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Folks in the social services talk about collaboration A LOT. Our funders and our community members want to know how agencies are working together to solve various problems. We get incredibly frustrated and disappointed when a partner doesn't collaborate with us in the way we think they should. Collaboration is ever-present in our minds as we write grant applications and narrative reports.
Impact has recently experienced some instances of meaningful collaboration. In all honesty, we didn't immediately recognize true collaboration when it was staring us in the face. This offers us a great opportunity to learn more about what we mean when we use the term and how we might do better.
Impact is all about the "science" part of the social sciences, so we'll turn first to an example of collaboration in nature. (Side note: The pictures chosen for Impact's newsletters are always symbolic of an important theme for Impact, plus they are pretty.) Flowers and bees are a classic example of a mutually symbiotic relationship. Bees obtain food from flowers, and flowers use bees to spread pollen. Here's a great video.
Healthcare provides great examples of interdisciplinary collaboration. When things are working well, a patient's oncologist collaborates with their surgeon, dietician, physical therapist, and mental health counselor. It is easy to see how this relationship is symbiotic; each health care provider treats the patient's symptoms from their various perspective, all while benefiting the patient overall.
Turning to social services, we can use this definition of "cross-sector collaboration."
...the alignment of service delivery and/or financing systems across sectors of public health, medical care,
and social services. (NIH)
If you work in a drug court, a childcare center, a youth-serving organization, or any other social service entity, you can certainly see how this gets very complicated very quickly. Bees and flowers serve their own purposes while almost accidentally helping each other. Healthcare workers are serving their own purposes, but overall are working toward the same goal of a healthy patient. It can be more difficult to understand how, for example, a workforce readiness agency is connected to an early childhood organization. Or how the goals of criminal justice might align with an infant car seat distribution program. This graphic from the NIH article referenced above is an example of centering one social issue and creating a web of support:
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