approach. The project was greenlighted by the funder.

At this point, the experiment began to go off the rails. The project initially stalled because AIDIA Social Impact provided no clarity on how the funds would be allocated, when they would begin to flow, and what kind of design support the project would receive. Then conflicts began when a new contact person at AIDIA Social Impact decided that Change Makers should get a share of the funding as the inventor of the idea and collaborator. (The organization had initially decided that Women Empowered would get the funds.) The contact person also urged direct on-the-ground involvement by Change Makers as a precursor to disbursement. “Keeping funding dependent on each iteration (as it was originally planned) would have also ‘encouraged’ dialogue to take place,” says Fayard. But Women Empowered was dismayed by the change.

There was even more turbulence over the next six months: The lead project personnel at Women Empowered changed, and a two-day workshop that AIDIA Social Impact designers held with Change Makers went badly. “It became clear that AIDIA Social Impact designers not only had a superficial knowledge of the winning idea but thought the team should start from scratch with research,” Fayard and Bechky write. It also became clear to Change Makers that Women Empowered’s senior management was not interested in experimenting with human-centered design. “Women Empowered had more of a planning, formal approach and thus developed a program up front without any room for feedback from the users and tinkering along the way,” Fayard says.

From this point, the abyss widened. Two major earthquakes in the area delayed the project longer. Then Women Empowered’s director alienated both Change Makers and AIDIA Social Impact by demanding the funds and dismissed both parties’ contribution to the project going forward. The partners felt betrayed by each other and by AIDIA Social Impact.

The project’s pilot program was finally launched, with Change Makers’ faculty advisor and three students running a weeklong series of workshops with the women in the slum, who were “incredibly engaged and committed.” But the positive feeling from this was temporary. Women Empowered used the remaining funding for a different effort, related to its original focus on rural areas and following its old routines, and the project petered out.

“Collaboration is hard to do wherever it takes place,” says Michele Kahane, associate dean of educational innovation at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy. “If funders want collaboration between organizations to succeed, they need to make the additional investment to build strong collaborations. Cross-sector collaborations require a new type of financing model including seed funding for planning, capital investment, and ongoing working capital to support collaboration.”

Anne-Laure Fayard and Beth Bechky, “A Tale of Two Continents and Multiple Sectors: Spanning Boundaries for CrossSector Collaboration,” working paper, 2018.

Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.