Collaboratory for Community Support-About Us

The Collaboratory's Emphasis and Core Beliefs

The Collaboratory’s work is based on the premise that local communities are increasingly becoming the unit of social and economic problem solving in the United States and Canada and that the best way for communities to respond to this expectation is to re-organize work across traditional boundaries. We recognize that this premise represents a particular emphasis.

When community leaders and scholars today wrestle with how to improve our society, suggestions often reflect one of two paths. One path emphasizes the power of individual people and individual organizations to strengthen themselves and draw on their own assets to change their immediate environment or to initiate or advocate for reforms in systems that are supposed to serve them. This path values such strategies as grassroots neighborhood organizing and capacity building within organizations. The other path emphasizes the power of systems of organizations and those who currently control the resources to reform their practices in order to be better servants to individuals and neighborhoods. This path values such strategies as systemic restructuring, policy and budget reform, and cross-organization capacity building.

The Collaboratory strongly believes that improving our society requires ongoing work along both paths. However, while our plan will encourage and support community organizing and the strengthening of individual organizations, we believe that systemic and policy reforms and efforts to work across organizational boundaries must be enabled to succeed. While we are not insensitive to power imbalances in our society, we hold that our existing ways of doing business will need support to change so that the full community can be more inclusive and better informed. Enabling change in the way work is accomplished in the shared space between multiple organizations and professional sectors is the focus of The Collaboratory’s activities.

In keeping with this perspective, we believe, for example, that the vast majority of individual nonprofit organizations are operating sincerely in the most efficient and effective ways possible, given the systemic constraints of insecure and fragmented funding streams, pressure to focus on service delivery over infrastructure building, inability to grow to scale, and unwieldy governance structures. Removing these systemic constraints requires more than nonprofit management support to individual organizations; it requires changes in resource flow, federal and state policy, and community governance models.

We believe that more informed citizens who can make use of standard tools and supportive practices are better able to take ownership of solutions, avoid getting stuck in the complex change process, and exert power for improvements. We do not think that sharing information and opportunities with community members is the same as imposing solutions.

In addition, we value the energy and innovation unleashed for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations by the free enterprise system, but we also believe that market forces alone, operating within current policy guidelines, cannot ensure the societal outcomes that communities seek to foster.

Our belief that systemic, holistic solutions are better suited to complex social problems than categorical, programmatic approaches also leads to a central desire for communities to have their own voice in political and appropriations processes. We believe that when multiple communities identify the same policy barriers to reaching local goals, they can create the momentum for political change. Yet we are concerned that no one is currently responsible to speak on behalf of full communities as opposed to the existing strong voices for particular social issues or the lobbyists for niche organizations that maintain the pressure for fragmented and categorical appropriations.

While we continue to challenge our core beliefs and assumptions through conversations with colleagues and regular reading in a variety of fields, these perspectives have clearly influenced our current approaches.

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The Collaboratory for Community Support
7423 Hickory Ridge Drive
Ypsilanti, MI 48197-9487
Phone: 734-623-4952
www.thecollaboratory.us
For more information, email us: jcrubicon@aol.com