This week, I will travel to Durham, North Carolina, to sit down with key leaders from three nonprofit organizations whose mission is to help move people experiencing the crisis of homelessness into stable housing as quickly and responsibly as possible.

These discovery conversations are part of a project I am working on through Moss & Ross.

The project involves the creation of a collaborative made up of three nonprofit organizations. The collaborative’s overall objective is to run parallel to the City of Durham’s Strategic Plan to End Homelessness. Essentially, the goal is to make homelessness “rare and brief” for all populations in the next five years. Their first major milestone is to see a 30% reduction in unsheltered homelessness by June 2027.

This goal and this purpose are lofty, but filled with so much promise.

And the promise has to do with one key word:

Collaboration.

Over the weekend, I attended a Leadership Summit hosted by Armstrong McGuire. The opening session featured representatives from the NC Center for Nonprofits and The Cannon Foundation.

One of the key messages I took home from the conversation was that, amid political uncertainty, technological advances, and financial challenges, nonprofits are finding it much more difficult to move their missions forward. In order to accomplish a lofty goal or mission, it may become necessary for nonprofits, even those serving the same audiences, to partner and collaborate in order to move forward.

For foundations and other donors, I would imagine this is pretty exciting to see: multiple organizations that serve the same market and often pull from the same resources, both time and money, working together to accomplish even greater things than any one of them could do alone.

For that reason, the Oak Foundation saw fit to help support the Durham Redevelopment Collaborative, made up of Housing for New Hope, Families Moving Forward, and Urban Ministries of Durham.

I have been tasked over the next six months or so with working alongside the collaborative to establish the governance, decision-making, communication, and project-management infrastructure that will allow the collaborative to make decisions together with clarity, transparency, and accountability.

My role is not to determine what they should ultimately build, nor is it to replace the authority of the existing organizations.

It is all about helping the collaborative establish how three independent nonprofit organizations will work together to make decisions effectively, transparently, and in pursuit of the shared community outcome of making homelessness rare and brief.

This project has reminded me of how important collaboration is, especially among those who might normally be viewed as competitors.

A few weeks ago at ASAE, nine nonprofit consultants came together and shared a booth at the Annual Meeting & Expo. In many ways, we serve similar customers and work in overlapping spaces. But we put our competitive hats away, put on our collaboration hats, and worked together.

That experience stood in sharp contrast to another recent situation where I had been working with a friend and colleague on a project. Even though there was an opportunity to continue the work, I learned I would not be part of the next phase because I was viewed as “competition.”

That one stung a little.

But it also made me think.

Imagine if the associations we serve held that same philosophy.

Associations are the quintessential form of collaboration. Whether it is around a boardroom table, in a committee meeting, at a legislative fly-in, or through a shared professional standard, associations and their members understand that even competitors can work together to raise the standards of the industry or profession they serve.

That is the whole point.

Collaboration does not mean giving up your identity.

It does not mean every organization becomes the same.

It does not mean there will never be tension, disagreement, or different priorities.

Collaboration means deciding that the mission is big enough, the challenge is complex enough, and the outcome is important enough that none of us should try to do it alone.

That is true whether you are helping an association rethink its education strategy, working with consultants to create a stronger presence at a national meeting, or helping three nonprofits build the infrastructure needed to address homelessness in their community.

Teamwork, in fact, does make the dream work!