November 15, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd Edition
by Paul W. Mattessich, Marta Murray-Close, and Barbara R. Monsey
Collaboration among nonprofit organizations can help tackle complex issues like poverty, crime, and education, write the authors.
Paul W. Mattessich, director of the Wilder Research Center, in St. Paul, Barbara R. Monsey, a researcher at the Center for Health Studies at the Group Health Cooperative, in Seattle, and Marta Murray-Close, a research assistant at the Wilder Research Center, analyzed hundreds of studies of collaborations to determine what makes such efforts successful.
They distilled 20 factors that predict the success of a given collaboration, including a history of collaboration and cooperation in a particular geographic region; mutual respect, understanding, and trust among the organizations; participation of staff members from all management levels of each organization; open and frequent communication; shared mission, objectives, and strategy; and sufficient resources — including funds, staff members, materials, and time.
Chapters include descriptions and practical implications of each factor, and document the ways groups have used this list to improve their collaborative efforts. The book describes how groups can examine their own collaborative projects based on these factors, and includes a worksheet to help with this assessment.
Publisher: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, 919 Lafond Avenue, St. Paul, Minn. 55104-2108; (651) 659-6024 or (800) 274-6024; fax (651) 642-2061; books@wilder.org; http://www.wilder.org; 104 pages; $20 plus $4 shipping; I.S.B.N. 0-940069-32-6.
