Everywhere you look in the sector right now, organisations are asked to collaborate. Funders want to see systems change, and working in partnership has become less an option than an expectation.
This is a good thing.
But it places further demands on organisations that are already overstretched, raising the question:
How can you meaningfully undertake systems change collaboration while continuing the work that made you worth collaborating with in the first place?
Collaboration requires flexibility, letting go of ego, and sometimes changing how you work. But that change should build on what you bring to the table, not dilute it.
Collaboration ≠ losing your identity or strategic goals in service of a ‘greater good’.
The example
Chefs in Schools is one of the founding partners of the School Food Project coalition, formed to seize a rare political opening: major new government funding and stronger school food standards across England.
As the School Food Project coalition grew, Chefs in Schools’ strategy could easily have become an extension of the coalition’s agenda.
That would’ve been a mistake.
Chefs in Schools’ distinctive contribution is hands-on work in school kitchens, at a depth of support that complements the coalition’s wider role.
Continuing this delivery work has been key:
The frontline work gives Chefs in Schools credibility, and gives the coalition the evidence base that makes it so compelling. The coalition, in turn, gives that work a reach it couldn’t achieve on its own.
The lessons, for nonprofits and funders
For nonprofits: Treat collaboration as an input to your strategy, not a substitute for one
- Name the thing that is yours alone, 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.
- Know which parts of your core work you’re protecting, and which parts you’re intentionally letting the collaboration reshape.
For funders: Fund the collective AND its members, not one instead of the other
Most philanthropic funding still defaults to direct delivery, despite the push for collaboration and systems change.
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.
Final thought
Collaboration is how the biggest problems get solved. But the organisations that thrive inside collaborations are the ones that stay unmistakably themselves.
Because a partner who stops being excellent at their own work is not a stronger partner. They are a weaker one.
