Health Fund grantees engage with communities across Michigan to tackle important health challenges and address the social determinants that influence health. This is complex work: Collaborating across sectors is often the key to meaningful and lasting change.
That concept is the foundation for the Health Fund’s Collaborative Capacity Building grant program, which supports cross-sectoral collaboration designed to spur progress on health issues.
These grants provide resources to foster effective collaborations, but we also recognize that health leaders can benefit from support on how to collaborate to make the most of their partnerships. To help, the Health Fund has engaged Healthy Places by Design to offer a cohort-based learning program called Collaboration Lab, which provides a rare opportunity for formal collaboration training.
To explain the Collaboration Lab model, impact, and the collaborative practices it teaches, we invited Phil Bors and Jamie Elliott from Healthy Places by Design to share more in the following guest post.
Healthy Places by Design — a national non-profit committed to advancing community-led action and place-based solutions for health and well-being — co-created Collaboration Lab to equip local leaders with the skills necessary to collaborate to solve complex problems.
Collaboration Lab is a learning experience that guides collaborative leaders through a 10-month journey to create healthier communities through cross-sector collaboration. Participants bring their perspectives and diverse backgrounds to the learning space that prioritizes peer exchange and practical application of key concepts.
Collaboration Lab helps participants develop a deeper self-awareness, facilitate dialogue, support system-wide collaborations, and create a culture of collective action. Each session prioritizes the participants’ needs, leans into their experiences, and builds relationships across the group.
The curriculum is centered on the “3P Model,” which emphasizes the importance of People, Process, and Planning for successful collaboratives. Collaboration Lab incorporates practical resources created by Healthy Places by Design and experts in the field to dive deeply into topics such as inclusive community engagement, self-assessment, leadership skills, ingredients for successful collaboratives, evaluation, planning for equitable outcomes, and more.
The Health Fund’s 2023-2024 Collaboration Lab cohort included leaders from 14 diverse organizations, which included a public health department, community foundations, two United Way agencies, older-adult support services, and health/education advocacy groups. These examples highlight how an intentional focus on collaboration has benefited their work.
- Esperanza Cantú, Senior Director, Community Information Exchange & Integration Services at the United Way for Southeastern Michigan described Collaboration Lab as a “fellowship” of like-minded change agents. As a result of her participation in the cohort, she changed the way her teams work together, making collaboration a shared goal as stewards of the resources that the United Way deploys in its community. The 3P Model helped frame their exploration in becoming a more collaborative intermediary with their nonprofit, government, and community partners.
- Kat Hutton, Program Director for MiGEN, described their own struggles with a partnership experiencing low enthusiasm and a lack of progress. Their experience in Collaboration Lab prompted the group to slow down and hold an “honest conversation” about why the collaborative no longer seemed aligned with the needs of LGBTQ+ elders. This step enabled key partners to reorient how they could better provide critical services through events that first prioritized bringing people together.
- Ally Hunter, Virtual Care Consultant for Henry Ford Health, works with the Southeast Michigan Coalition for Older Adults in a Virtual World to create a curriculum for medical residents providing virtual care for older adults. Ally and her partners applied principles and practical tips from a Collaboration Lab resource, “Engaging People with Lived/Living Experience.” Ally’s team incorporated older adults into the curriculum design for clinical care providers. To be inclusive, they held accessible meetings with older adults virtually, at various times, and with multiple options for providing input to accommodate different literacy levels. Applying this type of inclusive design thinking will ultimately improve the cultural capacity of providers as well as the care delivered to older adults.
For further reading about these related collaborative practices, check out these resources:
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- Key Ingredients to Successful Collaboratives
- External resource: 4 Agendas in Collaborative Innovation, CoCreative
- External resource: Engaging People with Lived/Living Experience, Tamarack Institute
- Healthy Places by Design’s 3P Model and Collaboration Lab page.
Collaborative leaders must attend to people, group process, and collective planning in ways that are inclusive and seek equitable outcomes. Healthy collaboratives conduct honest, and often difficult, conversations to move partners to reconnect with each other and their collective vision. And by integrating community members’ lived experiences and contributions to address social determinants of health, we create more meaningful and impactful solutions.
Traditional leadership styles often fall short as we aim to create healthy and vibrant communities because they fail to engage people for a deeper understanding of the problems people face, missing the opportunity to leverage collective power to carrying out solutions. Collaborative leadership provides a more effective and inclusive way of working together to tackle problems like food insecurity, inadequate housing, and other barriers to health.
For more information on Collaboration Lab, click here. To find out more about the Health Fund’s previous Capacity Building grants, please check out our grant database.