Contents of Summer 2005 Collaborative Solutions Newsletter:

In this issue:

Collaborative Solutions - True Collaboration as the Most Productive Form of Exchange

1. Networking
2. Coordination
3. Cooperation
4. Collaboration
            Enhancing the capacity of the other
            Risks, resources, rewards and responsibilities

Resources/Tool:
     The Continuum of Collaboration Worksheet

       Collaboration is a term that is appearing everywhere. Unfortunately, the more the word is used the vaguer its meaning becomes. I think of a recent New Yorker cartoon in which a kindergartner approaches the teacher, points to his pal, and says, “Billy won't collaborate." It’s funny in the cartoon, but what does the kindergartner mean? Being really clear about the meaning of collaboration will make a big difference when you want to encourage true exchange of this type. So let's start with an understanding of what collaboration is and is not.
       Collaboration is not just sitting in a room with a variety of people; it is about creating whole new ways for us to interact with each other. When individuals and systems interact effectively, we can maximize our resources and find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Collaborative processes have the potential for creating revolutionary changes in our communities and in our world.
        A good colleague, Arthur Himmelman, has carefully defined the kinds of exchanges that take place in community groups. He has described the differences between networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. His definitions build on each other—the functions of the first are incorporated in the second, and so on. As we move along the continuum from networking to collaboration, we increase the amounts of risk, commitment, and resources that participants must contribute to the exchange. At the same time, the capacity to produce significant community change also increases.
        Thus the end-point of this progression—collaboration—is the most powerful tool for community change. Keeping in mind that the first three types of exchange all provide foundation work for collaboration, and that each can be the most appropriate strategy in particular circumstances, let’s step through Arthur Himmelman’s concepts in order.

Networking

        Himmelman defines networking as exchanging information for mutual benefit. This common type of exchange occurs when two professionals exchange business cards; when a meeting opens with members’ descriptions of what's new at their organizations; or when a neighborhood gathering begins with a check-in. In a networking exchange, we hear news about opportunities for ourselves or for our clients: staffing changes, program development, clinic hours, and so on.
        Many coalitions and partnerships begin their meetings with a go-around of information exchange, in order to facilitate this kind of networking. When we understand that information is power, it becomes obvious that networking is a critical community function. We know that consumers suffer because they don't know about available resources. For example, lack of information can mean that people forego health care because they don’t know about low-income clinics. Providers are often in the same boat as consumers. Any single provider may only have up-to-date information on one or two organizations—because good friends and colleagues happen to work there. As a result, providers are limited in their ability to connect clients with resources.
        We can see that networking is a key building block for good collaboration, but by itself networking is not collaboration.

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Coordination

         Himmelman defines coordination as exchanging information and altering activities for mutual benefit and for a common purpose. Coordination builds on networking by adding a behavior, modifying activities, and foci, mutual benefit and a common purpose. Coordination increases efficient use of resources and the ability to meet community needs. A lack of coordination creates significant problems. Resources are wasted and the community misses out.
          A lack of coordination is a serious shortcoming in our helping system. It drives both consumers and providers crazy. How many times do we have to give the same information to the same people in the same organization, just because two departments or insurers or funders have failed to coordinate their intake forms? When the problem is pointed out, each of the offending organization’s staff members usually responds that “I must have the information in exactly this way in order to meet my needs.” There’s no overview of the situation that would help staffers understand the impact that a lack of coordination has both on the consumer and on the providers who must process all the forms.
          Activities that encourage increased coordination can be of great benefit. In one small, rural community, we brought together the clergy in order to address issues of hunger. We began to talk about how to provide as many warm meals as possible in the community. We started with a networking exchange: we had the representatives indicate when each church group served warm meals. This revealed that two churches provided meals on Sundays. When the churches agreed that one would offer a meal on Sunday and the other would serve its meal on Wednesday, we moved from networking to coordination. The participants had modified activities in order to provide as many warm meals as possible during each week for hungry community members. These changes were mutually beneficial and served a common purpose.
          Whenever people agree to announce each other's activities in their newsletters, recruit for each other's events, or modify their practices in light of each other’s activities, they are coordinating their activities for the mutual benefit of providing better service to a community.

