Your assumption that a community–any community–is, at heart, competitive and unable to see holistic answers in multi-institutional challenges is so outside the realm of the kind of work I regularly do, even with highly competitive partners, that I’m not sure what else to say.

Any community, organization, or individual can be competitive, but they aren’t necessarily competitive in all circumstances. I know nothing about the kind of work you do or the organizations you work with and so can’t speak to it, but I will say that organizational collaboration can make sense in some circumstances, but the point that Isaac is making in the main post about the silliness of mandated collaboration in all circumstances still stands.

My impression is that some commenters on this post are True Believers, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — unless being a true believer prevents you from getting funded or from keeping your organization’s doors open.

Anyway — I don’t think of the real versus proposal worlds as bad or cynical, but merely as something that exists. If you don’t know about the difference or that it exists, you might make mistakes that, once again, make you or your organization less effective. If that’s “troubling,” then so be it.

I’ll also say thanks to you and the other commenters in this thread — even the ones I disagree with — because it’s been an unusually lively thread. And most posters have implicitly taken Paul Graham’s advice on “How to Disagree,” which is nice.

With respect (and out of curiosity), I read your post about “real world vs. proposal world,” and your approach is troubling in both is cynicism and admission of practice.

I’ll go with the least harmful assumption and guess that I’ve not been in the business nearly as long as you have, and thus have been “bitten” one less time than the requirement to be shy.

Your assumption that a community–any community–is, at heart, competitive and unable to see holistic answers in multi-institutional challenges is so outside the realm of the kind of work I regularly do, even with highly competitive partners, that I’m not sure what else to say.

Collaboration is for the grantor and the recipient of grant funded services, not for the organization getting the money.

This is certainly true! I made the same point in Foundations and the Future: How Funder Incentives Affect Nonprofits, Grants, and Grant Writing, which discusses how the structure of foundation funding shows that the purpose of funding is more to gratify the desires of the funding agency than anything else.

DOL (or HUD, or ED, or whomever) wants to know that they are not paying to reinvent the wheel.

Which they do regularly anyway, in the name of innovation.

Collaborative strategic planning is for community-wide gaps analysis, so that new funds truly go to fund new services.

This is meaningless propsalese and completely true in the proposal world, as described at the link. In the real world, organizations compete with one another to some extent, and “collaborations” consist mostly of donut eating.

It is short sighted to think that any one organization can provide the complete continuum of services needed by the target population.

In the proposal world, you’re right. In the real world, there is no continuum of services and the target population is far vaster than the organizations providing services. This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone, since if you’re offering products or services that are subsidized or free, you will almost always have more people chasing them than you can handle. Dan Ariely discusses the love of free in his book Predictably Irrational, which is very much worth reading.

The target population is ALL the funder cares about.

See my first link WRT foundations.

However, for the past six years I have been working in one of the largest urban areas in the country, and the one of which the author speaks–gloriously sunny Southern California.

Here, collaboration is a joke for the most part. For the recent CBJT proposals, I would guess that nearly every college in the area was in at least two proposals. The local WIBs and Workforce Centers were in more than that. There was no regional strategic planning; there was no prioritization of needs. It was a free for all where we all supported each other with the hope of getting a piece of the pie. When the grants are funded, those of us who were lucky enough to be in the right proposals, will take our piece of the pie and do our thing. We will most likely only chat with the lead agency come report time.

As I worked on my own grant, I thought how much better it would have been if the Dept. of Labor had just given the region a chunk of cash, asked that we conduct a regional competition, and insisted that we prioritize regional needs. That would be true collaboration, and the most needed proposals would win, not the ones able to spin the best tale in a short amount of time.