GENUINE COLLABORATIONS: Looking Back to Look Forward

By Erica Joos

Throughout my interdisciplinary, professional, and academic career in education and community engagement, I have found one of the most overwhelmingly used terms is collaboration. 

Without any strict parameters, agreed-upon definitions, or protocols for accountability, the term is inserted in mission and vision statements, strategic plans, and founding documents for organizations. The intent isn’t malicious but, it does present an opportunity: when we have the chance, it feels right to sit and reflect on what we consider collaboration to be, ways it’s been successful, and ways it hasn’t. More specifically, we need to inquire how it’s acted to the detriment or even exploitation of groups of people it’s meant to uplift, amplify, and serve. 

Looking Back: Identifying the Gaps to Strengthen Them

When I think back to the countless classrooms, boardrooms, city hall chambers, and coffee shops I’ve sat in where leaders speak to the importance of creating opportunities that are collaborative, I wish there had been more specificity. What we’re truly trying to build are mutually beneficial relationships. This mutuality means collaborations that are sustainable, equitable, and co-creative—highlighting and utilizing all parties’ assets and fulfilling needs and goals in the most equitable manner. 

One of these experiences was during my tenure as City Arts Commissioner when I had the privilege to spearhead a collaboration between the Arts Commission (a spoke of the City Council that oversees the arts and culture grants programs and acts as an advocacy body for artists and arts organizations) and the Human Relations Commission, another arm of City Council that works in community-initiated activities that focus on or raise awareness of civil rights, human rights, or equity issues. 

As a young Commissioner, I had an intuitive understanding that while arts and culture are inherently related to human identity, there are pervasive and systemic barriers for people to equitably participate in them. In my specific context, the city and its Arts Commission, to date, had done little to create systems and structures that not only removed these barriers, but also increased access to resources for individual and community arts projects that would enhance representation of varying demographics in the arts as well. Thus, I set out to create a partnership between the Arts Commission and the Human Relations Commission to better address the gaps of the Arts Commission’s grants program through a series of recommendations and collaborations with the Human Relations Commission. The result of the collaboration was enormous and paved the way for more equitable practices across City Council to sustainably take hold.

Looking Forward: Systematizing the Good for Good

Like all professional practitioners, I find enormous value in looking back at experiences like this one and reflecting on not just what went well, but what could have been done better. Not only that, but also wonder how teams, organizations, and schools can really mechanize that kind of mutual, sustainable, equitable, and co-creative collaboration we all hope to achieve. 

In my wondering, I was reminded of Amy Edmonson, Tiziana Casciaro, and Sujin Jang’s (2019) article titled “Cross-Silo Leadership: How to create more value by connecting experts from inside and outside the organization.”  The article succinctly outlines four practices that organizations can follow to enable the most effective collaborations: 

  1. Develop and deploy cultural brokers

  2. Encourage people to ask the right questions

  3. Get people to see the world through others’ eyes

  4. Broaden your peoples’ vision

While this article was published in the Harvard Business Review, its relevance to arts and culture organizations is undeniable. From my experience, so many of the arts and culture organizations I’ve worked with already do these practices. In fact, one may argue that given the social and civic connections arts and culture organizations almost always engage in, they have a leg up in creating systems and structures that can more easily and effectively systematize the “good” kind of collaboration to truly uplift, amplify, and serve in the most generative and equitable ways possible. 

An Opportunity to Learn More

We, in our field, are well on our way to understand these types of intersections. To dive deeper into some of these topics, you can check out resources published in the last few years by my colleagues:

It is essential that we continue to learn - and share our learnings - in this process. All that may be needed is a shared language to describe the kind of magic and collaboration that’s already in motion.