Sustaining What Matters: Collaboration, Change, and Letting Go
On a very warm spring day in Phoenix, a group of us gathered around a conference table at the Net Inclusion conference. We had just listened to a somber, though well-intentioned, presentation about how to move forward after the repeal of the Digital Equity Act (DEA).
Around the table were partners from Western North Carolina, representing nine collaboratives working together to improve digital opportunity across the region, part of an initiative supported by Dogwood Health Trust.
Just days earlier, those same partners had been preparing for nearly $8 million in funding to support their work, on top of unprecedented federal investment in broadband infrastructure and aligned state funding. And then, in the blink of an eye (or pen), it was gone.
Along with it went carefully developed plans, months of time and energy to develop them, and a sense of forward momentum that had just begun to build. We were in the first few months of our work together. The groups were just beginning to build trust and the strategies they would pursue were just starting to come into focus. And still, the conversation had already shifted to one word: sustainability.
Across the country, millions of people are in the same boat, and some after spending years, or their entire careers, working toward a goal that uses evidence to support communities. Sustainability was already a word that we were probably all tired of hearing, but now, it has a different ring to it.
In our work supporting cross-sector collaboration, we hear it all the time, from nonprofits, local governments, schools, public agencies, and private sector partners working together to solve complex challenges. Whether it’s food security, childcare access, or digital opportunity, these are issues that take years, often decades, to make meaningful shifts. And yet, most funding doesn’t work that way.
For many of us, “sustainability” has come to mean one thing: how do we find enough funding to keep going? But especially in the current climate and in rural communities, where funding is more limited and harder to secure, that definition can feel both narrow and unrealistic.
Over the last year, we’ve started thinking differently about sustainability. It’s so much more than just finding money. It’s about being able to continue what matters most to us, our organizations and most importantly, the community.
So, at Liminal, we’re starting to ask different questions:
What is so important it must be sustained; What is meant to evolve, pivot or transform; and what might a collaborative need to let go of?
What can sustainability look like without a windfall of funding, but instead with slow steady persistent support and long-term commitment by partners, community, and place-based funders?
We started thinking about sustainability in two different ways:
Sustaining the collaborative
Sustaining the strategies (the work you do together)
These two are clearly connected, but not necessarily dependent on one another. You can sustain a collaborative without sustaining every strategy. And you can sustain strategies even if the collaborative evolves or goes away. Both can be seen as successful outcomes, if the community is ultimately benefiting.
What makes a Sustainable Collaborative
Successful and sustainable collaborations have diverse engagement and are ones in which every individual has a role to play, and in which responsibility for achieving outcomes, as well as the sustainability of their collaborative efforts are shared. Sustainable collaboratives are not necessarily ones that exist in perpetuity, but are instead able to adapt, evolve, learn, experiment, and remain relevant and useful over time.
Sustainable collaboratives tend to have:
Strong relationships and trust among partners
A shared purpose and clear reason to work together
Broad and inclusive engagement, especially from those most impacted
Structures that support shared leadership, growth and participation
A strong and flexible hub, backbone or coordinating function
Contributions from partners, not just participation
A focus on shifting systems, not just delivering programs
These are the conditions that allow a collaborative to continue, even as people, priorities, and resources change.
What makes a Sustainable Strategy
Sustaining strategies is something a bit different. All collaboratives need strategies, but not all strategies need collaboratives. This means prioritizing the impact of the work - irrespective of the collaborative or organization that leads it – and puts the purpose and outcomes above all else, to ensure it continues over time. While sustaining a collaborative requires coordination, unity, agreement, and momentum, sustaining strategies is more likely when there are strong results, a motivated organization or entity that can maintain it, and a commitment of resources.
That might look like:
Continuing to coordinate the work as a collaborative
Transitioning ownership to a partner organization
Embedding the work into existing budgets, programs or institutions
Influencing policy or systems so the change is more permanent
In other words, sustainability isn’t just about continuing an initiative, it’s about ensuring that the change you’ve initiated continues.
Not Everything Needs to Be Sustained
This is often the hardest, and most important, part. Especially in times of uncertainty, there’s a natural instinct to try to hold onto everything. But sustainability isn’t about maintaining all activities indefinitely. It’s about making smart choices.
What is working? What is starting to show promise? What is no longer serving its intended purpose? What was meant to be temporary or a learning opportunity (testing or piloting strategies)?
Letting go is not failure. In fact, it’s often a sign that a system is evolving in the way it’s supposed to. This idea is reinforced by the adaptive cycle, a concept drawn from ecological systems and often applied to collaboration. It reminds us that growth, stability, release, and renewal are all natural, and necessary, phases of long-term change.
Strategies Must Evolve, Not Just Continue
Our colleague Mark Cabaj has written extensively about this through the lens of Emergent Strategy, the idea that we can’t simply “make a plan and work the plan.” Instead, we have to zoom in to understand what’s happening on the ground, adapt based on what we’re learning, zoom out to consider system-level shifts, and repeat. Sustaining a strategy, then, is not about keeping it going as is, it’s about helping it evolve while maintaining its ultimate goal.
A Practical Tool: Two Checklists
To help collaboratives think this through, we developed a simple crosswalk, one that looks at sustainability from both angles. You’ll notice that only a few of the items relate to adequate funding or resources, it’s about all of the other factors that can keep us focused on the change we want to see for the long-term, even when you need to pivot, even when times get tough, even when the money is tight, even when different players come on the field.
This is not so much a scorecard, but more of a decision-making tool. Don’t eliminate strategies that don’t check all the boxes or feel like your collaborative isn’t successful if you don’t get a good “score.” This checklist can help you make a plan or decide how to adapt or adjust to keep up the momentum.
Ask yourself -
What elements are in place to sustain our collaborative?
What elements are in place to sustain each strategy?
Then -
Where do we need to adapt?
Where do we need to invest?
What might we need to let go?
You can explore the full checklist on the right »»
The digital opportunity collaboratives are a great example of putting this new definition of sustainability into action. A year later, they are still going strong, while their collaboratives have shifted and evolved, and their strategies have adapted to meet the changing environment. They’ve launched innovative projects, built deeper relationships, and are now designing what the next two years will look like, still with sustainability in mind, but with a much broader understanding of what it really means. That conversation in Phoenix did not mark an end by any means, it marked the beginning of a different way of thinking about what it takes for this work to last.
If there’s one shift we hope this sparks, it’s that sustainability may no longer mean what many of us though it did. . It’s about ensuring that what matters most continues, one way or another. Sometimes that means strengthening the collaborative. Sometimes it means letting the work live elsewhere. And sometimes, it means making space for something new. The challenge and the opportunity is to make these tough decisions together.
___________________
Citations:
Tamarack Institute. “A Guide for Building a Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration”
Holling, C. S., & Gunderson, L. H. (2002). “Resilience and Adaptive Cycles”
Cabaj, M. (2020). “What we know so far about the strategy continuum”
“Adaptive Cycle – Complex Systems Frameworks Collection”
Tamarack Institute. “Exploring the Collaboration Cycle”