The Work Between Organizations: Coordination as Its Own Infrastructure

The problem no single organization can solve

The hardest problems in public life, health inequity, housing, the durability of the systems people depend on, share a frustrating feature: no single organization can solve them. They sit in the spaces between sectors, where a hospital, a city agency, a community group, and a funder each hold one piece and none holds the whole. This is why partnership is not a nice addition to the work but the work itself, and why the capacity to coordinate across organizations deserves to be treated as infrastructure in its own right. This primer, which anchors a series on partnership, is about that capacity: what makes cross-sector coordination actually work, why it so reliably fails, and why it has to be built and stewarded rather than assumed.

The argument is that effective partnership depends on a small set of well-understood conditions, that the most decisive of these is a dedicated structure to hold the collaboration together, and that this coordinating capacity is precisely the kind of durable, governed infrastructure the Foundation exists to build.

Collaboration is common; effective collaboration is rare

The social sector is full of partnerships, networks, coalitions, and joint efforts. Most accomplish less than their members hoped, and the reasons are consistent enough that researchers have named them. The influential body of work on collective impact identifies five conditions that distinguish collaborations that produce results from the many that dissipate: a common agenda, so partners genuinely share a definition of the problem and the goal; shared measurement, so everyone is working from the same picture of progress; mutually reinforcing activities, so each partner contributes its distinct strength rather than duplicating others; continuous communication, so trust accumulates; and a backbone, a dedicated coordinating structure that holds the whole thing together.

The pattern in failed collaborations is the absence of these, especially the last. Partners agree to cooperate in principle, hold some meetings, and then drift back to their own priorities because nobody owns the coordination. Good intentions and a shared cause turn out to be necessary but nowhere near sufficient. What separates a collaboration that changes something from one that produces a report and disperses is structure.

The backbone is the infrastructure

Of the five conditions, the backbone deserves particular attention, because it is the one most often missing and the one that makes the others possible. A backbone is a dedicated team and structure whose job is the coordination itself: maintaining the common agenda, running the shared measurement, facilitating communication, and keeping partners aligned over time. Without it, the work of coordination falls into the gaps between organizations that each have their own primary mission, and it quietly stops getting done.

This is the heart of why coordination is infrastructure. A backbone is not a project; it is a standing capacity, like a road or a utility, that many organizations rely on and that must be funded and maintained as such. And it carries a governance demand that funders and powerful partners often resist: collective impact requires that power be genuinely distributed among the stakeholders, which means the parties with the most resources must be willing to relinquish some control. A backbone that is captured by its most powerful member is not a backbone; it is that member's project wearing a coalition's clothes. The structure works only when it is accountable to the whole partnership, which is a governance achievement, not a technical one.

Why partnership infrastructure decays

Coordination capacity fails the same way other infrastructure fails: it is celebrated at launch and starved in maintenance. A collaboration is convened with energy and funding, produces early wins, and then the backbone loses its funding because coordination is hard to attribute to any single outcome and easy to treat as overhead. The relationships fray, the shared measurement lapses, and the partnership reverts to a set of organizations doing their own work in parallel. The capacity that took years to build dissolves, and the next attempt to address the same problem starts from scratch.

The remedy is to treat the coordinating capacity as the durable asset it is: to fund the backbone as infrastructure rather than as overhead, to govern it so it stays accountable to all partners rather than the most powerful, and to design from the start for it to persist across the funding cycles and leadership changes that would otherwise dissolve it. Partnership, done well, is not an event. It is a standing capability that has to be stewarded.

What this means for partnership and the Foundation

Treating coordination as infrastructure reframes what partnership work requires. The measure is not how many organizations sign a memorandum of understanding but whether a dedicated, well-governed, durably funded coordinating capacity exists to hold the collaboration together over time and keep it accountable to all its members. That favors investing in the backbone, the shared measurement, and the governance of the partnership itself, over the convening that looks impressive and fades.

This is the Foundation's central concern stated at the level of partnership, and it is the thread that runs through this series. The other primers take up specific arenas: community-institution partnerships, civic coalitions, cross-sector financing, and the global partnerships now being remade. Beneath them all is this: the work between organizations is real work, the capacity to do it is real infrastructure, and like all infrastructure it must be built deliberately, governed fairly, and maintained to last. The problems that no single organization can solve are solved in the space between them, and that space does not coordinate itself.

References

1. Kania J, Kramer M. Collective Impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review (2011, ongoing). The five conditions: common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact

2. Milken Institute. The Case for Collective Impact and Cross-Sector Partnerships. Backbone organizations as coordinators; funders must distribute power and relinquish some decision-making authority. https://milkeninstitute.org/content-hub/collections/articles/case-collective-impact-and-cross-sector-partnerships

3. ncIMPACT Initiative, UNC School of Government. ncIMPACT's Updated Approach to Cross-Sector Collaboration (2025). Common vision, shared measurement, and a pathway to sustainability across government, nonprofit, faith, philanthropic, and business sectors. https://ncimpact.sog.unc.edu/ncimpacts-updated-approach-to-cross-sector-collaboration/

4. Sopact. The Power of the Collective Impact Model (2025). Backbone support and shared measurement as the basis of alignment; funders increasingly favor system-level approaches. https://www.sopact.com/perspectives/collective-impact-model

5. Cross-sector collaboration in cities: learning journey or blame game? Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (2025). Typologies and success conditions including backbone organizations and shared measurement. https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/35/2/117/7945708