(Illustration by Bryce Wymer)
On a Sunday afternoon in 2017, two policemen approached a bus parked in downtown Eugene, Oregon, to serve an arrest warrant. The bus housed the Occupy Medical mobile clinic, which was there to check ailments, dress wounds, and provide medicine for unhoused residents who needed attention. The police were there to apprehend a patient, but the medical volunteers refused the officers’ demands. Eventually, the policemen relented and left, but the interaction increased tensions between the city and the service provider.
Occupy Medical was established in 2012 as a partnership between the local city government and a small nonprofit after Occupy Eugene, the local instance of the worldwide Occupy movement, in which protesters camped in urban centers to protest social and economic inequality following the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent recession. Occupy Medical became one of the last remaining health-care resources for the unhoused community who either were turned away by the health-care industry or chose to avoid the overly bureaucratic administrations the vulnerable unhoused population did not trust. Every Sunday, a volunteer crew of physicians, nurses, nutrition experts, herbalists, and other health-care professionals dispensed their services at Washington Jefferson Park. The small outfit, operating out of a converted blood-donation bus, offered a safe haven for public health, rooted in an ethic of care for the most disenfranchised and marginalized of the local community. Allowing arrests would have violated this mission and trust.
Occupy Medical’s service to the unhoused and other at-risk social groups garnered the support of city council, but its claims to space within downtown Eugene led to conflicts. The city endorsed and allowed access to the area for Occupy Medical to operate but provided supplies and material necessities only when requested. Yet even these resources were not always forthcoming. In one instance, access to public bathrooms and hand-washing stations for doctors amid a viral outbreak arrived only after they asked three times.
Cross-sector partnerships (XSPs) like this small one in Eugene are integral to the innovation and concerted action needed to address societal problems. From global initiatives to local public-private partnerships, XSPs present a hopeful vehicle for integrating the best ideas, technologies, know-how, and leadership from across sectors to produce impactful, sustainable social change. The promise of XSPs as an organizational tool is particularly ripe for hard-to-serve groups, marginalized and often stigmatized beneficiaries with limited access to social services, such as the unhoused, those suffering from addiction, undocumented immigrants, refugees, and the incarcerated.
However, XSPs aiming to address complex, systemic problems and/or hard-to-reach communities are often difficult to establish and scale for impact. Myriad well-documented tensions and problems commonly occur between partners along the fault lines: identifying problems, setting goals, aligning priorities, coordinating actions, establishing roles and decision-making structures, and allocating resources, among others. These issues often fester without redress, driving the partnership to underperform. A common response from decision makers is to divest from middling partnerships, rather than to take steps to improve their performance.
In what follows, we distill our collective, decade-long experience researching and working directly with XSPs into a model we call Strategic Seeding of Latent Capacity (SSLC)—a road map for revitalizing underperforming XSPs and transforming them into engines of sustainable social impact.
We have found that while many XSPs falter under the weight of diverging goals, lofty ambitions, and partners’ miscommunication, the most effective partnerships often succeed in the face of such problems by starting small and thinking long-term. They focus not on headline-grabbing systemic solutions but on the incremental, often invisible work of building trust, cultivating local knowledge, and nurturing latent capacities within their communities.
Five Partnerships
We focus on five pioneering XSPs in Oregon and California that are tackling some of the most politically charged and socially stigmatized issues of our time: homelessness, health-care access, equitable education, affordable housing, and sustainability transitions in legacy-entrenched sectors. Over the past decade, we engaged with these organizations through extensive fieldwork and data collection, including wide-ranging interviews with the founders, employees, partners, and customers, as well as hundreds of hours of observations and volunteering.1
A consistent pattern emerged from our observations of these five cross-sector partnerships: Their managers addressed years of underperformance by employing different iterations of our model to cultivate their organizations’ latent value.
First, the aforementioned Occupy Medical sought to empower the unhoused and other at-risk groups through providing a model for free-for-all, no-questions-asked health care. This approach not only built trust but also created a repository of local knowledge and social-service capacity that was invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Second, the Rest-Stop program emerged in 2014 as a response to the urban homelessness crisis in Eugene as an innovative program to procure and manage safe, temporary housing for the unhoused on urban public lands, and overcame fierce local NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) opposition to do so. The public-nonprofit partnership combined government resources and supervision with nonprofit expertise and management.
