Sharing Sugar

(Photo by iStock/nadia_bormotova)

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the mid-Atlantic in 1840, he was struck by America’s power to collaborate. Americans “seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact,” he wrote; “From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded."

What Tocqueville admired—what he called the “association”—was the ability of everyday citizens to come together collectively on behalf of an issue or a cause. This early collaborative spirit was the starting point for American nonprofit governance, and informs the community organizing strategies and platforms that we still see today. Indeed, “collaboration” and “partnership” are two of the most commonly used words in the nonprofit sector, used so much that they border on jargon: Nonprofit conferences devote whole tracks to the subject, literally thousands of books and articles focus on these areas, and entire sub-industries have been created and dedicated to it.

Yet with all this focus on collaboration and partnership, the nonprofit sector is forgetting some of the main ingredients of collaboration and partnership that helped form our sector many years ago. The sector has grown in resources, but the majority of our organizations have not benefitted: With more information at our fingertips than ever before, our data and stories aren’t driving us toward shared learning but competition; with a renewed focus on trust in our society, we find that our communities are more unsure of our sector and our organizations are more unsure on how to come together; and with more tools to help us collaborate, we have moved farther and farther away. 

How We Lost Our Way

As part of my decades of work consulting with nonprofit organizations and community coalitions, I developed and led trainings, simulations, and workshops on partnership and collaboration. One simulation—which I led nearly a thousand times for about 20,000 participants—was designed to isolate the common problems that prevent organizations and communities from coming together to solve their problems. In this simulation, a roomful of participants broke into four groups, each with an envelope of materials and directions on specific tasks. Without knowing it, each group had the same directions but different materials, and because they didn’t have everything they needed to complete their task, the exercise would (hopefully) force them to collaborate. There were no rules for completing their tasks—outside of celebrating in unison with their teammates when finished—so the real goal of the simulation was for all the groups to come together and build the same five tasks, together.

How often would you expect that our association-minded culture of collaboration would successfully come together and complete the exercise? Unfortunately, in the nearly one thousand times I led this simulation, that winning outcome occurred fewer than 10 times, around 1 percent of the time. Nearly all the other times, teams competed against each other and, under the guise of “collaboration,” bartered for materials. When some of the groups finished and began celebrating their completion, they would forget about their brothers and sisters still working on completing their tasks.

One of the more interesting findings of the simulation was that in that successful one percent, it was teams led by young people under 18 years of age who came together to collaborate. Had these young people simply not learned the long-standing practices that had hindered some of their more-experienced peers throughout their careers?

In another simulation, a room of participants received a stack of red cards and green cards. On the red cards, participants wrote an individual organizational need along with the price tag (for example, “a new van to transport students/estimated cost $10,000,”). On green cards, the participant wrote every individual asset that the organization had, from knowledge and skills to parking and office supplies. After taping the red cards on one wall and the green cards on another, the first task would be to add up the costs of the needs and then matching individual red cards with individual green cards. For example, if an organization put down the need of transportation for their clients on a red card, we would search connect that specific transportation need to an asset that another organization listed, stating that they had a bus or van as an asset.

Once the matching activity was done, the remaining red cards would be added up to see how much remained. In a recent simulation, like dozens previous, the wall of red cards tallied to just over $1.1M dollars of “needs” identified by the room of participants. When the matching was completed, the remaining amount that the group still needed to raise was just under $200K, meaning that the room was able to knock out a heavy majority of the financial needs in the room simply through partnership.

Re-Finding Our Ability to Share Sugar

The guiding principle in these simulations was that true collaboration and partnership occurs when there is a real exchange of resources between organizations, or as we began to call it, the “sharing of sugar” (from the common idea of a neighbor crossing the street to borrow a cup of sugar). True community is defined by these kinds of bonds of trust and shared purpose, collectively sharing resources where our mutual interests lie (instead of competition).

However, sharing sugar is rarely practiced, due to a sector culture that believes trading or bartering to be a truer definition of partnership. And after attending thousands of collaborative meetings, I have never seen participants in a collaborative meeting bring a budget or financial information in hand so that participating organizations could exchange information on where their resources were limited or where they had resources to share. Most collaborative meetings primarily exchange information. But while informational collaboration is certainly a strength of nonprofits, that sharing of information must lead to a stronger cohesion for organizations to collectively come together.

