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Making Effective Collaboration Possible
This blog post first appeared in Philanthropy Front and Center Cleveland.
Are you tired of hearing that you should collaborate? It's understandable. As philanthropic leaders, it can sometimes feel like we're told to collaborate as often as children on a playground are told to share. We get it. Enough already.
But what if someone told you to avoid collaboration if possible? Now I've got your attention, right? That's the bright orange warning in the opening pages of the Fund for Our Economic Future's Collaboration: A Handbook. "Collaboration should only be pursued when it is absolutely necessary to achieve the desired change," writes Chris Thompson, the Handbook's author. and former director of regional engagement at the Fund. "Collaboration should never be the goal. It is a means to the goal."
And then, he says this: "Just because collaboration is needed doesn't mean it is possible."
I'll let that sink in for a minute.
As the president and CEO of Stark Community Foundation, a long-time member of the Fund, I'm quite familiar with Chris's musings on the value of collaborative cross-sector work. Indeed, the Fund is the very epitome of a collaboration and a collaborator. But it wasn't until I read the Handbook that this oft-esoteric concept made real concrete sense.
Chris shares the ins-and-outs and ups-and-downs of a decade-plus of collaboration experience and distills how to know if the conditions are right for a collaboration to be possible; what is needed to make it successful; how to get it back on track if it steers off-course; and, perhaps most importantly, how to evaluate if it's working. There are checklists and techniques and how-to guides. Lastly, there's also a whole website devoted to the handbook and its contents, though I highly encourage you to carry around a hard copy wherever you go.
The Handbook is more than just lip service. It's more than just CoBLABoration: "The evil cousin of collaboration, this made-up term, first shared with our Fund by Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon, describes the all-too-common experience of what happens when stakeholders engage in a poorly designed collaboration that is unable to transition from talk to action." When put into practice, the advice from this 60-page guide is relevant and useful.
Take, for example, where I work in Stark County. Almost two years ago, a group of civic leaders came together to share their respective strategic plans for the community, to better understand what each was doing, and to discuss how they might help each other be successful. Each time we met, we built trust with one another, and those early conversations grew into more formal planning.
Today, we are a full-fledged cross-sector collaboration that includes: my organization, The Canton Repository, the Canton Chamber of Commerce, the United Way of Greater Stark County, the Akron-Canton Regional Airport, the city of Canton, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the Stark Development Board. It's the first time I'm aware that we're envisioning the future of our community together, as a whole. We're developing shared responsibility for our future, and we wouldn't be so advanced in our discussions without the collaboration guidance of the Fund.
Of course, the Handbook doesn't actually make the act of collaboration any easier. It's still hard, messy, complex work. At least now, the next time someone tells you to collaborate, you can actually walk through whether the right preconditions exist for a collaboration to be possible, and if they do, how to make sure it's successful.
MARK SAMOLCZYK is president and CEO of Stark Community Foundation and vice chair of the Fund for Our Economic Future. He's the primary representative of the Stark Community Foundation in the community and the leader in achieving the Foundation's vision and mission. Mark joined the Foundation in October 2009.
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Want to learn more about nonprofit collaboration? Click over to Collaboration Hub, which links to publications, videos, podcasts, and blog posts, and the Nonprofit Collaboration Database, a comprehensive, searchable collection of 650+ profiles on four types of collaborations: back-office consolidation, joint programming, mergers, and alliances.


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UPDATE 8:10 PM PT: The Jackson family has arrived -- only an hour and ten minutes late.
Rest in peace, Michael Jackson.
UPDATE 8:00 PM PT: The Jackson family has still not arrived ... the service was scheduled to begin an hour ago. Some of the guests arrived around 6:30.
UPDATE: Lisa Marie Presley -- Michael's ex-wife -- just arrived. Corey Feldman is there too.
The star-studded crowd is arriving at Michael Jackson's funeral -- Liz Taylor, Barry Bonds, Macaulay Culkin, Mila Kunis, Chris Tucker, Al Sharpton and more...
Meanwhile, the family has still not left their Encino compound.
Does the fashionably late rule apply to a funeral?!
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Sunday, April 26, 2009
What we are drinking right now
Collecting fresh birch sap in our back yard.
For a few days now, we've been drinking lots of freshly collected birch sap instead of table water. It's very refreshing, and tastes like a mildly sweetened water. According to folk medicine, birch sap helps to combat 101 illnesses. It's detoxifying, contains C and PP vitamins, carotene, various sugars and malic acid.
But most importantly, it tastes good.
10 comments:
- Siri said...
Oh- I'm curious now! What will you do with it?
- 10:18 pm, April 26, 2009
- Susan from Food Blogga said...
I second Siri's question. What are you gonna do with it?
- 1:31 am, April 27, 2009
- Nicole said...
We have been thinking about doing this. Birch syrup is pretty popular here in Alaska.
- 6:33 am, April 27, 2009
- Pille said...
