Collaboration is rarely easy or straightforward, but through neutrality and brokerage LGBT Consortium brought 35 organisations from its 300-strong membership together, resulting in over £500k of new investment. Here’s how they did it.

By Paul Roberts 

I was intrigued to read the recent research from the FSI on collaboration and pleased that I was given the opportunity to feed into the research. What shocked me the most was discovering only 10% of organisations appear to be collaborating in any meaningful way, and it has led us to reflect on our own practice as we strive to ensure collaboration drives everything we do.

The word collaboration is something we hear all the time, and while for some it seems a very natural thing to do, for others it can either fill them with dread or just utter confusion. What does it mean to collaborate? How do we do it? When do we do it? How do we know what we are doing is meaningful collaboration?

These are all questions I myself have had to grapple with over the years as the CEO of the national umbrella body for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans voluntary and community organisations. While there have been more head-scratching moments than I care to remember when exploring what collaboration means to us, it is something that has shaped the direction of our organisation, and brought us closer than ever to our membership of nearly 300 LGBT organisations across the UK.

So why is collaboration so important to LGBT Consortium?

We are an infrastructure body that exists for our members and must act in a way that supports them at every opportunity. Not only that, we represent organisations that cover vast geographical areas and differing subject matters, and that vary massively in size. We might not be an expert in every aspect of issues affecting LGBT people, but what we are experts in is neutrality and brokerage – two things that have proved vital for our role in seeking meaningful collaboration across LGBT organisations.

We have a fundamental principle across all of our work, which helps to maintain the trust and confidence our members have in us as their umbrella body: we will not compete against them when it comes to funding. I am a firm believer that for infrastructure bodies to be successful, this is something that can never be compromised and solidifies the need for our existence. Our members know that when opportunities arise for the LGBT sector, we promote them widely and offer our expertise in brokerage to bring the right people to the table.

All great in theory, but does this really work in practice?

Yes! Let me share with you a fantastic example which has changed the shape of collaboration for the LGBT sector. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) wanted to invest in projects to address homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime. They already had a traditional model of investing, which would see lots of small projects funded to do local work. Now don’t get me wrong, local work is vital to address key social problems, but our vision was to shift this dynamic to something that was nationally driven, while locally delivered.

We drew together 35 partner organisations, who covered all geographies (across England, Wales and Scotland), who varied in size (from totally volunteer run through to million-pound turnovers) and who provided expertise in many cross-cutting areas (e.g. bisexuality, disability, housing).

We knew not everyone had the capacity to deliver the same outputs so we carefully structured a project that allowed organisations to do as little or as much as they could, but that had common strands of work that everything could be hooked onto.

We also knew that frontline organisations want to deliver tangible work to help individuals, so our stake in this was not only to see sector collaboration, but also to ease the pressure of funder requirements by facilitating monitoring, evaluation and data collection. We were able to provide a purely project management role for the contract, having a dedicated member of staff who had oversight of all partners, key links to be made, liaison with external stakeholders and a clear route to the funder at all times. This proved invaluable, allowing partners to do what they do best, while allowing us to also do what we do best – the perfect match.

Proving that wide-scale collaboration works

The result of this innovative thinking was over £500k being invested by the EHRC into the LGBT sector, through the single largest partnership the sector has ever seen. It has been independently evaluated – giving us both the track record and the evidence to prove that wide-scale collaboration can and does work.

We have established a working model that means when the next opportunity arises, we have the building blocks for successful projects before we have even started writing any application, meaning we can focus precious bid-writing time on the real work and not the structure.

Of course, collaboration doesn’t happen overnight, and nor does it always run smoothly – but then what does?! Funding is scarce and resource is limited, which leads to added competition. In these situations, you either become more fiercely competitive or you find a way of working available monies more effectively, achieving – to use a dreaded government phrase – value for money.

Enabling greater innovation, building resilience

I am a firm believer that by working creatively together, we can provide the positive interventions and solutions that a range of funders are looking for. There are fantastic ideas out there, but not enough money to put them all into practice. Bring that creativity together and explore the common threads among partners, and the result is work that can be truly called innovative.

This model of collaboration is something that guides all our fundraising efforts now. Our internal motto is “Everything in collaboration”. We need to survive as an organisation – but so do our individual members. By working together and using everyone’s expertise in the best way, there is room for us all to thrive, and remain a resilient LGBT sector.

We have built vital trust and confidence across a wide range of organisations, so they now think about collaborating before competing.

We are all still learning in this process and I am sure there will mistakes made along the way but it is our duty to support positive solutions to those problems, so the drive to collaborate is a natural one and not something we feel has been forced upon us by funders and commissioners.

Trust, confidence and clear agreements

My parting thoughts will hopefully help you in your journey of collaboration: Trust and confidence is fundamental – without it we cannot understand how each other works and what we all stand for. All partners need support in recognising their own capacity and capability – it is not the amount of work that partners deliver, but the impact of the work undertaken by those partners.

Clear agreements result in less confusion – we all need clear actions and outputs to work to and these must be defined early on so everything fits into a clear, collaborative picture.

Paul Roberts OBE is chief executive of LGBT Consortium @lgbtconsortium.