Third, SquareOne Villages emerged similarly from the foment in Eugene following the Occupy movement. The organization pioneered a public-private model for the design and implementation of tiny-home villages for poor individuals and families in Oregon. The partnership revolutionized housing access by decentralizing control and empowering residents to govern their communities through an innovative co-op/land trust ownership structure.
Fourth, Greenway Arts Alliance (GAA) in Los Angeles addressed the collapse of arts education in public schools by leveraging its deep ties to the local arts community, demonstrating how latent capacities can be a lifeline in times of uncertainty. The organization emerged in 1995 as a public-nonprofit partnership in the heart of the city when two local theater producers and actors with a community concern and a keen entrepreneurial sense sought to raise some funding for the resource-starved Fairfax High School. What started as a Sunday flea market on the school grounds expanded into a vital partnership with a dedicated theater (Greenway Court Theatre), a nonprofit focusing on fostering arts education and leadership training for K-12 students (Greenway Institute for the Arts), and one of the most visited and enduring arts-and-crafts markets in Los Angeles (Melrose Trading Post). Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the largest public-school district in the United States, provided access to the public facilities and schools, and the unique partnership raised more than $10 million for Fairfax High School over the past 30 years.
Finally, Solarpunks Club in Los Angeles emerged in 2022 as a sustainability-focused arm of a private production company, the Production Club, to create a dynamic hub for sustainability in the city’s vibrant creative and cultural sector. Solarpunks Club operates through project-based partnering with for-profit and nonprofit organizations, providing expertise, knowledge, and operational support to events in music, film, and art. The organization’s core approach involves deploying a proprietary technology of high-powered solar batteries.
A consistent pattern emerged from our observations of these five XSPs: Their managers tackled conflicts, slowdowns, and underperformance by employing different iterations of the SSLC model to cultivate their organizations’ knowledge, skills, capacities, and capabilities—their latent value. Over time, these intangible assets enabled the XSPs to survive local crises and adapt to unpredictable community needs, navigate complex economic and political landscapes, and overcome opposition from powerful stakeholders.
The SSLC model thus represents a problem- and beneficiary-focused alternative for underperforming XSPs. It seeks to balance the partners’ need for managerial efficiency and measurable achievements with the communities’ need to preserve and strengthen their capacity to address social challenges. By focusing on the strategic development of latent capacities, the SSLC model shifts the emphasis from short-term performance metrics to long-term resilience and adaptability. Our goal is to offer a structured approach for managers of fraught and underperforming XSPs to sustain and revitalize their operations, particularly during periods of resource scarcity or external pressures.
The Causes of Underperformance
Before we consider successful practices, let us first examine why XSPs stumble. The premise of XSPs is alluring in its simplicity: combine unique resources and knowledge to build the capacity for action and social impact. It is based on two foundational assumptions. First, no single organization or sector can solve today’s complex societal problems. Second, when well-intentioned partners negotiate and implement an optimal blueprint for collaborative governance around common goals, roles, action plans, and resource sharing, they can achieve outsize impact.2
Despite their promise, XSPs repeatedly face a set of well-known problems during their conception, implementation, and operation, many of which we observed in our fieldwork. These problems led to many inefficiencies, conflicts, and the occasional rift between partners.
(Illustration by Bryce Wymer)
The first of these are problems of knowing. Societal problems tend to be highly dynamic and multilayered, often crisscrossing geographic and administrative boundaries. This complexity often leads to a mismatch between how different actors and/or stakeholders view a particular problem. A social worker’s knowledge of the broad and specific contextual issues pertaining to homelessness, as someone embedded in the daily conversations and struggles of those afflicted, is far different from that of a business manager, who most likely learns about the problem from secondary sources, such as the media. Such information gaps between partners can be difficult to bridge and generate fundamental disagreements, even about what the problem is. (Is homelessness about housing or mental health issues? Is it a systemic failure or a product of individual choices?)
