With rare exception, our greatest aspirations cannot be achieved alone. No single organization can eradicate hunger, increase students’ academic success, improve the health and wellbeing of families, transform a community, etc. It is no surprise that we have seen a dramatic increase in the use of facilitated collaboration to bring organizations together in support of a common goal. Further, in those cases where organizations are extremely complementary and resources are potentially being duplicated, leaders may wish to explore and potentially pursue a merger.
A thoughtful, disciplined approach to collaboration and merger builds off the Inspiration Quest model—incorporating services such as:
- Facilitation (see Convening)
- Community asset mapping
- Assessment of core competencies and gaps across the participating organizations
- Establishing a shared vision and logic model
- Defining rules of engagement
- Strategic planning
- Collective sustainability planning and resource alignment
- Merger exploration
- Stakeholder input
- Merger agreement development
- Merger implementation action planning