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.
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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 Western Massachusetts, in the state’s most rural county, a coalition of town and regional governments, social service agencies, local governments, schools, law enforcement, and the business and faith communities have been working together for more than a decade on some of society’s most challenging…
“Public-private partnerships, or P3s, have nearly a quarter-century track record of delivering infrastructure and services for public sector agencies worldwide. … [S]ome of the most interesting applications have been in the defense sector, where the United Kingdom in particular has blazed a trail with almost…
“The term data collaborative refers to a new form of collaboration, beyond the public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors — including private companies, research institutions, and government agencies — can exchange data to help solve public problems. In the coming months and…
“Every company benefits from ‘the commons,’ the set of communal resources that allow firms and workers to be productive,” argue Karen Mills and Chris Rudnicki in this article for the Harvard Business Review. “Business has a key role to play in restoring America’s commons, but…
“I believe cross-sector collaboration is often the best way to tackle complex problems, as we can access more wisdom and power if we work across sectors,” writes Gap Inc. Executive Vice President for Sustainability Bobbi Silten in this reflective contribution to the Huffington Post. “But…
This piece from SSIR provides an in-depth look at pay for success, focusing on the history of the model in the United States, the model’s unintended consequences, the role of philanthropy, and the future of pay for success. “We believe that despite all the hype,…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher In this contribution to SSIR, StriveTogether’s Jeff Edmondson, Target’s Kate Mohan and United Way’s Stacey Stewart describe “ecoystem investing” — an approach that is “inherently more complex [than traditional investing], requires a different set of assumptions, and produces…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher In this contribution to SSIR, Living Cities Director of Collective Impact Tynesia Boyea-Robinson offers a “framework to help nonprofits effectively partner with the business sector; it focuses on who, when, and how to engage businesses in social change.”
“Society’s biggest challenges are also its most complex. From shared economic growth to personalized medicine to global climate change, few of our most pressing problems are likely to have simple solutions. Perhaps the only way to make progress on these and other challenges is by…
“When two organizations bond across sectoral lines, how do you keep the fire going?” ask the authors of this SSIR piece. They present lessons about what it takes to sustain a collaborative, cross-sector effort, and expand its impact over time. “There is a lot of…