Setting the Stage for Public Service Design Projects: Lessons in CollaborationFrom Third Sector's Work on Mixed Delivery Early Childhood Education Systems with Minnesota’s Department of Education
Everyone can benefit when our government agencies collaborate with community members, local providers, and business leaders to design and deliver services. The programs that help our children learn, prepare us for good jobs, ensure we can get and stay healthy, and keep us safe rely on strong partnerships to succeed. Strong collaborations make our government more efficient and innovative by enabling partners to share resources in ways that make sense, fostering the connections that allow communities to dream big—and to succeed.
At Third Sector, we are excited about working with policymakers, public servants, and change agents of all stripes to build the sustainable partnerships needed to help communities thrive. In our experience, many of our partners are eager to establish new collaborations or to re-invigorate existing ones but don’t know where to start. We have found that most collaborations encounter two types of challenges: logistical challenges and relational challenges.
- Logistical challenges involve the nuts and bolts of collaboration: getting people into a room, finding a time to meet, and managing through team turnover and capacity constraints.
- Relational challenges are deeper and pertain to building trust, being honest about community needs and program delivery constraints, taking risks together, and creating an environment where different partners are truly working together—not just next to each other.
While these challenges can seem daunting, we have found a few accessible and affordable strategies that teams can use to nurture the kinds of collaborations that lead to better outcomes for all.
Three simple tools for addressing logistical challenges:
- A contact list of key community collaborators: Start by doing some stakeholder mapping to understand who is—and who isn’t!—at the table. Then develop and share a list of partners that can help get the work done, including names, roles, and contact information.
- A shared workbook to track progress: A collaboration document stored in your favorite tech platform and shared with key partners can serve as a container for ongoing work, a place for brainstorming, a repository for ideas to return to later, and a resource to help get new partners up to speed as projects evolve.
- A meeting map: Use a common agenda format for team meetings and repeat facilitation activities to build consistency and help teams focus on project work—instead of getting bogged down in the details of the process.
Three ways to address relational challenges to build a trusting, collaborative team that gets things done:
- Build trust among partners: Strong public service programs are built by strong teams. Dedicate time for team members to get to know each other through 1:1 and small-group team-building activities. Incorporate activities that enable people to share their purpose for doing the work and to share what makes them tick outside of work. This is especially important when building new partnerships, but can also be helpful in shaking up dynamics among groups that have been collaborating for a long time.
2. Build trust in the process: Launching a new collaborative initiative often involves asking teachers, health care providers, caregivers, and other change agents to add work to their already busy loads. It’s important to build trust in the process itself to help participants understand that their hard work will pay off and that working together, they can achieve more than they would working alone. To do this:
- Align on the parameters of your work together to set a project scope that will be both feasible and rewarding. Dream big, but avoid overpromising what can be achieved.
- Offer multiple ways to collaborate. Collaboratives should include a mix of engagement activities—live discussion, asynchronous brainstorming, pair sharing, and more—to enable participation from a wide variety of thinkers
- Move both fast and slow: use effective decision-making tools like dot voting to gather input and clearly delineate roles and responsibilities related to key decisions.
3. Build trust with community members: Strong public service programs aren’t designed in silos. Instead, they rely on input and feedback from the families that will use or benefit from them. Use processes like human-centered design, liberatory design, and community co-design to gather input from community members on potential project ideas, priorities, and big decisions. Here at Third Sector, we’ve found that many of our partners are already set up to do this through community social media forums, public input days, open houses, community events, and mailing lists.
