Foreword
Twenty-five years ago—before the era of corporate social responsibility, before the publication of the significant body of academic literature on cross-sector collaboration that this book comprehensively synthesizes and insightfully elaborates—a cold call came in to the corporate offices of the Timberland Company from City Year, the then-fledgling nonprofit.
City Year was launching a corps of fifty young people in Boston to demonstrate the power of national service to unite diverse American youth, solve pressing social problems, and bolster our nation’s democracy. The nonprofit was in search of boots because it wanted to unify its members in appearance and spirit and protect them during physically demanding service projects. Timberland answered the call and donated fifty pair. This in-kind donation began what would evolve into a rich partnership, one that the two of us—as leaders of our two organizations through the most robust years of this partnership—are proud to call, in Jim Austin and May Seitanidi’s language, transformational.
Over the past quarter of a century, more than eighteen thousand City Year corps members in twenty-four cities nationwide have given a year of service in their Timberland boots. At the same time, Timberland, with inspiration from City Year, has embedded a deep ethos of service into the company’s culture, advocating—for its employees and for everyone else—the importance of doing well and doing good.
We have to admit that in the early days of our partnership, we had no rules—no effective framework to guide our collaboration. It was a little like cutting our way through a thick forest, clearing a path to partnership. But even though we had no rules, we did have regular discussions about how to invent the rules. And over time we developed processes and systems for our collaboration. They worked, and our partnership flourished.
But imagine having a road map for a transformational partnership, a map drawn from a rich field of research, a map featuring illustrative examples taken from nonprofit–business collaborations that have co-generated real value for the participating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the companies alike. That road map is what this book provides. Not only does it review the large corpus of literature on the topic of cross-sector collaboration and provide an impressive list of bibliographical resources for readers who want to delve deeper, it also—and this is perhaps more important—finds and fills in or clarifies the blank spots and gray areas in current research and practice. In these ways, this book offers readers a new conceptual and analytical framework, one that, as an outgrowth of the coauthors’ earlier seminal work, is highly applicable to the needs of practitioners. The presentation of this framework is accompanied by vivid examples of company–nonprofit collaborations that illustrate each of the framework’s concepts, and the book includes a superb final chapter that lays out twelve smart practices, based on the framework, for maximizing collaborative value creation.
As we look back over the quarter century of our partnership, the concepts presented in this book ring true to us. To take just one example, we actually did evolve through the collaboration continuum discussed in Chapter Four, moving from the philanthropic phase to the transactional phase to the integrative phase and finally to the transformational phase.
That first gift of boots from Timberland to City Year was philanthropic, but we almost instantly made the transition to the transactional phase. On the one hand, Timberland became City Year’s uniform provider, donating not only boots but all uniform parts and becoming a lead corporate sponsor. On the other hand, City Year led staff service days and diversity trainings for Timberland—City Year’s goal was never just to get a check; from the beginning of the organization, City Year asked its sponsors to get involved, to come out and do service, and to start seeing service as a vehicle for bringing people together.
As our collaboration grew, we were also quick to understand that our partnership was about much more than what each of us could get from or do for the other. And so we moved from the transactional phase to the integrative phase, and somewhere along the way we entered the transformational phase. Jeffrey Swartz joined the City Year board and later assumed the position of chair and helped lead the organization through a period of expansion. Timberland made a total corporate commitment to City Year, directing the vast majority of its philanthropic dollars to the organization. At the same time, Timberland’s unique culture of service began to take root through the company’s very close collaboration with Michael Brown, with his City Year co-founder Alan Khazei, and with their colleagues at the nonprofit. As a result, service essentially became an element of the company’s DNA. For example, Timberland’s Serv-a-Palooza eventually grew into a worldwide day of service across two dozen nations, and the company launched its “path of service,” through which employees are granted paid time off to serve their communities.
Jeff had a vision of building on his grandfather’s breakthrough product (the boots) and his father’s corporate success (the Timberland brand) by adding a unique, powerful, authentic contribution—belief. And soon the boots, brand, belief formula came into sharp focus. It was a powerful formula for a rapidly rising company, and it helped define what an authentic, high-quality lifestyle brand can aspire to and achieve. As for City Year, its transformational partnership with Timberland led to an organizational DNA that has generated a series of transformational corporate partnerships. These have helped to build a dynamic national organization and to inspire an innovative federal program of national service that by its very design requires high-quality nonprofit–private sector partnerships.
The framework presented in this book is a remarkable one. But it represents only one of the many helpful and resonant concepts captured in the pages that follow. For example, one of the most compelling concepts that the coauthors present is the idea of synergistic value, whereby two partners collaborate to produce an innovation that neither could have produced alone. And, indeed, although we are proud of everything that City Year and Timberland have done together over the many years of our partnership, there is no instance of synergistic value that we are more proud of than our having come together to champion the founding of AmeriCorps in the halls of Congress and to help make it possible for more than 775,000 young Americans to date, including City Year’s corps members, to serve their country.
At City Year and Timberland, we have often recalled the inspirational words of Robert F. Kennedy: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Ripples to currents—we are excited to think about the ripples that will be generated by this important book, about the partnerships that will be formed by its future readers, and about the value creation—the currents—for individual enterprises, and for society as a whole, that companies and nonprofits can generate together.
Michael Brown
CEO and co-founder, City Year
Jeffrey Swartz
former president and CEO, Timberland Company