Striking collaboration gold
City leaders in Sefton, UK, discovered the power of sharing the ability to solve when, after being battered by decades of industrial decline, the financial crisis of 2008 hit the city very hard. A rapid uptick in social needs of the community on the one side, and severe budget cuts on the other, left an increasing number of citizens exposed. No longer able to meet demand, city leaders realized that their government’s way of working had to change. Instead of serving its citizens and civil society organizations from above, it would have to serve in partnership with them, as equals.
One such example was the award-winning effort the city had undertaken in 2012 to transform its community meals program, subsidised by the city and co-paid by users, that served some of the most vulnerable residents. When faced with the need to cut the entire budget of the program, the city chose not to shut it down, but instead involved the users, local restaurants and volunteer organizations to redesign the service. Moving away from a single supplier contracted by the city (serving the same meals, over and over), they recruited and trained over fifty local restaurants to provide a rich variety at the same cost to users, but without the government subsidy. Learning from the success of this program, Sefton began to involve citizens, providers and volunteers in all aspects of planning, designing and delivering public services.
With this new approach, the city changed the way it does business, spending more of its budgets locally by contracting organisations with strong ties to the community: social entrepreneurs and their movements. Social entrepreneurs proved ideal partners, helping the city involve hard-to-reach communities, staying flexible to adapt to changing needs, caring for outcomes and stepping up at moments of crisis. The secret to this success, which happened despite the painful 50% cut of the city budget, was the high level of trust among the partners based on a shared set of values and a common sense of mission. Sefton was now open to anyone with good ideas.
A collaboration worth exploring
Governments evidently have a lot to gain by tapping into the talent, dedication and profound community organizing of social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs, for their part, can often multiply their ability to bring about positive change by not working around, but with local governments. However, despite the potential at play, many communities still lack this kind of collaboration.
In my work as a social entrepreneur working with hundreds of governments over the past two decades, I have experienced many of the barriers first-hand. In 2010, for example, I found myself presenting my organization’s work to a dozen department heads of New York City. We illustrated an example of a navigation system for the visually impaired developed in partnership with social entrepreneurs and citizens in Stockholm. We believed the same solution, deployed in New York, could save the city a billion dollars a year and lift almost 400,000 visually impaired people out of dependency. In a matter of minutes, the meeting was brought to a close with no further questions. It took five years, and a new administration, to sign an agreement to help New York City institutionalize our approach.
Over the past decade, I have been asking social entrepreneurs in all continents about their experience in working with local government. 99% say they failed despite trying, recounting many meetings like my own in New York City. That is a shame, since local governments spend an annual 5.6 trillion dollars to care for their communities, about forty times more than all global philanthropic spending combined. And that is without including their powers to change policy and regulations.
For their part, governments miss out on an abundant creative resource, too: there are about a hundred million social entrepreneurs in the world today. These are people who make it their profession to build organizations that solve urgent social problems. In fact, it is hard to imagine us solving problems at societal scale without a collaboration among social entrepreneurs and governments (especially at local level), as well as philanthropy and funders.
This has become a hot topic in the field of social change.
How can we get governments and social entrepreneurs from working on improvements in relative isolation to align around shared missions in order to transform broken social systems?
Revisiting assumptions
A new play is emerging, and it requires all sides to revisit their assumptions. Social entrepreneurs who succeed in working with the government have the insight that it is not simply a matter of getting governments to adopt their solutions. Instead, they treat the government as a creative and knowledgeable resource in its own right, a partner to co-create something new. They also invite the beneficiaries to have a seat at the table right from the start, keeping everyone focused on who matters most.
Governments that succeed on this journey to resilience and inclusion have, for their part, unlearned their preconceptions of partnerships. By letting go of traditional ideas of power and control, they open the door to new capabilities.
They find that unlike traditional suppliers, social entrepreneurs are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and actively empower beneficiaries to become part of the solution. More importantly, these new partnerships are designed not to service a slice of the problem, but to create solutions that tackle the root causes.
Design principles for collaboration
I have found a few common design principles that underpin successful journeys to collaboration.
Together, they create new answers, knowing that good will emerge from what I will call Design Principle #1: Sharing the ability to solve.
Albina Ruiz, a social entrepreneur, is a person who succeeded in partnering with hundreds of local governments as part of her 35-year journey to free Peru’s waste pickers from stigma and empower them to become valued recycling entrepreneurs. Initially, local governments weren’t responsive to her idea to contract waste pickers into municipal waste management and the national government delayed adopting laws to protect their status, health and safety.
All this changed when she helped waste pickers themselves lead the movement. When she let the beneficiaries speak for themselves, governments began to listen. Legislative and policy change accelerated soon after, with thousands of former waste pickers now contracted to operate municipal services. They continued to work with municipal governments to implement the new legislation across the country,. In her words, it would have taken her organization a generation to follow-up on implementation of national laws in Peru’s 1,800 municipalities. By sharing the ability to solve, she empowered the country’s 190,000 families working with waste to step up and accelerate local efforts.