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Cooperation

       Himmelman defines cooperation as exchanging information, modifying activities, and sharing resources for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose. Cooperation builds on the exchanges of networking and coordination and adds the new concept of sharing resources.
        Risk and involvement increase as each participant antes up resources in a cooperative relationship. This represents a crucial shift, and we’ll come back to it in a moment. First, though, we need to look at common purpose. Although Himmelman includes common purpose in coordination, in our experience we see common purpose really become critical in cooperative exchanges.
        Common purpose is more complex than mutual benefit. In order to acknowledge mutual benefit, participants can simply describe their intentions or goals. In mutual benefit, an exchange meets the needs of the various organizations, but those needs may not be based on a common vision. Common purpose implies more than this. In order to clarify and articulate a common purpose, participants need to engage in discussion. They have to take the time to become involved in a visioning process about where they want to go as separate entities, and then they have to determine what parts of their visions are held in common.
        Tom Wolff & Associates often leads communities or coalitions through visioning processes. Each time we are involved with this step we are astonished anew that—even in communities where people feel that they have very disparate ideas—we find common visions as soon as we ask people what they would like to see happen in the next few years.
        Now our consideration of cooperative exchange can return to the element of sharing resources. Here Himmelman has included the magic word: resources. That means dollars, staff hours, equipment, space, and other materials that actually get work done. As soon as resources are on the table, an exchange frequently gets more edgy. Many see resources as what makes the world go around. Once we start to share them, we need greater levels of trust.
        Nonetheless, cooperation can be simple. A number of human service agencies may decide to share a booth at the Cambodian Community Festival over the weekend. In order to cover they cost of the booth, they need to pool resources.
        Cooperation can take on a more complex form when several agencies combine funds to create a shared staff position. We sometimes see this with outreach workers. When a number of agencies would like to increase their effectiveness in a specific community, but none of them has enough money alone to fund an outreach worker – they can turn to cooperation. For example, one agency can contribute literacy-project outreach money, another can chip in diabetes-program outreach money, and a third can come up with HIV-prevention outreach money. Together, they can fund a worker who provides outreach out to the identified community on all three issues. The three agencies find a common purpose—making community resources accessible to the specified community—and they share resources to make it happen.
        The risks are clearly higher in the shared-staffing example than in the weekend-booth project. Will each agency get its money’s worth? Who supervises? Who gets credit?
        Cooperation is a very useful form of exchange. Our fragmented health care system (which affects everyone) and our inability to help the un- or underinsured (which affects mainly people with lower-incomes) both result in part from a lack of cooperation. If various agencies cannot come together and find a common purpose, their efforts remain piecemeal and they fritter away valuable resources. When organizations feel competitive toward and distrusting of each other, they don't share. As a result, each group may end up with inadequate resources. Crucial tasks never get done. On the other hand, if resources are pooled through cooperative efforts, as in the example of the outreach worker, common purposes can be achieved.

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Collaboration

        Finally, we come to collaboration, which builds on networking, coordination, and cooperation. Our definition already includes the concepts of exchanging information, modifying activities, sharing resources, and having a common purpose. To reach collaboration, Himmelman adds enhancing the capacity of another for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose by sharing risks, resources, responsibilities, and rewards.
        The key phrase relating to collaboration, as you’ll have noted from the emphasis, is enhancing the capacity of another. For a helping system in which many components are often competitive or even hostile, this is a revolutionary concept. In addition, Himmelman specifies the increased engagement of each party within the exchange. Participants share resources, and they also share risks, responsibilities, and rewards. These three extra elements—risks, responsibilities, and rewards—are inherent in the sharing of resources through coordination, but their importance comes to the foreground in collaboration because the amount of resource-sharing increases.
        Collaboration is a radical concept. It takes time and it takes dedication to achieve. Once we have a system of collaboration in place, we can accomplish significant changes in our systems and we can dramatically increase the effectiveness of our work—individually and together. Three examples demonstrate the possibilities.