The Rest-Stop program encountered this issue. The partnership launched in 2019 to provide safe temporary space to the unhoused community on unused public land. The program creates clusters of tiny houses called Conestoga Huts—20 people per site—and communal infrastructure, while the local government donates the spaces, such as parking lots and parks. While the program was approved and funded by Eugene’s city council, resistance quickly arose from the local community because of confusion about the impact the Rest-Stop would have on the area and the people residing there. The conflict mired the partnership in political squabbles and roadblocks. For instance, residents of a commercial neighborhood became concerned about unhoused-pet ownership, as businesses considered the unhoused and their animals a threat to passersby and business flow. Activists for the unhoused, on the other hand, understand the psychological value of pet companions for those who have so little. The competing priorities and values between the beneficiaries and critical stakeholders drove rising tensions and complicated the balancing of their respective needs.
A second knowledge problem is understanding how to seek out potential partners, which exacts a cost on the seeker. Business firms seeking to invest in corporate social responsibility often tend to control this cost through partnering with well-known brands in the nonprofit world. But such a tendency can lead them to overemphasize partners with more effective marketing at the expense of smaller organizations with greater insight into local issues. It can also cause a handful of social issues attracting a flood of partnerships, to the detriment of lesser-known issues that local organizations grasp. As a result, beneficiary organizations may be forced to redirect resources from the community to marketing efforts as they seek partners.
The Solarpunks Club, for example, faces this challenge constantly. The small outfit leverages its network of collaborators in the arts, entertainment, and fashion sectors to invest in developing local expertise and knowledge in sustainability and draw attention to the potential of renewable energy in the cultural and creative industries. However, they face the challenge of deciding which projects to take on. Large-scale productions with major brands can showcase the technological capabilities of the organization and the potential for solar energy to make the entertainment sector 100 percent sustainable. Small-scale, community-focused projects, by contrast, provide support and benefits to the local creative community and address local needs—for example, by building small makers markets for local artists and providing wildfire relief. Amid limited resources and personnel, these choices are dynamic and often difficult to make.
Problems of coordination arise when the logistics of assigning tasks, roles, and resource flows—i.e., who should do what and with what resources—is unclear. Partners need to agree on what type of resource investment, such as assets and personnel, they should contribute. Reaching such arrangements is indispensable yet complications can occur because of the divergent power relations between the partners. Further, the dynamic nature of the partnerships and the problems they address means that coordination demands can change over time. These problems are often mitigated through establishing a participatory framework for connecting partners, soliciting input, and learning.
Possibly the most important reason for Occupy Medical’s success was its close relationship with the community created among the tents of the original Occupy Eugene movement. This intimacy enabled its founders to respond to the specific issues facing the unhoused community and the reasons for their reluctance and or expulsion from traditional care suppliers. Occupy Medical consequently designed the organization’s structure, resource distribution, management of cases, and access in ways that met its patients’ needs and established clear communication and guides for the multiple partners involved.
Partnerships also confront the problem of valuation: How any party values particular aspects of a project may vary, as can the very aim of the project itself—i.e., what kind of value this partnership is trying to achieve, what metrics to use, and how to implement accurate and objective measurements. These issues have grounded critiques of theoretical frameworks such as the increasingly popular creating shared value (CSV) framework, introduced by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article, which advocates integrating social and environmental value creation into core business strategies. Despite the concept’s attraction, the problem of what constitutes value creation and for whom often goes overlooked.
We encountered this same obstacle with GAA, which runs the Melrose Trading Post. The success of the Trading Post rests on LAUSD’s providing public space and access to the Fairfax High School playgrounds for a minimal fee. This arrangement has shifted throughout the years as new administrations taking over LAUSD have changed their resource commitment and governance structure. Problems in valuation came to the forefront following the COVID-19 pandemic, when a new LAUSD administration increased the rent requirements, forcing the partnership into crisis. The drastic increase in rent requirement reflects a shift in what the public partner, LAUSD, believes is the value of the market component of GAA and where this value should flow: from raising funds to support school arts programming to generating income for the school district. These emerging problems underscore a deeper issue, as Melrose Trading Post’s reliance on LAUSD for space to operate meant the latter could exert its asymmetric power easily once its priorities changed.
