Tamarack Online Audio Seminars - Comprehensive Collaborations with Anne Kubisch

When the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change began a research initiative on race and community revitalization they realized communities can collaborate in more than one way. One of those ways is vertically.

Vertical collaboration is the collaboration between communities and entities outside the community (both public & private) who often bring resources to the community.

In the race and community revitalization project, Roundtable Co-Director Anne Kubisch says, “We saw communities engaging with the power bases.” They began to question the outside players and the restrictions and demands they make when they bring resources to bear on a community.

On March 17, 2005 Anne joined us in a tele-learning seminar to share the Roundtable's learnings on collaboration.

The Roundtable on Community Change is a forum in which people engaged in the field of comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) meet to discuss the lessons that are being learned by initiatives across the United States and to work on common problems they are facing.

On this page you'll find:

Meet the Speakers

Anne Kubisch is the Co-Director of the Roundtable on Community Change at The Aspen Institute. The 21 members of the Roundtable are leaders in the field of community revitalization and social policy, representing the policy, funding, academic and practitioner communities. They meet regularly to distill lessons that are being learned by the current generation of comprehensive, community-building initiatives (CCIs) and to work on cross-cutting problems facing the field.

Anne directs a number of Roundtable projects on topics such as evaluation, structural racism, and public and private sector engagement in community change. She was the lead author on the Roundtable’s two books on lessons learned about CCIs across the country (titled Voices from the Field I and II) and has co-edited two books on new approaches to evaluating community initiatives. She is the co-author of the Roundtable’s 2004 publication Structural Racism and Community Building, and has written numerous papers and articles about various aspects of community building and community change.

Prior to directing the Roundtable, Anne spent 10 years at the Ford Foundation, initially working on Latin American programs, then as Representative in Nigeria, and finally as Deputy Director of the Urban Poverty Program. She has a Master’s Degree in Public and International Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Seminar notes & audio clips

There are a number of different types of collaboration, and collaboration means different things to different sectors.

In terms of community change, there are really three main types of collaboration:

Horizontal collaboration – within a particular community, organizations and institutions collaborate around the development of community plans, etc. These collaborations are often the core of CCIs
Vertical collaboration – collaboration between communities and entities that are outside the community (both public & private entities). Collaborating up and down the scale to make sure we think about the resources those entities bring to bear on the community, and help the community to make demands on those entities and the resources they bring.
Larger scale collaborations - different communities collaborate across the country (e.g. Vibrant Communities).

Horizontal: Horizontal Collaboration is very important for community-wide planning and for engagement of residents and organizations. It can be powerful and effective for some things (e.g. community planning) but not for everything. It's not clear that horizontal collaboration is always the best strategy for implementation: it takes a lot of time to maintain and people often lose steam. We don't require collaboration at each stage of implementation. We need to streamline and become efficient - let organizations do the work that they do best.

Vertical: More and more we are seeing the need for communities to figure out how to engage effectively with private and public sector resources that lie outside the community. The limited success that the Roundtable has seen in many of the American CCIs can be attributed, in part, to their inability to leverage significant new resources on behalf of the community. Communities may have put into place important new services, but they weren’t able to leverage the big ticket investments.

Cross-site or national: We do not have enough experience yet here to draw conclusions about these sort of collaborations. We have some experience from social movements, for example, around civil rights, that these are the key to achieving national level change, but we’ve got a long way to go to get that kind of success in the community building world.

In Milwaukee a community-led planning process looked at all assets and potential assets in neighborhood. They saw they had abandoned land and former car manufacturing plant that were on the edge of their community (and which had isolated teh neighbourhood from the mainstream Milwaukee economy), that could be used for commercial or economic development purposes.

The community developed a collaborative powerful outside public and private sector actors to work together on this project. The private sector played a role here in that the car company agreed to donate the land to a community collaborative.

The public sector gave a tax credit to company that donated the land, changed zoning restrictions on use of land, gave tax incentives for developers, and devoted small business incentives to build new businesses there.

