What Will It Take to Build a Multi-Sector Partnership Practice for Systems Change?

Once I’d framed the question, I was able to start thinking about designing the syllabus and curriculum for the course as a response. Basically, every reading/listening/viewing assignment, in-class activity, guest speaker, and homework assignment is a working hypothesis about what the foundational ideas and practices are that a person needs to build a practice.

Since one of the values in emergent learning is to “return learning to the system,” I thought it might be valuable for others, and a great accountability tool for me to start to share what I’m learning on the blog. And as time progresses, hopefully, I’ll be able to dive more deeply into the specifics of the syllabus and curriculum, and what worked well and what I learned needed to be changed along the way.

Course Philosophy

As I thought about the philosophy of the class, I pretty quickly realized that I had to let go of some of the traditional ways I was viewing academic environments, and teach to my strengths - which was curation of resources and frameworks, and lots of opportunities to practice and engage in interactive, facilitated activities in class. I also wanted the design of the course to reflect its content. So at the beginning of our first class, I shared with my students that there were two concepts that made up our course philosophy:

1. Chefs, Not Recipes - Borrowing from a great blog post from my colleague Eugene Eric Kim, I told my students that there was no recipe for building an effective multi-sector partnership because it was all dependent on context, people, and topic. So, in this course, the idea isn’t to learn a recipe (or a set of tools and best practices), but rather to become a chef. Meaning that it was about being exposed to a bunch of different ideas and frameworks and methodologies, and their work was to build their skills - through practice - at discerning when to apply which ones.

2. The Class is a Multi-Sector Partnership - each person is bringing different training, work experience, lived experience, and identity into the process. Research has shown that diverse teams are better problem solvers AND that they are harder to manage. And while the classroom isn’t a perfect parallel (there is an “authority” in the room who is setting the direction (me) and there are repercussions for not showing up or contributing (grades)), the class time was designed to be highly interactive and practice together.

Have thoughts or insights about how the course philosophy relates to the question “What will it take to build a person’s multi-sector partnership practice for systems change?”

I’d love to hear them! share them below in the comments or email me directly!

Framing on Multi-Sector Partnerships

One of the things that was really great about developing this course was the opportunity to dig back into the archives of work that I’ve been doing for years, and update and adapt and synthesize ideas that emerged in different jobs and projects and that I say to people but have never written down and wrote them down and turned them into colorful slides. This included:

• Sharing a revised definition for multi-sector partnerships (Slide below labeled: What is a Multi-Sector Partnership?)

• Communicating that there are lots of models of MSPs (including unnamed ones) and trying to differentiate between those that were more systems change focused versus those that are more focused on efficiencies or benefitting the organizations involved. (Slides below labeled: Models of MSPs)

• Differentiating between what work looks like in organizations versus in multi-sector partnerships (Slide Below: How is Working in MSPs Different than Working in Organizations?”)

Have thoughts or insights about how the framing on Multi-Sector Partnerships relates to the question “What will it take to build a person’s multi-sector partnership practice for systems change?”

I’d love to hear them! Share them below in the comments or email me directly!

Modules & Learning Objectives

I was very fortunate that the previous instructors for this course - Jamie Gardener and Nico Van Exel - were generous enough to share their syllabus AND meet with me to debrief what they thought worked and didn’t in the course. Both of them came out of corporate social responsibility background, so we were bringing different perspectives to the work. My years of experience had been as someone who staffed MSPs, researched and provided technical assistance in them while working in philanthropy, directed a Fellowship program for practitioners, and now does consulting work with them. Two of my big takeaways from the conversations with them were: 1) don’t try to do too much (they admitted that their syllabus was too packed) and 2) if you are going to assign something to read/view/listen to, make sure that you are going to discuss it in class. I also liked some of the assignments they had developed - particularly their capstone project which I built on and adapted for my course.

These insights proved a really valuable in forcing me to realize that I was limited in what I could cover in the class. And as a result, I decided to focus on four themes (or modules):

Course Modules

1. Purpose & People — the purpose of Multi-Sector Strategic Partnerships as well as understanding the motivations, strengths, limitations of sectors, organizations & people who will participate in them;

2. Structures & Strategy — the structures and behaviors of high-performing partnerships and some of the strategies and processes that collaborators employ to do the work;

3. Funding & Casemaking — the relationship between funding and partnerships and how to "make the case" for systemic change, and

4. Learning & Accountability — the work of continuous learning and evaluation in order to determine if a Partnerships is making the progress and achieving the impact which it intended to create.

From these modules, my goals were that students would be able to do the following, which in academia they call the “course learning objectives.”

Course Learning Objectives

1. Build a foundational understanding of the purpose & people, structure and strategy, funding and casemaking, and learning and evaluation strategies of multi-sector partnerships aimed at addressing complex social, economic, and environmental problems.

2. Develop an understanding of the motivations, limitations, biases, assumptions, and capacities of different sectors.

3. Build an understanding of the structures, practices, and cultures of organizations that equip them to engage effectively in partnerships.

4. Practice the skills, mindsets, and behaviors that will enable effective leadership in multi-sector partnerships.

5. Learn from and with the experiences of multi-sector partnership practitioners working from different sectors, in different geographies, and on different complex problems.

6. Develop a real-world multi-sector partnership strategy to address a complex problem relevant to coronavirus recovery.

   
   

Now that I’ve shared the foundational elements on which the course was built, stay tuned for explorations of the various modules!

Have thoughts or insights about how Course Modules and Learning Objectives relates to the question “What will it take to build a person’s multi-sector partnership practice for systems change?”

I’d love to hear them! Share them below in the comments or email me directly!