4 Examples of Power Shared
“Collaboration is power shared.” – Jack Ricchiuto
Working together to achieve a shared purpose – collaboration – requires us to share power with others. However, when it comes to power we’ve been trained to hoard and aggregate it, not share it. Recently, I wrote about the difference between authority, power and leadership. And emphasized that sharing power is an essential act of leadership in collaborative environments.
Now I want to share four examples of how I’ve seen power being shared in ways that helped communities move forward. I want to emphasize that none of these examples are without their challenges and flaws – nothing in the civic arena works perfectly. But they do demonstrate that power can be shared and when it is good things happen.
One Member, One Vote: In the early 2000s several funders in Northeast Ohio began to explore whether and how they might pool dollars to support economic efforts across a diverse geography that included four distinct metropolitan areas. Advocates of the idea wanted to raise as much money as possible from a diverse group of funders. Those advocates primarily came from large foundations. To generate interest, they made multi-million-dollar commitments to the pool. Unsurprisingly, smaller funders were skeptical about their ability to influence decisions since their contributions to the pool would be much smaller. One leader of a small community foundation said board members were convinced that the funding pool was just another ploy by big players to suck dollars from their smaller community. That perspective shifted when the big players agreed to share power by establishing a “one member, one vote” decision-making structure. Funding decisions would be made by a majority vote of members of the fund, called the Fund for Our Economic Future. To be a member, entities had to commit at least $100,000 over three years. That commitment gave them one vote. Those that committed millions of dollars also got one vote. For once, more money didn’t automatically mean more power. Dozens of smaller funders joined the Fund. This year it is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It wouldn’t have been possible without shared power.
Trust the Community: As happened in many communities during the Covid pandemic, leaders in Lorain County, Ohio, pooled resources to create an emergency response fund. In most communities, the powerful institutions that formed the fund decided how the funds would be distributed. Not in Lorain County. Instead, they asked grass roots leaders in the community to decide how the funds should be distributed. The institutional leaders recognized that those closest to those in need were best able to allocate the resources. The power to raise money doesn’t always have to turn into the power to decide how that money is used.
Host, Don’t Control: Health outcomes in the Mahoning Valley regularly ranked near the bottom of the rankings in Ohio. Shari Harrell, the now-retired CEO of the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, wasn’t willing to tolerate that status quo and committed the foundation to catalyzing a collective, community effort to improve health outcomes. The Healthy Community Partnership of the Mahoning Valley has been hosted by the Foundation for seven years, but it isn’t run by the Foundation. A diverse steering committee sets the strategy and allocates the budget. Funding comes from the Foundation, affiliated foundations and other funders. The Foundation has the power to control much of what the Partnership does. But it doesn’t exercise that power. Instead, it defers to the steering committee. In a place with a long, painful history of powerful entities (ranging from steel mills to the mafia) calling the shots, many now see HCP’s approach as the new way forward for the community.
Primary Actors Decide: Advocates of civic collaboration often advocate for engaging “individuals with lived experience,” a clunky term for the people most affected by the issues being addressed by the collective effort. Cynthia Rayner and Francois Bonnici, in their book The Systems Work of Social Change, use the term “primary actors” and make the case that the most successful system change efforts are shaped by them. The funders, policy makers, service providers and consultants that work on the collective effort are referred to as “supporting actors.” While “primary actors” are often consulted in the development and implementation of collective efforts, rarely do they shape, influence or decide strategies and tactics. An exception is A Place 4 Me, a collective effort to end youth and young adult homelessness in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The name of the effort was chosen by youth and young adults in 2014 when the effort was started with the leadership of the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland. And since then, youth and young adults have served on its governance bodies and the “primary actors” have shaped a wide variety of decisions ranging from locations for service delivery to the scope of federal grant proposals. Sharing power with the primary actors often is challenging and frustrating for the supporting actors, but they’ve learned that the messiness is worth it as sharing power results in better policies, programs and outcomes.
Sharing power isn’t easy. But hoarding and aggregating power has not resulted in the outcomes we want in the communities that we care about. It’s well past time that we learn from others and do the hard, messy work of sharing power.