Siri and Susan - I should have explained it :) You drink it au naturel - tastes like a very lightly sweetened good water :)
Nicole - how interesting. Do you boil it down to reduce it as a syrup? We collect maple sap here as well, but it's not as sweet as the Sugar Maple sap you get in the Northern America, so it's not used for making maple syrup.
- 9:16 am, April 27, 2009
- iml said...
Interesting. This is something new to me. Drinking sap of a birch tree.Here in Asia, it's the coconut juice.
- 5:26 am, April 28, 2009
- Nicole said...
Wow, I have actually never heard of drinking it straight from the tree. I will definitely have to try that. Do you tap them right away in the spring?
Birch Syrup is not nearly as sweet or thick as Maple Syrup. I still love Maple Syrup the best, but Birch Syrup is a fun, much less expensive, and local alternative.
I must admit that I don't have much syruping experience. As far as I know you just boil it down. My partner, David grew up in Maine and is the Maple Syrup officiando!
- 10:00 pm, April 29, 2009
"Do you tap them right away in the spring?"
The season is about 2 spring weeks only - until the ground is fully thawed.
"You drink it au naturel - tastes like a very lightly sweetened good water :)"
Some also ferment the sap and bottle it, and then preserve in cellar. But the fresh sap is much tastier.
- 12:41 pm, April 30, 2009
- Scott at Real Epicurean said...
Tree in my garden looks like a birch. Will have to find out!
- 6:36 pm, May 02, 2009
- Pille said...
Iml - well, we've got no coconuts here, so birch and maple sap are the natural spring-time options :)
Nicole - yes, early spring, when the average daily temperature is 4 C and before the birch leaves appear. The season is pretty short, just a fortnight or so.
Scott - do so. But note that as you live in a much warmer place than I do, the season is probably over for 2009 already. But you can always try next year. I wonder if your wife's family in Poland collects the birch and maple sap in the spring (or relatives on the countryside?).
- 8:38 am, May 03, 2009
We're bottling birch tree sap ... and bringing it to the US. It's a pretty amazing product, hope you'll enjoy it - www.byarozavik.com.
- 5:59 pm, April 14, 2014


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Most commodities are currently offering forward pricing opportunities. For once, marketing seems simple. Having a plan on paper, however, will make marketing much simpler.
As quickly as the commodity markets rise, they can also unexpectedly turn. A marketing plan will help in making rational pricing decisions.
A marketing plan built into an Excel® spreadsheet is available through the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service and can be downloaded at the following address: http://www.uaex.edu/depts/ag_economics/default.htm.
This tool can help producers develop plans for cotton, rice, soybeans, corn, grain sorghum, and wheat.
Using excerpts from the University of Arkansas Extension crop production budgets, the user is guided through the budgeting process, determination of breakeven prices and yields, and marketing methods and timetables.
Your cost of production:
Sound marketing begins with an estimate of production costs and yields. Those two pieces of information are crucial in determining an operation's breakeven price — the unit price that will cover operating costs. The University of Arkansas Marketing Plan spreadsheet can assist farm managers in this process.
To begin, some preliminary data gathering is required. The best source of cost and yield information is found in your own business records. A record-keeping program that tracks all costs of production can be very useful in developing a marketing plan.
Coupling historic production records with current input prices is a sound approach to projecting costs for the coming year.
In the absence of your own cost estimates, you can use published costs of production from Extension Services and other sources. However, these sources only provide a rough estimate of fixed and variable costs and may not include all costs related to your business.
Marketing methods and timetable:
A final step in the marketing plan is picking a strategy and developing a marketing timetable. There are a number of choices, from cash sales and forward contracts to futures and options.
Basis information for your local market would be helpful in analyzing cash and futures marketing alternatives.
The results or expected prices from various marketing alternatives will likely differ. These expected prices should be compared with your operation's cost of production.
Marketing is an emotional process and it is extremely helpful to calculate price targets or key sales dates. When prices are moving up, it is human nature oftentimes to postpone sales. When prices are moving down, it's common to turn optimistic and wait for prices to recover. This happens frequently.
An integrated marketing plan includes setting price objectives around your predetermined breakeven price(s).
Farm managers may also need to keep track of the percentage of expected production that has been forward priced so that they do not oversell as they reach pre-set price targets or sales dates in their marketing plans.
The final step of the marketing plan worksheet assists producers in tracking what percentage of expected production is already forward priced.
A marketing plan begins in part with an estimate of production costs. Once crop production has actually started and production costs become more accurate, a marketing plan can and should be updated.
The beauty of using a spreadsheet is in the ease and flexibility in which changes can be made. Spreadsheets also allow the user to save and evaluate a number of possibilities.
Break-even prices will differ from farm to farm due to differences in yields and production costs. Rent arrangements must also be considered as these will influence breakeven prices as well.
For more information on commodity marketing, contact your local county Extension office or the author of this article.