How can we move our communities from visioning to solutions? How can we ensure that we achieve relevant outcomes? And what role does collaboration play in achieving community visions, community solutions?

Jay Connor, Founder & CEO of the Collaboratory for Community Support joined us for this seminar focusing on Community Visions, Community Solutions.

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Meet Jay Connor

Jay Connor is the Founder/CEO of The Collaboratory for Community Support in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has extensive leadership experience in the business, nonprofit, and public policy arenas. His major interest is in crossing the borders between these sectors and articulating their interdependence for the benefit of community dialogue and system effectiveness.

Jay holds a J.D. and MBA in management from Northwestern University. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, where he teaches graduate students from the schools of Urban Planning, Business, Public Policy and Social Work. The Collaboratory will soon, also, be associated with Florida State University.

Jay is also the author of Community Visions, Community Solutions: Grantmaking for Comprehensive Impact, a book that we just love.

For more on Jay Connor, click here.

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Seminar notes & audio clips

Audio Description	Select Format*
Community Visions, Community Solutions. (Runs 00:59:54)
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Creating a Collaboration Laboratory

With a background in business and 15 years in the corporate world, Jay Connor didn’t expect to find his passion in understanding how nonprofits can be effective. But when Jay wanted to make an impact in his community, he chose to try to apply his business skills to the nonprofit sector. He quickly realized that the nonprofit world was a completely different environment to corporate America.

Jay began working with organizations and tracking their performance. With his colleagues, Jay worked diligently with individual organizations and on individual issues but became increasingly frustrated at the inability to make significant inroads and achieve impact. Real transformation occurred when organizations, though confronted with the reality of scarce time and resources, worked across the community to achieve higher purposes and solutions.

This propelled Jay and his colleagues to look at the work from a community, rather than a strictly organization level and to focus on using collaboration to achieve cross-organizational purpose.

Since then, the Collaboratory for Community Support has worked with many organizations and communities, including:

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Linked by Intentionality

The three core ideas or themes that emerge from Jay’s work are Community Visions, Community Solutions and Collaboration.

The three are linked into action by intentionality.

We have moved beyond collaboration, as we’ve experienced it in the last decade, to “working differently”. This requires us to have clarity of vision (what do we want to see?) and clarity of solution (what are our intended outcomes?).

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Vision

Frances Ford Coppola was asked once what the difference is between a good movie and a bad movie. He replied that the only difference is that on a good movie everyone is making the same movie.

It’s the same with community work. Is everyone clear on the vision? Are they all making the same movie?

What is the objective the community is working toward? This needs to be clearly defined and articulated.

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Solutions

Finding a community solution does not necessarily come from the vision. Solutions drive the vision. Solution is outcomes-focused and allows us to align our work.

For example, with a solutions-focus, a community would move from considering the number of beds needed in transitional housing (which is focused on transactional relationship) to a focus on anti-homelessness (which necessitates a collaborative, or cross-sectoral approach).

Though the transactional approach to working is needed, it does not move the community towards solution.

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Collaboration

Collaboration is both an outcome and a way of working. Collaboration asks how we can best use a multiplicity of community resources to best effect, rather than consider the impact individual resources might have.

The bulk of collaboration that occurs is in response to a funding or resource spigot (which is transactional – “if you collaborate, we’ll fund this”). But real and effective collaboration comes from a solutions perspective (“What resources and people do we need to move forward?”).

Collaboration, community visions and community solutions are linked by intentionality or an outcomes point of view.

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Community Support Organization

A community support organization (CSO) is an impartial, skilled, local intermediary dedicated to fostering the success of local collaborations and systemic reforms in order to improve the way the community solves problems. The CSO acts as a servant to the community even as it sometimes leads the process of collaboration.

The CSO acts as the cartilage that supports cross-sectoral work. Since the mid-90’s drive of collaboration within the framework of a “lead agency”, the CSO has evolved to become characterized by an infrastructure that is neutral to strategy but passionate about outcomes and works to achieve these.

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Community Visions, Community Solutions: Grantmaking for Comprehensive Impact

Public & private funders can support the work that goes on in communities. They are both catalytic agents for working differently in communities, and the supporter who prop up the current system. They can be both agents of change and impediments to change.

Funders then, need to be engaged in the community process to understand how they can release energy and resources in ways that benefit the community while achieving their own mission.

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Creating Communities That Deserve Us

Jay’s hope is to create the kind of communities that deserve us. We have, to an extent, allowed ourselves to become servants to other’s visions of community, and those are communities that under serve us. Instead, let’s focus on working differently together, to achieve leverage and to get to community solutions.

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Additional material

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