Although these groups have very different politics, they have all come to a shared conclusion: “that America’s pattern of mass incarceration is bad for the country, terrible for communities, and devastating for individuals,”⁹ and that it needs fixing. These groups have enough of a shared commitment to making the criminal justice system “smarter, fairer and more cost-effective”¹⁰ that they have put aside long-standing differences to collaborate on this particular issue and have achieved significant progress as a result.

Truly powerful collaborations go beyond just having shared interests to develop a shared vision and strategy. They identify and implement shared activities. Some go further still and establish shared measurement practices and advocacy efforts. Robust coalitions often have a “backbone” or “quarterback” organization leading on much of these mechanics of collaboration—a group that is providing technical expertise to a range of groups, channeling funding or acting as a convenor for social movement leaders. Girls Not Brides and Crisis Action (see below) are both backbone organizations. Some are entirely focused on acting as a backbone, while for others, it’s just one part of their identity. Typically, backbone organizations have a few major roles: guiding vision and strategy, supporting aligned activities, establishing shared measurement practices, building public will, and mobilizing funding.¹¹ One of the advantages of a backbone organization is that it helps overcome much of the friction impeding effective collaboration.

Regardless of your approach, collaboration requires leaders to keep their egos in check. It requires a willingness to focus on the cause over the organization’s or leader’s shorter-term interests around control and profile. Given that all organizations have differing objectives and approaches, to a greater or smaller degree, you won’t be able to build successful coalitions if you insist on everything being done your way. Saying “you must collaborate entirely on my terms” (as happens surprisingly often) is an oxymoron. I’m often reminded of President Truman’s aphorism “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” However, this can be hard for nonprofit leaders to accept, as, at the same time as collaborating, they are often also seeking to raise their organization’s profile, demonstrate their impact, and impress donors. Most donors expect the groups they fund to be able to attribute direct impact of their funding, and true collaboration necessitates a willingness to accept complexity and nuance regarding attribution.

All the challenges aside, the time and effort invested in building effective networks—whether on an issue-by-issue basis or on a more long-standing footing—will almost always deliver greater progress on your cause than working in isolation.

CASE STUDY

Operating Behind the Scenes to Build Coalitions to Tackle Armed Conflicts

Nonprofits often seek publicity for their work—media coverage, name recognition, a strong social media presence. These can be effective ways to highlight impact and mobilize others, including funders, to their cause. So how did a nonprofit that consciously avoids publicity and deliberately operates behind the scenes become one of the most impactful conflict prevention organizations of recent decades?

I’m talking about Crisis Action,^* a small, highly effective nonprofit, whose board I chaired from 2006 to 2013. It describes itself as “a catalyst and coordinator for organizations working together to protect civilians from armed conflict.” Despite playing a key role in mobilizing impactful coalitions to campaign against conflicts in countries ranging from Myanmar to Yemen to Ukraine, Crisis Action is not a household name. That is by design. The organization sees its role as one to bring together and promote those coalitions and campaigns, and it can do that much more effectively by avoiding the spotlight and directing it onto others.

Crisis Action’s efforts to prevent a potential genocide in the Central African Republic (CAR) illustrate the power of this approach. Following a coup early in 2013, horrific ethnic cleansing spread rapidly throughout CAR, with mass atrocities committed by both Muslim and christian groups. By March, 90 percent of the capital’s Muslim population had been forced from their homes or murdered. Local authorities had no ability to stop the killings. The atrocities prompted calls for international action to prevent a possible genocide.

Crisis Action, working closely with its human rights and humanitarian partners in the country, determined that, without a UN life would be catastrophic. So it began to ring alarm bells with the United Nations and the African union, and in Washington, DC, and European capitals. At the same time, it brought together a powerful interfaith delegation consisting of CAR’s most influential Christian and Muslim leaders.

Crisis Action helped this delegation get access to the international media, including CNN, Time magazine, the Washington Post, and other outlets, while shunning media coverage for its own efforts. It also helped the delegation secure meetings with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French President François Hollande, and all fifteen Security Council ambassadors.

These efforts proved effective. Over the course of the next few months, the African Union, the united Nations, and the European union deployed peacekeepers to CAR. The feared genocide didn’t happen, and the violence subsided.

Later, the French foreign minister commented: “Crisis Action offered the CAR religious leaders an international platform at a critical time when their calls for peace needed to be heard. Crisis Action’s collaboration with the faith leaders was of enormous support to the French government’s engagement in CAR.”¹²

SHARE KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE

Whether or not your organization is actively collaborating in a network, it can support other organizations by sharing relevant knowledge and expertise. Some organizations go further and provide training or support to peer organizations. Do this well and your nonprofit can facilitate cost-sharing and benefit the field as a whole. You can also potentially influence the thinking and strategies of the groups you help to educate, as well as the broader field.

