As a nonprofit board or staff member, you have a tremendous responsibility. As the leader of your organization, you are responsible for keeping your organization strong.
You are empowered with decision-making responsibility that will impact your organization’s work long into the future. And you are entrusted with ensuring that you put your organization’s core purpose and those who depend on it first.
Nonprofit leaders are right to take this responsibility seriously. But sometimes in our efforts to serve our own organization and its work, we can become singularly focused on our own success or survival, and lose sight of how what we do fits into the bigger picture. How our work is impacted by the work of others. How our programs and goals overlap or intersect with other organizations. How we might be limited by current resources, programs, or scale. And – importantly – how our efforts could be accelerated and amplified by working together.
There are powerful examples of collaborations across the social sector. Transformational partnerships that enable organizations to expand their impact through collective action. Ways of working together that enable organizations to share expertise, coordinate efforts, expand resources, and achieve scale. Creative solutions that enable individual organizations to move past the boundaries of their current capacity and build new possibilities.
These partnerships can take many forms. Some are informal and temporary, enabling groups to come together for a specific short-term purpose. Others are long-term and durable – strategies such as joint programming, administrative consolidation, and mergers. It’s these types of strategic partnerships – what we refer to as strategic alliances and restructuring – that are the focus of this initiative.
We believe that strategic alliances and restructuring can be a powerful lever for impact within the social sector. We are hopeful about what we could accomplish if we allow ourselves to think big about how our individual missions and purposes could be lifted by coming together for a common purpose. And we believe that board members can play a powerful and visionary role in making that happen.
We believe in the power of possibility, and we invite you to learn more.