I have a sign on my desk that says “collaborate” with an exclamation point on it, because it’s really the only way things get accomplished in communities.
I became involved through a very large grant that we were administering with a group that was developing a concept called strategic doing.
And strategic doing is a process for helping to solve gnarly problems in the civic space.
I recognized that community colleges have a responsibility to serve as that convener in a lot of cases. It’s about getting the right people to the table.
It doesn’t always mean powerful people. It just means the right people. It means building achievable goals and leverage. A term I use all the time is “link and leverage”. Identify and connect the resources that are already there to come up with a sustainable solution.
There’s a global group that we work with in strategic doing based in Belgium. I was a speaker at one of their online panels recently. I talked about a concept that we developed called a “no overhead organization”.
Let’s go back to the North Carolina manufacturing Institute for a second. That was created using strategic doing. Each group pitched in something to make it happen.
And as a result, so we vowed that we would not do a few things. We wouldn’t apply for a grant. If we apply for a grant, as soon as the grant funds are gone, the program will die. We also said that we will commit to ongoing support of this with the resources that we already have, so long as it continues to benefit the organization.
What we created was that no overhead organization. One organization created and supported the website. One did all the billing and the finances. One did all the marketing and advertising. Everybody agreed to do all these things because they were going to get benefit out of it.
Here we are nine years into it. The no overhead organization kept us sustainable. When we ask our partners for financial investment, we can assure them that 100% of what they give us will go towards the scholarship to support one student through the program.