We’ve pursued this approach from the earliest days of the Freedom Fund. We commission a lot of research and publish it all. We also publish a monthly bulletin of others’ key research developments across the field, so that all can benefit from this knowledge. In this spirit, we have also developed an online, publicly accessible resource containing all of our templates and systems for identifying, working with, funding, and evaluating grassroots NGOs. Our objective is to encourage funders to directly support grassroots organizations, and to provide them with the tools and templates to do so. Beyond this, we recognize that many other organizations with fewer resources will benefit from understanding our approach and learnings.^*

Some organizations go even further and provide funding to their peer organizations. They understand that this is a powerful way of shifting power and investing in collaborations. The Freedom Fund currently makes grants to over one hundred partner organizations. We have introduced new funding mechanisms, including a fund that provides unrestricted grants to survivor-led organizations and small grants to support inclusive convenings, in order to fill gaps that we’ve observed in the anti-trafficking movement.

Support does not need to be financial. Organizations can invest in coalitions by hosting others on their premises, sharing expertise or insider knowledge, or paying for partner staff from smaller organizations to attend convenings or participate in advocacy meetings. These modest investments can have an outsized impact in strengthening relationships.

OBSTACLES

Effective collaboration is difficult. None of the challenges are insurmountable, although, on occasion, the cost of overcoming obstacles may outweigh the benefits of collaboration. The calculation needs to be made on a case-by-case basis.

Almost invariably, one of the greatest perceived obstacles to better nonprofit collaboration is competition for funding and attention. Given nonprofits are often seeking funding from similar sources, they often hesitate to collaborate with their “competitors.” In my experience, this is generally a shortsighted perspective by nonprofits and one that is rarely welcomed by philanthropists. Effective collaboration can and should grow the funding pie, as it should make you better able to demonstrate progress and impact to donors. Second, donors rarely welcome cutthroat competition for their funding and are apt to look more kindly on organizations that are explicitly collaborative in nature. Collaboration also reduces the pressure on donors to pick a “winner” out of many worthy organizations.

Another common challenge is that, in an effort to build consensus, objectives become so watered down as to be meaningless. For example, if you are advocating to a legislator, you will usually be most effective if you have a clear ask, such as voting in support of a piece of legislation. But if you go to a policymaker simply telling them they need to “do something, urgently” without specifying what—perhaps because your coalition has not been able to agree on what to ask for—then you’ll be markedly less effective.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLEAR “ASK”

When Gareth Evans, my former boss at International Crisis Group, was foreign minister of Australia, he would often meet with human rights organizations who wanted to lobby him to act in response to an unfolding regional tragedy. In his recounting, they would come and tell him there was a pressing emergency, and he would agree. They would tell him the Australian government needed to do something and he would signal openness to action. But when he asked specifically what they wanted the government to do, more often than not they would say that was for the government to decide, not for them to recommend—likely because they hadn’t agreed upon a clear ask among themselves. As Gareth pointed out, this was a hugely wasted opportunity to advocate for a clear course of action to a receptive interlocutor.

Crisis Action identifies its advocacy “asks” by engaging with all its members to identify robust policy positions that have broad (though usually not uniform) support, and then gives members the option to sign on or pass, effectively creating a coalition of the willing behind a more robust policy position. Part of being a willing collaborator is accepting that not all partners will line up on every ask or campaign, and understanding that they have their own internal stances, dynamics, and priorities to manage.

Another challenge is that many leaders, and their boards, will be more focused on the growth of their organization and its revenue than on impact—especially impact that can’t be directly attributed to their organization. While this is not surprising, it’s a limited perspective and will often be counterproductive over the longer term in regard to foregone relationships and perceptions in the field.

Donors can also be impediments. While many enthusiastically support the idea of nonprofit collaboration, they often don’t design their funding practices to support it. For example, restricted funding and overly interventionist engagement actively undermine collaboration. On the other hand, donors can give a huge boost to collaboration by structuring their funding to supporting networks, backbone organizations, and sharing of resources.

Any nonprofit leader truly dedicated to the purpose of their organization will be focused on achieving the greatest possible impact over shorter-term organizational imperatives. However, the happy reality is that, in most cases, the two are mutually reinforcing, not in conflict. Generosity is generative in the nonprofit space, and effort spent trying to collaborate effectively with peers will usually bear dividends for the cause and your organization.

This concludes the section on partners. I hope these chapters have helped explain the centrality of your partners to everything your organization does. Effective nonprofit leaders embrace this reality. They put the people and communities they serve at the center of everything they do. They build resonant relationships with their funders to fuel their work, and they collaborate with other organizations to scale impact. Done well, working closely with your partners significantly increases the chances of your organization having an outsized impact in pursuit of its purpose.

PEER ORGANIZATIONS AND NETWORKS ACTION POINTS

Collaborate to Scale Impact

Recognize that collaboration can be a highly effective way to scale impact.

Identify shared interests or outcomes that peer organizations can coalesce around.

Share credit (and resources if you can) to increase the chances of collaboration succeeding.

Don’t settle for a lowest common denominator approach to collaboration. Rather, build consensus around a credible ask or strategy.

^* For example, “5 Reasons Why Child Marriage Affects Us All,” Camfed website, December 17, 2017, camfed.org/5-reasons-why-child-marriage-affects-us-all.