Problems of communication can exacerbate any of the foregoing issues. Proper communication channels are essential, not only between the two partners but also between the partnership and its external stakeholders, such as the government, the communities where the organization operates, and beneficiaries. The Rest-Stop program, for example, had to tackle a severe communication problem. In the years following the documented success of its pilot sites in 2014-2016, the city council approved expansion with the endorsement of representatives of the city neighborhoods and the business community. A thorough analysis of the pilots, conducted primarily by the city manager, clearly showed that the partnership was cost-effective, served the beneficiaries, and did not risk the safety of residential neighborhoods. Yet any attempts to open new sites were met almost immediately with strong opposition by local homeowners and concerned parents decrying the program’s dangers to the safety and well-being of the neighborhood. The program launched a large public relations and communications campaign to appease these concerns, yet not until the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the unhoused population in the city posed a public-health crisis did new sites open.
Exacerbating valuation and communication concerns are problems of access and trust. Partnerships need to reach communities and beneficiaries who are often wary of interacting with local service agencies or who do not have the skills and qualifications to engage with the partners. To go out and find their intended beneficiaries, partnerships can too often settle on contacting the most prominent organizations first, rather than finding the ones with the greatest access and trustworthiness.
Instead of pushing for high impact and deep investment of resources, partnerships that employed a slower, more deliberate approach to their agenda were far more successful and overcame the endemic problems of such partnerships.
Houselessness is a quintessential example of how access can exacerbate the suffering of beneficiaries. Many of the people experiencing houselessness are at high risk for illness and injury and are often criminalized through citations, ticketing, and street sweeps. Social innovators and entrepreneurs seeking to provide solutions for this population must build enough trust with these communities to persuade them to seek services without fear of shame or incarceration. Building trust and, through it, access is precisely what makes Occupy Medical so effective.
XSP governance must navigate all five of these problem categories. Effective partnering for marginalized beneficiaries looks at reducing the frictions around trust in partnerships. A lack of trust may precipitate problems in coordination, access, and communication. For example, the successful XSPs built trust by aligning the partners’ intentions, promises, and impact with the community’s needs and goals. Trust, in turn, can be undermined by many of the problems mentioned. For instance, communication breakdowns can lead to misinformation and action delays, thus eroding trust. Failure to agree on goals and metrics can drive mistrust in priorities. Strong power differences between partners can lead to distrust, especially of business partners if they wield their financial resources to advance their perspective and goals in the partnership at the expense of public actors.
Guidelines for Transformation
XSPs routinely encounter these five sorts of problems, which often lead to friction, underperformance, and, in many cases, dissolution of the partnership. Our experience working directly with partnerships that have overcome such problems, including the five we studied, offers a new perspective on how XSPs can address them. Instead of pushing for high impact and deeper investments of resources to achieve high-level goals, partnerships that employed a slower, more deliberate approach to their agenda were far more successful and overcame the endemic problems of such partnerships. These partners focused on cementing their roots in the local community and building relationships, goodwill, and local knowledge—what we call repositories of latent capacity. The strategic use of these seeds became critical to partnership operations over the long term and especially during times of crisis.
Specifically, we have identified four effective tactics that the SSLC model employs: embracing local goals, decentralizing control, capturing local knowledge, and committing to the long haul. The SSLC model requires minimal additional investment from partners but has the potential to yield significant benefits for both the partnerships and the communities they serve. Let us consider the tactics in turn.
1. Embrace beneficiary-level local goals and less headline-grabbing problems. | One of the counterintuitive tactics we gathered, especially from our studies of Occupy Medical and the Rest-Stop program, was to embrace limited goals. Limited goals here do not mean low-hanging fruit or easy fixes. Rather, we mean that for many societal problems, prioritizing improving beneficiaries’ quality of life can be more effective than pursuing a more ambitious agenda, such as finding systemic solutions to the roots of the problem. Critics of social innovations and cross-sector partnerships allege that they are mere Band-Aids that mask deeper issues. Recent studies showcase how common it is for firms to engage in partnerships merely for publicity.3 Lofty, ambitious goals risk feeding these trends as they are more likely to suffer from problems of knowing, coordination, and valuation.
