Sept. 10, 2018
Fall is here, and for most of us that means rolling up our sleeves with a renewed focus on the business at hand. The Alliance staff continues its search for ways to support our partners’ work, part of which is trying to keep our eyes on the big picture and the long-range change we hope to achieve. For the past six months or so, I have been in dialogue with a number of national leaders around the topic of "network building." As was the case with Collective Impact, network building is developing into its own world, filled with best practices, storytelling, creative leadership, and the promise to assist communities interested in systems change.
With thought leaders such as Jane Wei-Skillern (read about her research) and June Holley pioneering the way, the conversation and ideas are rich and powerful. While we were very excited when those behind Collective Impact (CI) labeled efforts like The Alliance "backbone organizations," there was much about the basic tenets of Collective Impact that didn’t quite fit our situation. CI now refers to its ideas as a framework, not a model, and groups like ours take what works for them and leave the rest, in order to help us do our work better.
Network building is much closer to what I feel The Alliance is trying to accomplish, and the conversations and opportunity to learn from others also dabbling in this world is particularly prescient. All along we have been saying that there is power in connection, that most groups, agencies and efforts lack collaborative roots/DNA, and that the positive outcomes of these relationship-based partnerships when they do occur are the foundation for much larger success. In our case, we added the notion of the neutral third party as convener as key to our model’s success: Without someone whose job it is to be the intentional connector and to support connections over time, many partnerships fall apart. Scaling up our efforts is the way we can advance the systems-change results we all desire.
With the Power of Partnership work that The Intertwine Alliance has been doing with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Clean Water Services and Portland State University's Institute for Sustainable Solutions -- and with continued learning about network building -- we feel more strongly than ever that we have the right foundational model to bark up this systems-changing tree. More on these ideas in future newsletters, as we discover ways to take the lessons learned through the Power of Partnership research and turn it into usable tools for being better partners.