The call for collaboration among nonprofits has grown in intensity in recent years. The reason is simple: in times of limited resources, sharing them among organizations with like missions stretches the effectiveness of each.
It doesn’t hurt that Rhode Island is such an intimately sized state. There are many counties across the nation that are larger in size and with more people. So how goes the effort to rationalize nonprofit resources in the Ocean State?
According to the leaders at the Rhode Island Foundation, there is more working together than in any time in this decade. Its Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence represents a tangible effort to improve the capacity and effectiveness of the state’s nonprofits, and it includes a number of collaboration-building programs in its toolkit.
Recent collaborations highlighted on Page 3 involve education and health care, but there are other issues that are getting more effective leadership thanks to diverse groups coming together on common agendas.
Environmental, transportation and resource planning groups are working to help the state adopt a progressive yet pro-growth agenda for dealing with the shrinking capacity at the state’s landfill.
And in perhaps the largest effort so far, all 11 of the state’s colleges and universities have created a research collaborative to help inform state policymaking with the latest research.
It has taken a while for Rhode Island to wake up to the value of working together, but now that it has, such efforts should grow across more than the nonprofit sector. •