We recommend focusing on goals that can be measured on the individual level. Many of the clientele at Occupy Medical needed simple care, such as cleaning of wounds and scratches, treatment for foot infections or mineral and vitamin deficiencies, herbal medicine, and even haircuts. Rest-Stops offered beds and shelter in small Conestoga Huts with barely enough standing room for a small, select group of those experiencing homelessness, but for this particular group, they symbolized warmth, safety, and hope. Neither of these organizations is revolutionary, nor were they ever intended to be, yet they had an enormous impact on the people they served.
Working with, not just for, targeted beneficiaries is critical. One of the reasons Occupy Medical and the Rest-Stop program have evolved into their current form and been so successful is that the founders immersed themselves in the lives of the unhoused, sharing governance and decision-making with their beneficiaries and maintaining these deep levels of engagement over the years.
Similarly, Solarpunks Club operates as a small outfit, focusing on partnering with local events and festivals to provide renewable energy sources for productions. The partnership brings together for-profit and nonprofit members to facilitate energy transitions across the industry. The club, however, embraces a grassroots approach and focuses on building ties through working mainly with volunteers from the local artist-and-maker community. These deep connections and local know-how were useful following the Palisades and Eaton fires of January 2025 in Los Angeles. As thousands of structures burned and hundreds of thousands of LA residents lost power, the Solarpunks Club rapidly mobilized its expertise and network across the county to provide solar batteries for many of the affected communities and disenfranchised victims of the disaster who might otherwise have been forgotten among the many victims. The organization also brought its technology to Altadena, California, powering fundraising events and supporting the residents with electricity as they attempted to search through their damaged houses.
Systematizing knowledge management is challenging for many partnerships. Funding rarely stretches to cover investment in knowledge management infrastructure, not to mention the personnel to engage in collecting and maintaining directories.
2. Delegate control and decision-making to those on the front lines. | Control is a crucial element of organizational design and coordination. It extends from controlling the processes of creating value, such as administration, finances, and resource flows, to controlling the value delivered to beneficiaries. Maintaining firm top-down control can lead to good results in many venues, such as manufacturing. But in the social sector, knowledge of how to address people’s problems resides at the end of the value chain—i.e., with the beneficiaries. Accessing this knowledge is crucial for effectiveness and building community goodwill, but doing so may require embracing inclusive participative frameworks whereby knowledge can flow upward, so that those with a lived experience of the problem have a say in how services are provided.
To this end, managers of the partnership must be willing to delegate control of the operations to those on the front lines working directly with the beneficiaries. The Rest-Stop program successfully managed this tension between delegating and retaining control. It fulfilled its mission of empowerment by delegating control of the day-to-day operations to the temporary residents on-site. But the nonprofit operator still had to provide certain levels of oversight to defuse tensions, ensure compliance, and maintain an adequate level of performance to ensure partners’ support from local businesses and government.
Of course, persisting with delegation and inclusive approaches may come at a cost. The Rest-Stop program had to deal with many setbacks and retractions due to a lack of expertise. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the partnership was sorely needed to open and operate safe and transmission-free havens around the city; however, only a handful of Rest-Stops opened effectively because of the shortage of qualified operators. Almost 10 years since the start of the partnerships, the program operates only nine sites in the face of increasing demand for services.
SquareOne Villages developed its housing model around decentralization as well. In building its communities of 20-30 tiny homes, the fledgling partnership employed a land trust cooperative structure, wherein occupants of the community owned and operated the village with limited intervention from the partnership. The owners, who were mostly formerly unhoused, people of color, and victims of domestic violence and family abuse, were responsible for the governance of the village, including operations, policies, and selecting new occupants. The partnership stepped in only to resolve disputes and make funding decisions.
The model was successful, despite initial opposition from local government officials and city managers who preferred more hands-on control from the partnership as a means of maintaining more control of the villages and decreasing potential risk to the neighboring residents. SquareOne currently operates four villages in Oregon; three more are in the planning and building phases. The model was replicated successfully, albeit with a different set of challenges, in Los Angeles, with five tiny-home villages, including the flagship Alexandria Park, the largest in the state, with 103 tiny houses; Chandler Boulevard Village; and Westlake Tiny Home Village. However, the model still faces challenges in funding and siting.