The Roundtable became aware of vertical collaboration through the reviews that they do of CCIs. They read all the evaluation reports, conduct focus groups sessions and hold national meetings to try to distill what is working well and not working well in the various initiatives.

A recent lesson from all this work is that communities can make the most progress on the things that are within their direct control: social services, safety, cleanliness control, etc. But poverty alleviation and economic revitalization depends on so many things outside of their control - so the challenge is how to tap into those broader resources.

Additionally, a few years ago the Roundtable began a new area of work focusing on race and racism and how it connects to poverty in America as we enter the 21st century.

The Roundtable looked at communities that were doing CCI work. Many of them, the vast majority of them actually, are communities of colour. Staff reviewed documents from these initiatives and looked at the strategies these communities pursue and saw that many of them don't have a racial component.

They then looked at how history matters in America and how racialized history has consequences today.

They found that racism is buried within institutions and institutional policies. The result is vestigal racial practices that accumulate across institutions, producing racialized outcomes across communities. Racism is then institutionalized and systemic in the instituations that are outside the community, but have enormous power in the community.

The challenge that we all have is to demonstrate that collaboration across organizations in communities makes a difference in terms of improved outcomes for children, youth, families and communities. Anne hesitantly reports that we don’t yet see that evidence.

We haven’t been able to prove that community building processes do lead to greater programmatic outcomes. The evidence is still sparse.

But, there is good news on another front that links back to the vertical collaboration theme.

It turns out that there is evidence that efforts to promote vertical collaboration are bearing fruit. We can show that building community capacity to try to link to the broader political and economic system has pay-offs.

That is, there is an increased ability to do vertical collaboration. Residents learn to recognize when the resources are outside their community, they learn when and how to interact with the public sector, how to intervene, etc.

A book about the Industrial Areas Foundation (the old Saul Alinsky community organizing group) shows how community groups across the state of Texas were able to work up through the system to the state level to obtain improvements in public services and infrastructure, and school reform in the public sectors as well as new employment programs that increase the number of jobs as well as wages in the private sector.

The Roundtable's working hypothesis is that the strongest case to be made for community building and collaborative processes, or working together, is enhanced civic capacity building rather than enhanced programmatic outcomes.

The Roundtable isn't giving up on finding processes that create programmatic outcomes.

For instance, we know that residents engaged in housing activities will take better care of their house. We also know that community mobilization around safety issues can increase neighborhood safety. But the results are inconsistent and can not yet be generalized.

Instead, what we have to do is to try to determine which programmatic outcomes really are influenced by genuine participation and collaboration – such as housing upkeep and safety – and which aren’t, which probably includes broad based economic development. We have to work very hard to keep track of the activities and results.

Investment in collaboration continues to be important because the power of the civic outcomes (better infrastructure and an organized community) is turning out to be stronger than we thought.

The Roundtable on Community Change's next generation of work will concentrate on how communities work with outside resources and the community capacities that are required to do that.

They will focus on understanding the public and private sector resources that are available and how they can be used to work for the community.

The alignment of resources is critical. (This is where regionalism and smart growth movements have taken off.)

The key is in knowing how to collaborate up the power system, up the power stream.

Gather good data about the community, analyze it and keep track of it - This is critical to depoliticizing the issues. Once people see the data, they begin to see the issue as a broader picture and can rise above their own agenda. Having good data also enables the members of the collaboration to develop common language and agreement.
Understand power relations and how they can benefit you - Complete a power analysis. Where is the money in your community? Who holds the purchasing and investment power? Who are the influencers? How can be influence the policies and practices of the public sector.
Engage the private sector - Determine how you can best leverage private sector investment, or capture the economic activity on behalf of your community.
Avoide participation for participation’s sake – Everyone does not need to participate all the time (form follows function); not all programs benefit from a lot of collaboration.
Early wins are important - Early wins sustain a collaboration. Don't place too much importance on process. Outcomes are important.

On this page you'll find:

Meet the Speakers

Seminar notes & audio clips

Additional material