The Social Innovation session on "Cross-Sector Collaboration: Maximizing Impact through Successful Partnerships" provided experience-based insights to help answer these questions. Successful partnerships, session panelists said, require skills outside of those that are taught in traditional business school programs. They require skills you would more likely learn during a lesson on community organizing; skills such as active listening, building trusting relationships, immersing yourself and staying within the population you seek to serve, humility, transparency and accountability in practice and flexibility to explore ideas and solutions as a group - not entering into relationships with a predetermined solution. Collaborations require both recognition of the value you and your partners wish to bring to partnerships as well as extensive knowledge of historical context. Each sector requires different sensitivity to the political climate, internal culture and regulatory system. 

Together, collaborators create new agendas to address areas of interest, decide how the defined goal can be reached, and collectively work to improve current conditions. Short-term engagements with collaborations are often less risky and therefore, at times, present more appealing commitments; however, long-term collaborations possess the potential to create systemic change. Benchmarks can serve as one method to take broad goals and define them incrementally, reassessing and enhancing approaches with each benchmark addressed.  

While the session on "Cross-sector Collaboration: Maximizing Impact through Successful Partnerships" provided an overarching argument for and description of collaboration of this nature, the session "Haiti Onward: Rebuilding for Success" provided a tangible application of coordinated collaboration as the most effective method for addressing post-disaster aid and development. A common criticism of aid work is that there is no systematic method for ensuring that redundant activities are managed (or reduced in some cases) to make certain that money is spent on the most impactful/sustainable initiatives and that the spectrum of needs are being addressed with available resources. 

Haiti Onward is an orchestrating entity that organizes initiatives to create a collaborative and unified movement for change within Haiti. Its work aligns skills of a variety of groups to operate effectively and efficiently as an "ecosystem of workers." Within the initiative are partner organizations that intend to stay in Haiti long-term and to transfer skills/capacity to Haitian partners. (You can read more about partner organizations within Haiti Onward here). While meeting immediate needs is a focus, identifying antecedents of current problems and addressing these larger systemic challenges with sustainable and locally-sourced solutions directs the majority of the work under the Haiti Onward initiative. 

While none of the panel speakers were Haitian, their involvement was framed in a way that made Haitians the central change agents. The non-Haitian partners' long-term goal for this collaborative effort is to "make yourself not needed and leave a sustainable infrastructure, all the while providing continued consulting services when necessary, noted Sam Bloch, Founder and Executive Director of Grassroots United. Its initiative provides one example of how long-term collaboration may change individual roles, but that the system remains intact.

The reality is that individuals, whether in Haiti or elsewhere, do not operate in separate philosophical silos in their everyday lives. Rather, they interact with and are often bombarded by different forces (business, social, economic, psychological etc.) in daily activities. Why then, would we approach solving human problems through development without the same regard for intersections of sectors? It appears the shift within the field of development is already underway. Despite the challenges, professionals operating within different sectors in society are increasingly aware of the importance of cross-sector collaboration in resolving larger social issues.