Everywhere you look in the sector right now, organisations are facing pressure to collaborate. Funders want to see systems change. Collective action has become less an option than an expectation. Mostly, this is a good thing. 

But for organisations, there is a real question about how you can meaningfully undertake systems-level collaboration while also doing the work that made you worth collaborating with in the first place, whether that’s frontline delivery, research, advocacy, or something else entirely. Organisations are encouraged to let go of ego in order to collaborate, but that shouldn’t mean losing your organisation’s individual identity or strategic goals in service of a ‘greater good’.

This is not an argument against collaboration, but it is an argument about what collaboration asks of individual organisations, a question that gets far less attention than it deserves.

The example:

At Spring Impact, we actively work to build and enable collaborations that help organisations tackle big issues collectively. One example is the School Food Project, a coalition formed to seize a rare political opening: a billion pounds of new government money, stronger school food standards, and free school meals extended to hundreds of thousands more children.

One of the founding partners of the School Food Project coalition is Chefs in Schools. Since 2018, they’ve reached over 250,084 children across 638 schools, working with 776 school chefs, proving that good school food is achievable and affordable. That hands-on transformation work in school kitchens is now the delivery engine behind the School Food Project’s work in schools. 

Earlier this year, we supported Chefs in Schools with developing their new 5 year strategy. The pull toward the coalition was real: with the School Food Project now incorporating some of their delivery work, and a rare funding moment demanding a collective response, it would have been easy for the Chefs in Schools strategy to become an extension of the School Food Project’s agenda rather than its own thing. But that would have been a mistake. 

Chefs in Schools’ distinctive contribution is hands-on quality and innovation, working directly in school kitchens with a depth of support that complements the coalition’s wider role. The School Food Project coalition and its policy advocacy, in turn, give this detailed, kitchen-by-kitchen work a reach it couldn’t achieve on its own. Keeping both strands strong has been key: Chefs in Schools’ frontline work gives it the credibility that makes it a valued partner, and gives the coalition the evidence base that makes its case so compelling.

The lesson, for organisations and for funders:

A partner who stops being excellent at their own work is not a stronger partner. They are a weaker one.

So the discipline, for any organisation heading into a collaboration built to scale, is to treat that collaboration as an input to your strategy, not a substitute for having one. Name the thing that is yours alone, the thing that would genuinely be lost if you vanished. Be honest in how you measure yourself, claiming the system-level wins as things you contribute to rather than own. And know which parts of your core work you’re protecting, and which parts you’re intentionally letting the collaboration reshape.

Which brings me to funders, who hold the lever that decides whether any of this is possible. Despite how much conversation is happening around systems change and collaboration right now, most philanthropic funding still defaults to direct delivery. The coordination, backbone and shared-learning work that holds a collaboration together is usually the piece that’s hardest to fund, since it’s invisible and doesn’t sit inside any one organisation’s budget line. That gap needs to close. At the same time, if you fund the collaboration infrastructure while starving its members, you hollow out the very asset you’re paying to scale. So the message to funders is to fund the collective AND fund its members, not one instead of the other. 

Collaboration is how the biggest problems get solved. But the organisations that thrive inside collaborations are the ones that stay unmistakably themselves. That doesn’t mean they don’t change – but they change in ways that build on what made them worth collaborating with in the first place, not in ways that dilute it.