Breaking Silos: Real Collaboration in Community Work
When Scale Becomes the Enemy of Transformation
The Day Everything Changed
Picture a neighborhood where everything was finally working. After years of fragmented efforts, a community quarterback had emerged, bringing together residents, schools, housing developers, health providers, and youth organizations around a shared vision. Philanthropic investors had made substantial commitments—not to individual organizations, but to the collective effort. The partners had done something remarkable: they had fundamentally changed how they operated.
The school had restructured their entire approach to family engagement. The housing developer had committed nearly their entire local production to align with the community's needs. The health center had embedded staff in the schools. Youth programs were coordinated rather than competing. Most importantly, community members weren't just consulted—they were decision-makers.
The data was undeniable. Test scores were climbing. Housing stability was improving. Health outcomes were trending upward. After decades of disinvestment, this neighborhood was becoming a model for how comprehensive, coordinated investment could create transformation.
Then came the announcement that shifted the entire ecosystem.
A major philanthropic foundation announced a massive multi-million dollar "city-wide transformation initiative." Suddenly, those same partner organizations that had spent years learning to work deeply in one place were being asked to scale their impact across the entire city. The temptation was irresistible—more funding, broader recognition, the chance to help more people.
Within months, the intensive focus that had driven breakthrough results began to fracture. Organizations started spreading their efforts thin. The weekly coordination meetings became monthly check-ins. The community quarterback found themselves managing a portfolio of initiatives rather than facilitating deep neighborhood change.
What happened next broke my heart, because I've seen it happen too many times. All the organizational behavior changes that had taken years to develop—the willingness to subordinate individual metrics to collective outcomes, the commitment to deep rather than broad programming, the courage to say no to opportunities that didn't serve the shared vision—began to erode.
This story isn't unique to one city or one set of organizations. It's the story of how the nonprofit sector's obsession with scale and the public sector's commitment to "fairness" consistently undermines the very transformation we claim to seek.
When More Becomes Less: The Seduction of Scale
There's something intoxicating about the idea of helping more people. When a foundation offers to fund your successful program in five additional neighborhoods, when a school district asks you to replicate your model across all their schools, when a city wants to take your housing approach citywide—it feels like success. It feels like impact.
But here's what I've learned after three decades in this work: scale without depth is activity without transformation.
The Organizational Behavior Reversal: When organizations that had learned to work collaboratively are suddenly incentivized to demonstrate individual impact across multiple sites, everything changes. The school that had restructured their entire family engagement approach to align with community partners suddenly needs to show results across twenty schools. The housing developer that had committed their local production to community priorities now needs to demonstrate citywide reach.
The behavioral changes that enabled breakthrough results—shared decision-making, integrated programming, community-driven priorities—become impossible to maintain at scale. Organizations revert to what they know: individual metrics, programmatic thinking, and surface-level coordination.
The Data Tells the Story: In the neighborhood where everything was working, organizations were measuring collective outcomes: family stability, neighborhood safety, educational progress, and health improvements. When scale became the priority, those collective metrics disappeared. Organizations returned to counting participants served, units built, and programs delivered.
The irony is devastating: in trying to help more people, we stopped helping anyone deeply enough to create lasting change.
Questions for Reflection:
What would happen if funders required organizations to demonstrate mastery in one place before funding expansion?
How might we redefine "impact" to value depth over breadth?
The Fairness Trap: How Equity Rhetoric Undermines Equity Outcomes
City governments and school districts face a challenge that nonprofits don't: they're accountable to all residents, not just those in one neighborhood. When a neighborhood starts receiving intensive, coordinated investment that produces dramatic results, elected officials inevitably face the question: "Why aren't you doing this everywhere?"
The Logic of Equal Distribution: The response is predictable and, on the surface, reasonable: spread the resources more broadly to ensure fairness. If one neighborhood has five organizations working in coordination, let's fund five organizations to work in five different neighborhoods. If one school is receiving intensive support, let's provide some support to all schools.
The Mathematics of Dilution: But transformation doesn't work like paint—you can't thin it out and cover more surface area while maintaining the same impact. When you take the intensive collaboration that was creating breakthrough results in one place and spread it across five places, you don't get one-fifth the impact in each location. You often get zero transformation anywhere.
The Real-World Consequences: In the neighborhood that was working, the community quarterback had built trust across sectors and with residents over years. When city leaders decided to replicate the model in four additional neighborhoods simultaneously, they didn't have four additional quarterback organizations with that level of community credibility and cross-sector relationships. Instead, they had organizations struggling to build the foundation for collaboration while being expected to demonstrate immediate results.
The Political Pressure: Elected officials face real constraints. How do you justify intensive investment in one area when others are struggling? How do you explain to a school board that one school deserves more resources than another? The political pressure for parity is real and understandable.
But Here's the Truth: Sustainable transformation requires finishing what you start. Half-built bridges don't improve transportation; they waste resources and disappoint communities. The same is true for neighborhood development.
A Different Approach: What if we measured fairness differently? Instead of equal distribution of resources, what if we measured equal access to transformation? Start small, go deep, prove what works, then methodically replicate the model—but only after achieving breakthrough results in the initial site.
Questions for Public Leaders:
How might you frame intensive investment as a pilot that will ultimately benefit all neighborhoods?
What would it look like to create a replication timeline based on results rather than political pressure?
Crossing the Finish Line: Why Completion Matters More Than Coverage
One of the biggest challenges in community development is that we rarely define what "finished" looks like. We start initiatives without clear endpoints, measure progress without defining completion, and declare success based on activity rather than transformation.
