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…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Local government collaboration, in which efforts and responsibility are shared across organizations, is an increasingly pervasive approach to addressing community challenges. It has evolved from interlocal, bilateral and targeted cooperative arrangements to include complex relationships involving multiple partners…
“The Lodestar Foundation, founded in 1999 and based in Phoenix, has set for itself what many may consider a quixotic journey: to foster, encourage, and celebrate collaborative partnerships among nonprofit and public-sector enterprises that advance social good,” writes Feather O’Connor Houstoun in this piece for…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher In this contribution to SSIR, Saphira M. Baker — former Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Human Services for the City of Richmond, Virginia — asks the question, “What is it that makes collaborative community change efforts involving nonprofits…
“Public-private partnerships are often touted as a ‘best-of-both-worlds’ alternative to public provision and privatization. But in practice, they have been dogged by contract design problems, waste, and unrealistic expectations. Governments sometimes opt for a public-private partnership, for example, because they mistakenly believe that it offers…
✴︎Available only with purchase from publisher “State and local governments across the United States have increasingly utilized collaborative, interorganizational approaches to the delivery of public services. This shift in governance structure often necessitates that public managers not only lead the agency in which they are…
This report, from the IBM Center for The Business of Government’s Collaborating Across Boundaries Series discusses public-private partnerships for food safety: “Using food safety as a case study, the authors discuss new approaches to public-private partnerships. This use of new approaches to public-private partnerships is…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “This article presents a comparative analysis of the evolution of two community mental health networks that both have similar contracts from the State of Arizona. One of the networks is governed by a for-profit firm that buys needed…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “In an effort to deal with complex community issues in a more comprehensive and cohesive manner, communities have increasingly created locally based interorganizational entities, referred to here as community collaboratives. Community collaboratives are comprised of representatives from multiple…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Fiscally strapped local governments have increasingly turned to public-private partnerships (P3s) for redevelopment assistance, empowering private actors to exercise functions typically performed by the public sector. While P3s can enhance project funding and completion, they create the possibility…
✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher “Service delivery partnerships with local government offer both opportunities and challenges for nonprofit agencies, but the normative and institutionalist tendencies of the collaboration literature tend to downplay the rationales for avoiding partnerships and the influence of managerial characteristics…