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The Collaboratory's Guiding Principles
Throughout our first two years of work, The Collaboratory has sought to articulate some fundamental principles and lessons from our work that continue to guide our decisions and behaviors. These are discussed briefly here.
When The Collaboratory works with a community, we begin our discussions where the community wants to begin by focusing on the issues they care about and by offering services tailored to their strengths and challenges. In addition, The Collaboratory and its community partners must honor and build on local assets and successes while helping community members learn from past disappointments.
Decisions on what a community should do about a problem should be based on their highest aspirations. So often, in the name of getting people around the table, communities take the “undiscussables” off the table and are left with only a “least common denominator” agreement about what is possible. The Collaboratory believes community participants should be continually challenged to ask the difficult questions and focus on the greatest good.
The Collaboratory must behave impartially and be perceived as impartial in relation to all sectors, organizations, and communities in order to be able to foster partnerships and hold everyone to the highest aspirations. Our work cannot be designed in such a way as to make us beholden to any particular stakeholders (for example, we cannot be a membership organization). We will also expect local community support organizations to be impartial in order to accomplish their mission. As one CSO leader said, “We’re neutral, so we can be fairly brave.”
While The Collaboratory may take a leadership role in enabling community support, we base our work on our desire to serve our various partners to help them reach their greatest potential. Our work is characterized by listening, empathy, prompt responsiveness, foresight, stewardship, and a commitment to help others grow. We also envision community support organizations as servant leaders to their communities.
The Collaboratory and local community support organizations must seek to be inclusive in their partnership-building and look for the value that any possible partner can bring to the table. Comprehensive community initiatives are not plagued by a lack of good ideas but by a lack of scaled implementation, which requires wider circles of involvement. As noted Harvard scholar, Theda Skocpol, says, “The wave of the future will be surprising connections.”
Good community decision making requires quality, unbiased background information provided in clear, synthesized, and well-organized materials and presentations. All those convened to address a problem should have the same data and best-practice examples in front of them. In addition, information shared across communities allows for comparability and standard setting for multi-community improvements.
Though there is always a creative tension between process and action, disengagement results from taking so much time to build trust that there is no concrete action on which to solidify and sustain that trust.
All the previous guiding principles should culminate in the ability to engage more and more community residents in the vision and work of reaching their community’s highest aspirations. Over time, The Collaboratory and the community support organizations should strive for ever greater numbers of diverse people being able to articulate their community’s goals and the efforts undertaken to reach those goals. In this way, communities demonstrate the ultimate sense of ownership of the future they want.
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
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