Incentivizing Partnership

While the philanthropic sector has had a focus on partnership and collaboration for many years—ranging from discussions on collaboration in our conferences to bringing grantees together when we see partnership opportunities—those examples are often siloed to philanthropic networks. There remain very few examples of how philanthropy has incentivized or funded true collaboration or creating a more collaborative culture for and among nonprofits. And while we often hear about how philanthropy or donors may provide match funding as an incentive for collaboration, when we canvassed and researched collaborative models around the country, we quickly surmised that matching funds didn’t really create better collaborative behavior. Such funding only tends to bring groups together to receive the initial funding (rather than to truly share sugar over the long term). Once the grants end, participating organizations mostly left the collaboration, with the program ending as well when the funding stopped. Several organizations said that when philanthropy offered matching funds for collaboration, they would often run the other way because of the burden that pursuing matching funds added to the overall fundraising effort. In this way, raising matching funds often de-incentivized true partnerships long-term.

To solve this problem, the T. Rowe Price Foundation created a Partnership Fund. Built on the idea that if multiple organizations can come together around a specific area, such as a technical area like fundraising or evaluation, that together they could sustain that specific need over the long term. Our goal was to seed the middle of that initial partnership and hope for sustainability over time.  

Part of the problem is the power dynamic between funders and nonprofits, which may cause collaboratives to only come together to obtain funding; for this reason, we did not initiate a public process to find collaboratives, communicating the purpose of the fund through word of mouth when the collaborative seemed appropriate. And with the problems revealed by the red card-green card simulation in mind, the Fund proposed that if a need was jointly identified by two or more organizations, than we would fund that collaborative need 50 percent in the first and second year, 25 percent in the third year and by the fourth year the collaborative would either be able to sustain their collaborative need on their own jointly or that each individual member would be able to walk away from the collaborative being able to sustain the need on their own.

As we enter the end of the third year of the Partnership Fund, however, the Fund has largely not met expectations: after meeting over twenty potential collaboratives, we made just four deals. And in most of the potential deals that we were unable to close, something similar would happen. One or two of the organizations in attendance would pull me to the side and explain that while they held their prospective collaborators in very high regard—sometimes highlighting that their kids played together or that they worshipped together—they would offer a counter-proposal: a small amount of funding for the exact need that the overall collaborative was asking for (even knowing that the small, single grant to their organization would not meet the overall need that the collaborative funding would have met). The reasons given were that most organizations had never shared resources in this way and that it was simply easier for them to receive funding directly for themselves rather than coordinating their overall efforts together. One variation I often heard, as the discussion would conclude, was, “I like this partner, but I don’t want to partner with them in this way.”

Incentivizing collaborations proved harder than expected, and we ultimately decided to close the Fund. There is potential in this model; of the four deals, the oldest of the four has started to see real success. But our culture of collaboration—seen many years ago by Tocqueville—had developed into a culture that made sugar sharing very difficult.

Sugar-Sharing Gone Right

Baltimore has always been at the epicenter of Black cooperative thought in the United States, and one of the four successful collaboratives that the T. Rowe Price Foundation’s Partnership Fund supported was developed by three Black-led, youth-serving organizations in Baltimore. These three came together to form the Black Legacy Builders Collective, which had decided their goal was to "share sugar” on fundraising needs to help build their collective and individual sustainability. Through their efforts, the BLBC aimed to shed light on the “disparities in funding to Black-led organizations and the crippling impact it has on those organization’s ability to develop capacity, provide more services and become sustainable in the long-run.”

Now, with the collaboration into the third year of their partnership, they have started to see amazing results. In their most recent impact statement, the collaborative has reported that they were able to increase from the original investment of T. Rowe Price by over ten times, from the $80K initial investment to nearly $900K; by the end of 2021, each member of the collaborative is on pace to acquire funding for the full salaries of all three executive directors. Even more rewarding, though the members of BLBC locked arms really focused on coming together to advance each other’s work, they also recognized that they had to work much harder than they intended to truly collaborate. As seen in the previously described simulations, members lived by long-held cultural norms that instinctively caused them to start with a competitive mindset, often exacerbated by their interactions with philanthropy, which prevented them from truly sharing sugar. Once these norms were tossed aside, the members were able to not only effectively fundraise together, but they also began to collaborate around programs and other areas, including an effort to provide 100 hours of training to 1,300 young people in the Baltimore area while also providing technical support to organizations on the partnership model.

As BLBC has gained steam, their efforts have been highlighted as models for Black-led organizations in Baltimore and beyond. As the collective heads into 2022, their goal is to provide technical support and assistance to other Black-led organizations in developing collaboratives. One of the members Tonee Lawson from TheBe.Org stated, “the goal is for us to help build capacity in those individual organizations, but also in the long term be able to reshape the landscape of philanthropy.”

As I reflect on what Tocqueville saw in his visit many years ago in the early formation of our social good organizations to the current state of partnership and collaboration in the nonprofit sector, I am encouraged by the good work of the BLBC but also reminded of the conundrums I have seen over the last 20 years. The sector is going to have to get back to its sugar-sharing roots. If not, I’m afraid our existing assets will not meet the growing needs of today.

Read more stories by John Brothers.