To make real traction on complex social problems, we can’t go it alone. Organizations with ambitious goals, such as ending childhood hunger in a state or solving a city’s housing crisis, need partners in the work. Yet too often, organizations form partnerships without a clear purpose or focus, and the partnership eventually becomes more of a drain on resources than a lever for greater impact.
A partnership strategy can help. We created a field guide to guide you as you create a partnership strategy and grapple with questions about with whom to partner and how to make those partnerships meaningful and effective. In the field guide, we walk through common stages of a partnership and offer actionable tools, questions to explore, and examples of what this work looked like for the education nonprofit City Year.
Partnerships can be challenging, messy, and time-consuming, but they also can help us accomplish more than we could ever hope to achieve on our own. We hope this field guide can provide some structure as you think about how you can approach your partnerships more intentionally.