Whether you’re working on a local collective impact initiative or a national public-private partnership; whether you’re a practitioner or a researcher; whether you’re looking for basics or a detailed look at a particular topic, our Resource Library can help you find the information and tools you need for your cross-sector thinking and practice. The Library — which includes resources from research organizations, advisory groups, training organizations, academic centers and journals, and other sources — spans issue areas, sectors, and partnership types.
Learn More
There are a number of academic courses, programs, and certificates offered in the United States in which cross-sector collaboration is a major theme. We hope this list will be useful for educators who are interested in how this topic is being taught at universities across the country…
In this paper, Living Cities offers “a strategic framework for cross-sector partnerships including describing and defining the traits that make up a strong foundation, factors that influence success, and behaviors of high-impact efforts. In addition to the theory, the paper steeps these ideas in four…
This landmark SSIR article introduced the concept of collective impact and its five conditions of collective success. “Collaboration is nothing new. The social sector is filled with examples of partnerships, networks, and other types of joint efforts. But collective impact initiatives are distinctly different. Unlike…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Theoretical and empirical work on collaboration has proliferated in the last decade. The authors’ 2006 article on designing and implementing cross-sector collaborations was a part of, and helped stimulate, this growth. This article reviews the authors’ and others’…
“This report focuses specifically on a cross-sector collaborative effort to significantly reduce traffic congestion in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota. The organizers of the program concluded that a collaborative, multi-modal approach was crucial to making real headway on a longstanding, costly, nearly intractable…
In this blog post for The Intersector Project, Kevin McDermott and Barry Colbert (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Elizabeth Kurucz (University of Guelph) examine the leadership activities that foster collective action across sector boundaries to solve complex social issues. “Leadership of cross-sector collaboration is complex and…
“On the national forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service, there has been a substantial increase in the creation of formal ‘forest collaborative’ groups,” write Emily Jane Davis (Oregon State University) and Eric M. White (Pacific Northwest Research Center, U.S. Forest Service) in this blog…
In this blog post for The Intersector Project, Lea Stadtler of the Grenoble Ecole de Management in France looks at how companies are using alliances within and across organizational boundaries to seek environmental change. “There are no one-size-fits-all approaches in environmental alliances,” she writes. “Rather,…
In this blog post for The Intersector Project, Carrie Chapman and Danielle Varda of the University of Colorado Denver present findings from their research that explores the questions of resource contributions and other values that non-profits bring to cross-sector partnerships. They also offer recommendations for…
“In 2012, the ACEs Public-Private Initiative (APPI), a Washington state consortium of public agencies, private foundations, and local networks, was formed to study interventions to prevent and mitigate adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and facilitate statewide learning on these topics. In 2013, APPI funded a three-year…
“One challenge that arises in cross-sector partnerships is the set of practical governance tools available to each of the partners, which we argue differ significantly across sectors,” write Carlos Rufin and Miguel Rivera-Santos in this blog post for The Intersector Project. They detail the unconventional…
“Homelessness among military veterans has long been an endemic problem at the intersection of multiple public-health disciplines,” writes William D. Eggers in this Governing article. “Issues from substance abuse to housing prices to mental health care to re-training workers to disability access all contribute to…
“A recent report … suggests that executives increasingly are working with government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to help adopt sustainable business practices,” write the authors of this piece in MIT Sloan Management Review. “It is important to understand the differences between these two types of…
In this contribution to Governing, Don Kettl argues, “There just isn’t an easy way to solve the infrastructure problem we’ve allowed to grow and fester for a generation. To get the money it needs, government is going to have to attract substantial private investment. That,…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher Change is rarely easy. And systemic change within the largest and most complex higher education system in the United States — the 113 California Community Colleges, which I help lead — is no exception,” writes Van Ton-Quinlivan, Vice…