arts & business council

MetLife Foundation National Arts Forums Series

Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston
Boston , Massachusetts

The Power of Collaboration: Building Effective Partnerships for the Arts and Cultural Sector
06/15/2004

Panelists:

• David Straus, Founder and Former Chair, Interaction Associates; Author of How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions
• Marianne Hughes, Executive Director, Interaction Institute for Social Change
• Bill Nigreen, Principal, Facilitation For Social Change; Vice-Chair, Arts & Business Council; Member, The Boston Foundation's Cultural Taskforce

Program Summary
Collaboration is an everyday practice that frustrates and exhausts many people, whether they are in the arts, business, education, government, or consulting. This forum provided a remedy: five principles of collaboration that have helped organizations throughout the world make better decisions and function more effectively. The workshop followed the May 11, 2004, report of the Cultural Taskforce of The Boston Foundation that recommends more collaboration within and beyond the cultural sector in order to make better use of available resources.

The five principles the speakers presented were:

1. Involve the Relevant Stakeholders
2. Build Consensus Phase by Phase
3. Design a Process Map
4. Designate a Process Facilitator
5. Harness the Power of Group Memory

Each principle addresses specific challenges and each can be applied to any problem-solving scenario.

For example, the presenters recommended using the accordion approach when designing the process. In this approach, a small core group drives the process from start to finish but regularly involves larger groups of stakeholders during appropriate phases. This keeps the process manageable at the same time that it engages necessary experts and periodically negotiates the agreement of figures who have the power to veto decisions during late stages.

Participants showed particular interest in the question of identifying an objective facilitator, especially since small nonprofit organizations often cannot afford to hire an outside convener. Straus and Hughes clarified that a facilitator might belong to one of the collaborating organizations as long as he or she commits to attending to the process of collaboration rather than investing himself or herself in the content of negotiations.

Through discussion and facilitated break-out groups, forum participants connected with each other while engaging these tools for successful collaboration. They identified opportunities and obstacles for collaboration in Boston's cultural sector as well as practical next steps to take as a group, like having the organizations represented link to each others’ websites and keeping in contact through regular brown-bag lunches and a yahoogroup e-mail community. These next steps were summarized by A&BC/Boston and e-mailed out with a list of participants and contact information.

A few participants created real plans for collaborative projects with each other during the break-out sessions. Participant Candelaria Silva, director of ACT Roxbury, wrote the following:

"I don't know what I was expecting when I attended the MetLife Forum on the Power of Collaboration on June 15, but I had one of the richest experiences I've ever had at a workshop because of the brainstorming I did in a small group while there.

"Quite by chance, I sat at the same table as two people I'd heard about but never met. They were Sabrina Aviles, executive director of the Center for Latino Arts, and Stella McGregor, director of The Cloud Foundation. I was thrilled. As we brainstormed about issues we faced in the collaborations on which we were planning to embark, it came out that each of us has (or will soon have) a space/facility at which we run programs. We started talking about the differences and similarities between our audiences and communities, and we realized our offerings could reach three distinct audiences if we created a mini touring program of some kind between our spaces. We talked about art exhibits traveling between the spaces and having public receptions for the youth edition of the Roxbury Literary Annual at all three, since work with youth is an important element of each of our programs. We will not only extend our reach but also expand our offerings and open our audiences to new experiences.

"The possibility of extending our reach through this sort of touring became even more powerful with the thought that each of us would expand our offerings and open our audiences to new experiences as well. We are excited and, since our first meeting, have already taken concrete steps towards realizing this synergistic possibility.

"The MetLife Forum provided the opportunity for us to meet, and the topic and facilitation of the forum allowed us to move beyond possibility to a real plan for collaboration that none of us had thought about before this forum.