Case Examples:

Example One:

        Example onerequired many years to come to fruition, and it produced profound results. The Mayor's Task Force on Deinstitutionalization was a collaborative effort that took place in a small New England city during the 1980s. Its intention was to coordinate efforts within the community among those organizations that dealt with people with mental illness who were being deinstitutionalized from the state mental health hospital and the local VA Hospital. These people in need of support interacted most often with members of the Police Department and with emergency service workers from the Department of Mental Health. When these two groups of helpers entered the Task Force, they didn’t trust each other. Working together, they began first to understand and then to build trust. At that point, the police and mental health representatives were able to sit down on a weekly basis and go over their caseloads together—discovering an overlap of about 40%.
        As they learned to know and respect each other, they could collaborate in handling, and ultimately in preventing, some difficult and dangerous situations. Through these exchanges the police were delighted, and able, to enhance the capacity of the emergency service workers, and the emergency service workers were delighted, and able, to enhance the capacity of the police.

Example Two:

        Example two comes from eastern Tennessee and was a project of the Cocke County Collaborative (formerly the CONTACT program), a community-based social-change and community-building organization. This collaborative takes a holistic, grassroots approach to social change in their area (see case study - http://www.waittfoundation.org/images/present/resources/resource_files/e_tennessee.pdf)A few years ago this program brought together white youths who were learning videography with black elders, with a long history in the community. The common purpose was the recording of oral histories of the community. This videography experience set the stage for amazing interracial, intergenerational collaborations that enhanced the capacities of all participants. The white youth and the African American elders truly collaborated.

Example Three:

        Example three occurred on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where the Lower Outer Cape Community Coalition worked to promote the livable wage for workers. The livable wage is an alternate concept to the minimum wage. The living wage is calculated according to what a family must earn to live in a given community in the most basic way. It includes the expenses of child care, housing, transportation, and other essentials, based on local costs. The coalition determined that staff members at hotels, motels, and restaurants in the area needed to earn about $15 an hour in order to live in the community where they worked.
        The coalition brought this data to the local Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber members’ first response was derisive laughter. However, as the discussion deepened, the Chamber members began to understand that the livable wage calculations included only the essential expenses of holding a job. They then began to understand the problem more personally. It turned out that many Chamber members could not keep their stores, restaurants, and other businesses fully open because they could not find workers—even during the busy summer season. Workers were not available because they were unable to locate affordable child care and housing.
        There was indeed, mutual interest: the businesses needed more workers, and the workers would be happy to clock more hours—if they could afford to pay their bills at the end of the day. Out of this collaborative effort was born the Business Human Service Collaborative for Affordable Housing and Child Care, which became a powerful force working to enhance the capacities of both businesses and workers on Cape Cod.

Risks, Resources, Rewards, and Responsibilities

        What's involved in collaboration? First, collaboration isn’t easy. Himmelman describes four Rs that are basic to the collaborative process: risks, resources, rewards, and responsibilities. Let's look at a generic example of a coalition that is working to collaborate.
        First there’s risk. When the coalition takes a controversial point of view, the mayor or state government may get angry and attack the coalition. That’s clearly an issue of risk. At that point, do the coalition members all point to the coalition coordinator, or do they as a whole say we took this risk together and we will face the consequences the same way?
        Sharing becomes more challenging when the topic is resources. The greatest difficulty of collaboration often becomes clear when resources are put on the table. Who gets to have the resources, and who determines how they get used? If the project is a community effort and the health-and-human-service community wrote the grant proposal, do the agency administrators set aside resources for community members, or do they divide up the dollars first and then inform the community members that all resources have been spoken for? Finding ways to fairly and equitably distribute resources—whether those consist of cash, educational opportunities, office supplies, or any other asset—is a key element in collaborative success.
        Rewards, too, must be shared. If the coalition achieves great success and is acknowledged with an award to be presented by the mayor or the state government, who gets to step up and accept the prize? The coalition coordinator or the whole group? We often feel that a spotlight is only big enough for one. Yet if you have ever been lucky enough to be honored for a group effort, you know how the spotlight can expand and how good it can feel to share the sense of accomplishment.
        Finally, we look at sharing responsibilities. Unfortunately, the most common story for coalitions is that of the Little Red Hen. In this folk story, as you’ll probably remember, the Little Red Hen asked for help in planting the wheat, harvesting the grain, grinding the flour, and baking the bread. All the other farm animals were too busy for those tasks, but they all showed up to eat the finished loaf. . In successful coalitions, everyone shares the responsibility. In true collaboration, everyone does some of the work.
        In future newsletters, we will talk more about how to build collaboration. As a step in that direction, you can use the tool included in this newsletter to evaluate the ways in which your current projects depend on the techniques of networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. The tool itself, simply by raising awareness, can help organizations move toward collaboration.