To let the magic unfold, like the one witnessed in Sefton, governments have become mindful of the fragility of these new, smaller partners that lack the government’s power and resources. They often shift from controlling the market to nurturing these new players to grow their capability to solve through recognition, mentorship, funding and contracts.
Governments and social entrepreneurs that succeed at collaborating also show what I will call Design Principle #2: The ability to listen. They do so much more attentively than their peers. They seem unafraid to acknowledge the limitation of their own knowledge and capabilities, despite the common incentives and traditions to aggregate power. This humility translates into real action: they empower others to lead and deliver solutions as equals, with no strings attached.
In the case of Albina’s work in Peru, listening meant seeing through prejudice against waste pickers cultivated for generations, to hear the voice of people who offered unique capabilities. Often led by highly entrepreneurial women, they were better and significantly more cost-effective in managing municipal waste than the fancy modern machinery peddled to municipalities by global companies. The 2009 passing of the groundbreaking “Ley del Recyclador”, Law of the Recyclers, as the waste pickers had now branded themselves professionally, included a free national training and certification scheme to facilitate the local listening that was tailored to the needs of people who suffer extreme poverty, work long hours and cannot read or write.
Design Principle #3: The right speed. Successful collaborators also stand out by how they think of speed, a function of time and progress. As against pursuing quick wins, they are acutely aware that a divisive win will sow the seeds of resentment, and future failure. They keep inviting more people to participate, patiently building bridges and growing their community. This results in two critical structural advantages. Traveling at the speed of inclusion, means that collaborations grow more powerful and resilient at every step of the way, ready to absorb the inevitable setbacks of ambitious social change. The second is an inherent ability to wait and improve for when the tipping point arrives.
In Albina’s case, this meant her movement didn’t tire on a journey that has taken 35 years so far. She might have resorted to more aggressive and polarizing tactics along the way to force a win. Instead of shaming government leaders or simply representing the waste pickers in drafting the law, she hired journalists to lobby for waste pickers to join the negotiations and speak for themselves. And just before the decisive vote for the law, thousands of waste pickers marched across the country not in protest, but in a March of Happiness.
This approach paid huge dividends after the law was passed because the work of implementing it still lay ahead. Not burning bridges led to a better, more comprehensive law involving several ministries like health and labor. It also meant that government, business and export association leaders would join her for a ‘national round-table on recycling’, and follow-up programs and regulations that helped to embed the legislation in a winning and economically sustainable model.
I also found that successful collaboration thrives when it can draw on new knowledge, ideas, science and technology. Instead of being locked into set ways or solutions, successful collaborations use their listening skills and inclusiveness to unlearn preconceptions and open the ecosystem to new ideas and partners.
That is why I will call Design Principle #4: Curiosity. It allows governments and social entrepreneurs to co-create in the first place, but is also expressed through practices of measuring progress and exploring options to discover what works.
Back in Sefton, such curiosity helped city leaders unlearn generations of thinking that put their government above all else, and defined their role as providers of all social and public services. Their curiosity fed on the realization that their old patterns were no longer fit to serve their community. With the unlearning, the door opened to new possibilities like seeing the capabilities of their residents instead of their problems, embracing volunteers and social entrepreneurs as full partners, and adopting new service models like the partnership with local restaurants to deliver community meals. The city invested in training its staff to adopt a commissioning framework used by a growing number of local governments in the UK, that leverages data, evidence, innovation and an emphasis on partnerships to redesign community services.
Letting go
If all this sounds obvious, I beg to differ! Almost all players in social change today struggle to open up to collaboration and create shared infrastructures. In practice, it feels like an almost revolutionary undertaking. There are literally hundreds of reasons why governments and social entrepreneurs find it almost impossible to collaborate. Among the prominent ones are mindsets framed by stereotypes, a propensity to think solutions before problems, an inability of letting go of control and a spectacular asymmetry of power. Humility doesn’t come easily to institutions and people. Social entrepreneurs who have honed the pitch for their fixes have learned to navigate a system that rewards quick results. Letting go of what has worked so far, for many, is a truly existential question. Governments, for their part, struggle to sustain efforts to unlearn their traditions of service, control and power. And they struggle to exert their powers in mindful ways that nurture the kind of new, long-term partnerships that will have the most meaningful impact.
But many governments and social entrepreneurs are experiencing a shift. Around the world, local governments have seen the value of social entrepreneurship in all its guises during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was community organizations who stepped up to fill the gaps, to meet needs, provide mutual aid. New budget plans and policies call for diversifying government spending to build more resilience, strengthen communities and economic recovery. The door has opened to a generational opportunity. But this opportunity will only be in our reach for as long as we play our cards differently, like Albina and the leaders of Sefton.
