Oct 05 2016 New at The Intersector Project: A Resource Library for Cross-sector Collaboration
At The Intersector Project, we recently began to think about the possibility of creating a resource hub for those interested in cross-sector collaboration — a section of our website where practitioners, researchers, and anyone exploring the field of cross-sector collaboration could search and filter through hundreds of quality resources (coming from research organizations, advisory groups, training organizations, academic centers and journals, and more) to discover findings, thoughtful commentary, examples, and tools to improve their cross-sector collaboration thinking and practice. Several piles of books, articles, reports, and toolkits later, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve created exactly that.
Interest in cross-sector collaboration continues to grow. But the work is difficult. As new and experienced practitioners design collaborations and encounter obstacles along the way, and as scholars continue to research this topic, it’s beneficial to have an organized hub of existing thinking and resources on this topic. And we think we are well-positioned to do this work, having spent several years surveying the field and collecting everything we can find on the topic. Earlier this summer, we noticed that the platform we use internally to catalogue these resources contained more than 400 popular and scholarly articles, cases, tools, reports, books, and multimedia all related to collaboration and partnerships. We wanted to find a way to share this information with you.
After reviewing several quality resource libraries for insights into how we might want to shape our own, we worked to pare down our internal catalogue of resources based on their relevance to cross-sector collaboration (in all its forms, including some that were not strictly about cross-sector collaboration, but could be useful to those working in the field); relevance in a U.S. context (including some international resources that are broad enough to be applicable to a U.S. context); and whether a resource comes from a trusted source (the resources largely come from experienced practitioners, academics, and experts in the field). We created something broad, that includes resources spanning partnership types, issue areas, and sectors, and relevant to collaborations at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels.
One of our key objectives at The Intersector Project is to build a stronger bridge between research and practice. This goal manifests itself in the way we designed the Resource Library, as we chose to include resources oriented toward and created by both practitioners and scholars. We hope that the Library serves as an opportunity for these groups to learn from each other’s thinking.
This Resource Library is a living resource that we will continually refine and update. If you have any thoughts on how the Library could be more helpful to your work, we invite you to contact us at communications@intersector.com.
To learn more about how we chose and organized the resources in our Library, visit About the Resource Library. Or go to the Resource Library to start exploring.