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Conclusion

        The process of Collaborative Solutions (see Collaborative Solutions Newsletter Fall 2004 issue http://www.tomwolff.com/collaborative-solutions-fall04.html) is the basis of the work of Tom Wolff and Associates. All of our work depends on the above definition of collaboration.
We are convinced of the enormous power of the collaborative process. We have seen it in action. We have helped create it in communities and organizations. Can you imagine the following situations?
        What if two hospitals in the same community didn't fight competitively, but collaborated to build each other’s strengths?
        What if a city’s mayor and its neighborhood associations worked together to improve both the city’s management and the neighborhood association, instead of attacking each other?
        What if the rich and the poor in our communities worked to enhance each other’s capacities?
        What if the United States saw its relationships with other nations as collaborative?
        And what if we and our closest neighbors also dedicated ourselves to enhancing each other’s capacities, and therefore each other’s lives?
        Can you imagine a world like that? And wouldn’t it be a great place to live?
        We can do this work—one step at a time. At each step, we will be required to combine our resources, to take risks, and to take responsibility. Then we can also share the rewards.

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Reference

Himmelman, A. On Coalitions and the Transformation of Power Relations: Collaborative Betterment and Collaborative Empowerment

American Journal of Community Psychology
, vol. 29, no. 2, April 2001, pp. 277-285
Himmelman, Arthur T. "Communities Working Collaboratively for a Change." In Resolving Conflict: Strategies for Local Government, edited by Margaret Herrman. Washington, D.C.: International City/County Management Association, 1994, 27-47.

For a free copy of a summary of Arthur's thinking on collaboration, write him at ArthurTHimmelman@aol.com, and he will send you a copy of his paper, "Collaboration for a Change."

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Resource/Tool:

The Continuum of Collaboration Worksheet

        The following tool can help you and your neighbors assess how your efforts are making use of networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. The tool allows you to mark how frequently you now employ each of these exchange processes, and to indicate how frequently you would like to use each process in the future. This evaluation can help move organizations toward increased collaboration.

Reference:
Himmelman, A. On Coalitions and the Transformation of Power Relations: Collaborative Betterment and Collaborative Empowerment

American Journal of Community Psychology
, vol. 29, no. 2, April 2001, pp. 277-285
Himmelman, Arthur T. "Communities Working Collaboratively for a Change." In Resolving Conflict: Strategies for Local Government, edited by Margaret Herrman. Washington, D.C.: International City/County Management Association, 1994, 27-47.

For a free copy of a summary of Arthur's thinking on collaboration, write him at ArthurTHimmelman@aol.com, and he will send you a copy of his paper, "Collaboration for a Change."

The Continuum of Collaboration Worksheet

Instructions: Given the definitions of networking, coordinating, cooperating and collaborating, identify the following:

  • With an “x” identify which functions are most frequently used in your collaborative efforts
  • Discuss how you might like to change this “mix”
  • With an “o” identify where you would like to be (which functions you would like to use more frequently, etc.)
  • Discuss and note what your collaborative needs to do to make this happen
  Use Frequently Use Sometimes Hardly Ever Use
Networking
Exchanging Information
     
Coordination
Exchange Information
Alter Activities
     
Cooperation
Exchange Information
Alter Activities
Share Resources
     
Collaboration
Exchange Information
Alter Activities
Share Resources
Enhance Capacity

     

 

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