^* Not to be mistaken with International Crisis Group, a different and much more public conflict-prevention organization.

^* The initiative is called Funding Frontline Impact, and all the materials are available at www.fundingfrontlineimpact.org.

CONCLUSION

As I was in the final stages of writing this book, I returned to the place where my nonprofit journey began. It was a scorching summer’s day in the port of Fremantle, Western Australia. The sail training ship Leeuwin was tied up alongside “B-Shed” wharf—at the same berth I had first laid eyes on it more than thirty years before. Young crew members were ambling around the decks and one or two scampered up the rigging, wearing their blue canvas smocks and harnesses. I reminisced about some of the experiences I’d shared on that ship decades ago, from furling furiously billowing sails in howling gales to diving over the side into crystal clear ocean waters while at anchor. I reflected on how many young lives had been transformed over the decades through the opportunity to bond as makeshift teams in an unfamiliar environment while testing themselves against the elements.

I reflected, too, on the long and winding journey my career had taken since then and the many inspirational nonprofits I had worked for and with. Between them, they have spanned the globe and committed themselves to issues as diverse as armed conflict, modern slavery, child marriage, climate change, national security, and legal aid and poverty. In addition to everything else, the organizations I’ve been part of provide a snapshot of the huge diversity of nonprofits out there seeking to make the world a better place.

All of these nonprofits have a deep commitment to driving ambitious change. But even the most successful of them have only a fraction of the financial resources available to big corporate and government agencies. Lacking financial firepower, they have to rely on the power of their purpose and their ability to mobilize others, starting with their staff, around their vision for change. They have had to identify smart ways to change systems and collaborate to scale impact. They have been at the forefront of changing the world into an immeasurably better place in the nearly eighty years since the end of the last world war. And that’s despite the dire situation we find ourselves in today with the unfolding climate emergency; war in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere; mass migration on a scale never seen before; and a host of other pressing challenges. Think of those who have been in the vanguard of efforts to sound the alarm on climate over the last few decades; of movements against conflict and the dangers of authoritarianism; and of campaigns to support refugees and address the systemic factors that cause them to flee their homelands. Invariably they are nonprofits and nonprofit leaders.

Investing in the leadership of nonprofits is about investing in efforts to make the world a better place. To describe what good leadership looks like is straightforward enough—not that writing this book has been easy. It’s been a real challenge for me to distill what I’ve learned—from my experiences and those of others, as well as from the research—into something digestible, practical, and (hopefully) useful. I’ve struggled somewhat with sharing my own stories, particularly my missteps. But, all that said, the attributes of good nonprofit leadership are pretty clear. The real challenge for any leader is to actually internalize and apply them consistently.

The best nonprofit leaders I’ve encountered are those who combine a laser-like focus on their organization’s purpose and impact with humility about their own leadership. They know they always have more to learn from their peers and those they lead. They try to avoid raw exercises of authority over colleagues in favor of bringing them along on a journey. They invest heavily in teams and culture. They model the behaviors they want to see and create space for colleagues to take risks. And they always put the people and communities they serve at the very heart of the mission. This all takes a lot of work—in fact, in my case, it’s fair to say that it’s the work of a lifetime. But I can’t think of anything more rewarding.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was fortunate enough to get a sabbatical over the summer of 2022, and this gave me the time and the space to start reflecting and writing. I very much doubt this book would have happened without that time away from work, so my first thanks go to the then board members of the Freedom Fund for providing me with the opportunity, and for much more besides: Natasha Dolby, Andrew Doust, Grace Forrest, Molly Gochman, Felicity Gooding, Alan McCormick, Mahendra Pandey, and Philippe Sion. I want to give a particular shout-out to Alan, who was the hugely influential chair of the Freedom Fund for its first decade. I’m profoundly thankful for his support and wise guidance throughout our journey together. The Freedom Fund and I owe much to him. We also owe deep thanks to Molly for her willingness to succeed Alan as chair when he stepped down.

It’s daunting embarking on the writing journey, particularly as a first-time author. The experience was made considerably more enjoyable thanks to my dear friend Natasha Stott Despoja giving me the run of her family’s holiday house in Provence for the first weeks of my sabbatical, for which I’m most grateful.

It proved to be a particularly productive sabbatical. Not only did I make significant progress with the research and writing, but I also proposed to my partner, Sarah Le Mesurier. To my delight, she accepted, and as a result, we now have a wonderful, blended family, bringing together my daughters, Elza and Zoya, and Sarah’s, Cicely and Darcey. Sarah has impressive leadership experience herself, and I’ve hugely valued her wise counsel and thoughtful feedback throughout this process. She’s also brought much additional joy to my life, and I love her dearly. This book is dedicated to her, now my wife, and our four wonderful daughters.

Speaking of family, my parents, Richard and Monika, and my brother, Andrew, have all been exemplars of leadership through public service all their lives, and have all inspired me in ways large and small— which I far too rarely acknowledge, but hope to make up for that somewhat by doing so here.