Speaking notes for L. Robin Cardozo, CEO, Ontario Trillium Foundation

Robin Cardozo MC'ing at the Creative Places + Spaces Conference

MaRS Centre,
Toronto, October 30, 2009

Welcome everyone. I am Robin Cardozo, CEO of the Ontario Trillium Foundation and your host for this morning’s session.

I am really pleased to be here, and as this morning’s program gets under way, I have the opportunity to offer you some observations on the subject of collaboration in Ontario’s not-for-profit sector, building upon my experience at the Foundation.

The Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) is an agency of the Government of Ontario. The Foundation’s role is to contribute to the building of healthy and vibrant communities in Ontario, and I’m pleased to say that we’re fully aligned with the themes of this conference – both the title, Creative Places and Spaces and the specific focus, Collaboration. 

Now, opposing collaboration these days is much like opposing motherhood and apple pie – which has surely been one of the great collaborations of all time. Although in today’s diverse and inclusive Toronto, I might say, “motherhood and apple pie, spring rolls, samosas, and beef patties”.

History has shown us that some of the greatest successes in science, business and the arts were born of collaboration.  You have Watson and Crick modeling DNA, and Canada’s own Banting and Best discovering insulin.  In business, you have Procter & Gamble, Hewlett & Packard, Jim Ballsillie and Mike Lazaridis – and of course my family’s favourite, Ben & Jerry. 

And in music we have Gilbert & Sullivan, Lennon & McCartney, Rogers & Hammerstein, and who can forget Captain & Tenille. (I guess I’m showing my age!)

In the work of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, we find ourselves facilitating and engaging in collaborations every day. To a funder, there are many attractions – collaborations increase capacity and reach, they expand available expertise, they build community vibrancy.

But while there is great power in collaboration – Cagney & Lacey proved that – there are also a number of lessons we can learn about maximizing the strengths of collaborations, while minimizing the risks.

So let me highlight two or three of the organizations I’m hoping you’ll visit in the Collaboration Marketplace today, and then conclude with some lessons we have learned at the Foundation. I should add that we are very pleased to have been able to work with the organizers of this conference to invite a number of the Foundation’s grantees to participate in the Collaboration Marketplace. Each of these organizations has a wonderful story to tell about the value of community collaboration. I will highlight just a few in my remarks this morning.

Heartwood House in Ottawa brings fifteen charitable organizations under the same roof to share ideas and resources. The Foundation provided funding to enhance the ways those organizations share administrative resources and undertake creative partnerships.

One of the key lessons of Heartwood House is that, as logical as this multi-party collaboration is, it is, at its core, a collaboration of people.  Real success came only when the people in the collaborative were comfortable with each other personally.  Those relationships needed to be defined and nurtured.

The Imperial Cotton Centre for the Arts in Hamilton – another participant in today’s Marketplace – had the same experience.  The Centre’s collaboration with community groups, businesses, and the municipality – offers a comprehensive development program for artists.  Partners have been more than happy to collaborate with local artists in finding, for example, creative new uses for abandoned industrial buildings in Hamilton.

Farther north, Mamow Sha-way-gi-kay-win: North-South Partnership for Children, is using an OTF grant to support the development of a network of partnerships between Northern First Nations and southern resources to address community conditions. This evolving program deliberately had a slow start.  It took time to build trust and understanding.  Often, it took the right catalyst or facilitator to help overcome any initial wariness – easy to understand when you are, quite literally, “flying” people into a relationship.

So what have we learned about collaboration at the Trillium Foundation that we couldn’t learn from Simon & Garfunkle?

Obviously – and this is the motherhood-and-samosas part – there is great power in collaboration, but it is not necessarily easy, and collaborative efforts do come with built-in risks.

But we can minimize those risks if we follow some key collaboration guidelines… 

1. Collaborate only when it makes sense – Forced collaborations, marriages of convenience or even worse, shot-gun weddings, almost never work.

2. A catalyst or facilitator can play a powerful role. This may be a not-for-profit such as the wonderful Artscape, a community leader such as the visionary David Pecaut in Toronto, or, dare I say, a funder. At OTF, this is now part of our strategic approach; we look for opportunities to act as the catalyst, sometimes assertively. 

3. Be prepared to be patient – Effective collaborations take time to develop.  Be patient at the start and impose performance targets only after the relationship is strong.

4. With collaboration, the costs in time and money are usually immediate, and the benefits are typically down the road. It usually takes a leap of faith.

5. Look beyond your comfort zone for collaborators – Collaborations between unlikely partners can be the most rich, rewarding and productive.  I’m reminded, for example, that the true strength of the collaboration between Rocky & Bullwinkle was that only one of them was a moose. As a more serious example, at the Foundation we have seen successful collaborations between environmental groups and the corporate sector.

These are just a few of the lessons I have taken from the Foundation’s experience in working with – and in – collaborations around our province.  But I have just scratched the surface.  As the competition for resources increases, and the needs become increasingly complex, not-for-profit organizations are going to be pressed to collaborate in innovative ways. With the Ontario Trillium Foundation, they will find a willing and enthusiastic partner.