I sit on the Mayor of Edmonton’s Task Force to End Poverty. It’s a diverse group including the expected mix of leaders from government, business, education and community services. At a recent gathering we were working together to increase common understanding about poverty as well as to move forward with identifying strategies.
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Pretend you run a business that sells widgets that are critical to a buyer. The price of each widget is $1000.00 and the buyer needs 100 of them. That’s $100,000. Now let’s pretend the cost of each widget (materials, labour, reasonable marketing costs, equipment maintenance, transportation costs, etc.) makes up 80% of the market price, leaving you with a gross profit of $20.00 per widget or in the case of this order of 100, a gross profit of $20,000 or 20% of the total price.
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INTRODUCTION
This piece is about our practice as community workers, our mindset, our tendencies to resist the transformative leap. Sometimes it feels like we are standing on the edge of convention, a wide chasm between us and the “New World,” and looking down at the gremlins of risk and failure.
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Sometimes, collaboration stinks.
Okay, I imagine I have your attention now.
Yes, I am being overly dramatic. I guess what I really want to say is that sometimes a really good idea gets overdone, twisted up, misguided. Collaboration is generally a good thing of course, but it seems sometimes we just do it or at least try to do it whether it is needed or not, whether or not we truly believe it makes sense. All of us know that sometimes we do it because funders require it. I called that “coerced collaboration."
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