The Neighborhood That Was Almost There: The neighborhood in our story was approaching something remarkable: they were nearing what I call "community sustainability"—the point where positive outcomes become self-reinforcing rather than dependent on external intervention.
Test scores weren't just improving; they were consistently high across all student populations. Housing wasn't just stable; property values were appreciating while affordability was protected. Health outcomes weren't just better; residents were becoming health advocates for each other. Youth weren't just participating in programs; they were designing and leading initiatives.
The Elements of Completion: True completion in neighborhood transformation includes:
Systems Integration: Partners work together naturally, not through forced coordination
Community Leadership: Residents drive priorities and decision-making
Economic Sustainability: Local assets and businesses support neighborhood vitality
Institutional Commitment: Schools, health centers, and other anchors are invested in long-term success
Outcome Consistency: Positive results are sustained even when individual leaders change
The Investment Required: Getting to this finish line typically requires 7-10 years of intensive, coordinated effort. Not 7-10 years of scattered programming, but sustained, collaborative investment where partners fundamentally change how they operate.
Why We Stop Short: Organizations and funders often abandon this approach just as it's beginning to work because:
New opportunities arise that seem more exciting
Political pressure demands broader distribution of resources
Success attracts attention that leads to premature scaling
Long-term thinking feels less urgent than immediate needs
The Cost of Incompletion: When we abandon comprehensive efforts before completion, we don't just fail to achieve transformation—we often leave communities worse off. Residents who invested hope and time in collaborative processes become cynical about future efforts. Organizations revert to siloed work that's less effective than their previous coordination. Trust that took years to build erodes quickly.
The Community Quarterback's Choice: But here's what happened in our story that offers hope: the work didn't completely fall apart. While partner organizations were pulled away by the allure of scale, the community quarterback faced a choice. They could accept the erosion of the collaborative model, or they could adapt to preserve the transformation that was within reach.
They chose adaptation. When the youth organization scaled back their intensive neighborhood presence, the quarterback developed their own youth programming. When the health partner reduced their embedded services, the quarterback created community health advocate positions. When housing coordination weakened, they expanded their own housing counseling capacity.
This wasn't mission creep—it was mission preservation. The quarterback understood that their job wasn't to coordinate partners at any cost, but to ensure the community reached the finish line by whatever means necessary.
The Quarterback's True Test: This reveals something critical about the community quarterback role: it's not just about facilitating collaboration when it's easy, but about maintaining focus on community-defined outcomes when collaboration becomes difficult. Sometimes that means doing the work yourself. Sometimes it means finding new partners. Sometimes it means calling former partners back to their commitments.
The quarterback that survives the scale pressure and reaches the finish line is the one willing to transform themselves as many times as necessary to serve the vision the community entrusted to them.
Questions for Leaders:
What would it mean to commit to finishing what you've started before beginning something new?
How might you define completion for your current community development efforts?
The Leadership We Need: Choosing Depth Over Breadth
To Funders: Insist on the Finish Line The most transformative thing philanthropic leaders could do is resist the temptation to fund scale before depth. Instead of asking, "How many neighborhoods can you serve?" ask, "How will you know when you've succeeded in this neighborhood?" Fund completion, not expansion.
Create incentive structures that reward organizations for the hard work of going deep rather than the easier path of going broad. Measure success by transformation achieved, not people served.
To Nonprofit Leaders: Choose Courage Over Comfort The pressure to scale is real, but the choice is yours. Organizations that have learned to create breakthrough results through intensive collaboration have a responsibility to model a different way forward.
This means having the courage to turn down funding that would dilute your impact. It means defending depth over breadth in board meetings and with peer organizations. It means measuring success by lives changed, not grants received.
To Public Sector Leaders: Reframe Fairness True fairness isn't giving everyone the same resources—it's giving everyone the same access to transformation. This requires starting somewhere, finishing what you begin, and then methodically replicating what works.
Build political support for intensive investment by framing it as a pilot that will ultimately benefit all neighborhoods. Create timelines for replication based on results, not political cycles.
To Community Leaders: Demand Completion Communities deserve partners who will see transformation through to the finish line. Hold organizations accountable not just for showing up, but for staying until the work is done.
Advocate for depth over breadth in your own neighborhood while supporting other communities' efforts to achieve the same level of intensive investment.
The Discipline to Finish What We Start
The neighborhood in our story isn't fictional—it's a composite of communities across the country where breakthrough results were achieved through intensive collaboration, then abandoned in pursuit of scale. Every time this happens, we learn the same lesson: transformation requires finishing what we start.
The organizations that had learned to subordinate individual success to collective impact, the residents who had become decision-makers rather than just consultees, the funders who had committed to long-term investment—they had created something rare and valuable. They had nearly reached the finish line.
But scale seduced them away from completion. The promise of helping more people overcame the discipline of helping some people completely.
The Choice Before Us: We have a choice as a field. We can continue the cycle of starting comprehensive efforts, achieving preliminary results, then abandoning them for the next shiny opportunity. Or we can develop the discipline to finish what we start.
This requires different behavior from everyone involved:
Funders who value completion over expansion
Organizations that choose depth over breadth
Public leaders who reframe fairness as equal access to transformation
Community members who demand partners committed to the finish line
The Questions We Must Answer:
What would your community look like if every collaborative effort was sustained until completion?
How would your organization's approach change if you were required to finish your current work before starting something new?
What partnerships could you deepen rather than expand?
The Invitation: The neighborhood transformation that almost happened is still possible. Not just there, but in communities across the country where organizations are willing to choose courage over comfort, depth over breadth, and completion over expansion.
The finish line is reachable. But only if we have the discipline to cross it.