"You need a thing'.

So much this week... A few highlights from the first half. (Pics are of the CSH's office in New Haven, Connecticut, and the subway sign next to New York City Hall, which I visited yesterday.)

Monday: spent the morning with Richard Cho and colleagues in the Corporation for Supportive Housing, in New Haven Connecticut. They are a non-profit, working with local government agencies to promote collaboration over prisoner re-entry. In particular, trying to get housing and welfare to join up to help former prisoners find work - which in turn reduces reoffending. The coll

aboration in New Haven has been going for over 15 years, so it’s a mature one and it really has made a difference. So much so that they won an award from the Harvard Kennedy School for Government, for innovation.

There were lots of great insights from this meeting. One of my favourites was the idea of having a neutral party with a stake in the whole solution. This is the role that CSH plays. The week before, I’d been talking to people who had this whole system view, but invariably they were the ones at the top of the tree, with the convening power and often with the money. I’d started to think that using this positional power was essential. But actually it’s also the ‘whole system’ view that is essential. What a good idea - appointing someone inside the collaboration to hold this view too so that they’re pressurising from the side, not just from the top.

Tuesday: I met Diane Baillargeon, former CEO of Seedco and now on President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships. Over 12 years, Diane was able to work with community groups, getting Government contracts worth, in the end, up to $45m for them to provide Welfare to Work services - and therefore ensuring that local people rather than private corporations got to benefit from these contracts, plus ensuring that those who needed work were being looked after by their own communities.

We talked around all sorts of things - having a sort of ‘price of admission’ (not an actual financial amount) - where Seedco could afford, at that point, to insist to the incoming community group, ‘if you want to play in this territory, then you must... (collect this data, work this way)'. But in return, Seedco would work hard to respect its collaborators. They weren’t seen simply as sub-contractors, but as partners, to whom Seedco made a long term commitment and promised to take the burden for some of the riskier upfront costs. My favourite bit of the meeting with Diane was when she boiled it all down at the end and said, “This is messy. Not clean. And you need a thing. You can’t collaborate without a thing that you're all committed to. So don’t put your energy into collaboration unless it’s worth it, and the thing is worth it.”