Focus On: Collaboration by Torri Estrada
 Collaborations, partnerships, coalitions, and alliances are some of the most difficult endeavors to envision, develop, lead, and maintain in environmental and social change work. They require careful planning, honest and upfront communication, facilitative skill, and knowing when to call it quits. However, in certain instances, collaborations have the potential to reap rewards and impacts far beyond those that can be achieved by any one individual or organization. In this issue of Environmental Leadership News, several ELP Fellows discuss the opportunities and challenges of building collaborations across various constituencies, sectors, geographies, and interests in the environmental field.
Collaborations can come in the form of a partnership (such as Environmental Defense's Partnership for Climate Action), a coalition or political alliance (such as Environment 2004), or network (such as the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice). Each of these formations can be organized around an issue or set of issues, a key constituency, or groups defined by race, geography, class, or sector. Collaborations may seek to share resources (in the form of financial, human, and technological resources), take advantage of others' strengths and unique strategies, build political and economic power, and/or build legitimacy for a given perspective or solution.
In building collaborations, it is important to be clear and upfront about common core goals. Typically, collaborations are defined by the coming together of organizations who share "lowest common denominator" interests. However, in the end, the long-term viability of such collaborations will rely on the members' ability to work through conflict and difference. Further, although it sounds obvious, each organization must decide if it will truly benefit from the defined collaboration and also must join of its free will. For example, organizations may join a coalition to belong without really identifying how they would benefit from the relationship. Conversely, many collaborations will seek to involve key organizations for legitimacy or other reasons, sometimes without providing the space for such groups to fully understand what benefits they would derive from participating. Lastly, the collaboration should have an intentional set of identifiable and measurable goals and a sense of knowing when they have been accomplished.
Although rarely discussed, leadership is a central ingredient in forming collaborations, especially coalitions for social change and advocacy. While a collaboration benefits from charismatic spokespeople, it also requires skilled facilitative leaders who can mediate between organizational interests, needs, conflicts, and varied experiences and backgrounds.
Closely related to the issue of leadership is the structure and decisionmaking process of a collaborative effort. A collaboration must be able to secure and equitably allocate resources, and requires a decision-making process that allows for representation of the most powerful as well as the least powerful. Without such capability, collaborations become sole proprietorships where the legitimacy, strengths, and identity of less powerful members are used for individual gain. Also, a collaboration must define how its members will share public credit, recognition, and the kudos that come from them.
In my experience, collaborative formations are not the norm due to many barriers in the external political, economic, and social environment. First and foremost, the current nonprofit advocacy model in the U.S. has been structured along the lines of corporate competition and efficiency, where each nonprofit has to demonstrate that it is outperforming other nonprofits in creating environmental and social change. Second, and in part driving the former, progressive foundations fuel nonprofit competition in the struggle to secure a portion of the limited pool of short-term, project-driven funding. Lastly, and most importantly, collaborations exist within a larger society characterized by inequality, lack of democratic decisionmaking and accountability, racial, class, gender, and other social divisions, and the "every person for him/herself" mentality that collectively undermine many of the key characteristics collaborations must achieve to be viable and effective.
Like any relationship, collaborations are defined by the ups and downs of working out issues of difference, experiencing glimpses of success, and realizing that they take hard work, commitment, and maintenance. While collaborations must measure achievement towards their agreed goals and products, the very process of building relationships and collaborative social capital is in and of itself an important factor for defining success.
The environmental movement should consider collaboration as an important strategic tool in its arsenal. Increasingly, environmental leaders must turn to other progressive movements and constituencies - including the growing majority of people of color and immigrant communities - to build sufficient political power not only to protect and restore the environment, but also to achieve the social and economic justice that environmentalism depends upon.
Torri Estrada is a program officer at the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, where he is responsible for grantmaking in environmental justice, global justice and democracy, civil and constitutional rights, and media reform. Torri also is co-director of Environmental Justice Solutions. Previously, Torri was a senior policy fellow with the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water and director of the Latino Issues Forum's Environment and Sustainable Development Program.
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