3. Invest in capturing local problem-based knowledge, even with inexpensive, low-tech methods. | Another opportunity for seeding latent capacity is to reframe underperforming partnerships as storehouses for local, problem-specific knowledge. The central role that Occupy Medical played during the COVID-19 crisis depended on its deep knowledge of the unhoused population, their campsites, their problems, how to reach them, and how to work with them. Systematizing knowledge management is challenging for many partnerships, especially ones working on problems facing marginalized communities. Funding rarely stretches to cover investment in knowledge management infrastructure, not to mention the personnel to engage in collecting and maintaining directories. Certain populations, such as the unhoused, undocumented immigrants, and those suffering from drug addictions, may be resistant to divulging much information, for fear of prosecution or shame. Lastly, many partnerships and nonprofit services occur through volunteer work, which means knowledge can get lost through burnout and turnover.
GAA offered a lifeline to the artist-and-maker communities of Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds of local entrepreneurs and artists rely on Sunday markets and other community events for their livelihood. When the government enacted stay-at-home orders, members of these communities were strapped for income. GAA, however, was able to mobilize its local knowledge of the city. It built on its local network to reach out to those artists and makers, providing quick recovery and access to clients. The Melrose Trading Post was one of the first markets to reopen under strict health guidelines, giving hundreds of artists a lifeline. This resilience is rooted in GAA’s deep knowledge of the local art scene, based in years of personal relationships with artists and routine email and phone surveys conducted with vendors, all organized in a simple archive of documents, photos, and Excel spreadsheets.
4. Commit to the long term and develop trust, even if you do not agree on the methods. | Trust is a slowly accumulating but invaluable resource. Societal problems are long and enduring. Efforts to resolve them are expected to last through years, if not decades, of work and collaboration. Investing in developing deep relationships and community-level trust with beneficiary groups will pay off in the long run.
Public agencies and nonprofits commonly share this perspective on trust. Housing agencies working to place people experiencing homelessness in affordable housing are familiar with processes that can last a decade. Businesses and their economic logic of return on investment tend to demand faster and more substantial outcomes to impress consumers and shareholders. Similarly, government officials are beholden to election cycles wherein intangible benefits like trust are hard to sell to the vast block of voters who are not marginalized and disenfranchised beneficiaries. Yet for partnerships to act as repositories of knowledge and action, as Occupy Medical and the Rest-Stop program demonstrated during the COVID-19 crisis, mutual trust is foundational and can create greater and longer-lasting value than that generated by headline-worthy successes.
Solarpunks Club best demonstrates the tension between short-term compromises and long-term focus. The outfit initially embraced the sole goal of 100 percent renewable energy as its formative ethos. However, it found that working within a stable legacy sector, such as entertainment, required it to collaborate with event promoters and partners with less lofty goals. Still, the club persisted and continues to engage through goodwill and negotiating to find common ground. Its approach is currently paying off in the form of more collaborations to power entire large-scale events, most recently Brooklyn’s first 100 percent solar-powered concert, in October 2024.
Governing With Beneficiaries
Our model is founded on governing with beneficiaries, instead of merely engaging with them. Across our observations of XSPs, seeding latent capacities and long-term impact required having beneficiaries as central stakeholders in designing and operating the partnership. While committing to this norm added complexity, it ultimately proved essential for each partnership we studied. For the Rest-Stop program and SquareOne Villages, for example, having members of the unhoused community as cofounders remedied the problems of knowing and valuation and ensured that the decision makers would sustain the ultimate vision over the long term. And Occupy Medical could embrace goals that helped beneficiaries, instead of addressing headline-grabbing problems, because the beneficiaries articulated what services they wanted, in lieu of the mainstream health-care system and its predetermined set services deciding for them.
We propose the model of SSLC as a tool to complement other effective approaches. For instance, the minimal viable benefit framework articulated by University of Minnesota researchers Vanessa Laird, Kathy Quick, and J. Myles Shaver in this magazine offers step-by-step guidelines for implementing SSLC tactics in the early phases of partnership formation.4 Similarly, combining our tactics with the rich existing partnerships following the CSV model can enable managers to seed the latent capacity in expensive, high-profile partnerships residing in beneficiaries’ perspectives to generate more resilient impact and civic capacity.
Read more stories by Mohamed Hassan Awad, Mabel Sanchez & John Parsons.