#1 - The Friday Change - The one about collaboration

I’m growing as a human

This week I dove into my role as the treasurer for the National Girls Collaborative. Accounting and finance happened to be the only courses I struggled to pass during my undergrad and MBA courses, so my confidence is a bit shaky. Luckily, I have a good teacher, the organization's chief innovator, and strong leader Karen Peterson for helping me to waddle my way along a path to support the organization, even though I feel like more like a duck out of water right now. I also took some IRS.gov training, shocking revelation that they are better than I thought -?and learned from an animated character, "Bleagal," whose name indicates he's sort of a beagle with legal authority. Side note, if a beagle who loves legal can learn this, I can too… right? Anyways, the weight of the responsibility feels real. I'm less scared than I was at the beginning of the week and want to support NGC in this role because I'm enthusiastic about supporting their mission to "connect, create, and collaborate to transform STEM for all youth."

An organization I love

There was a time when I would have told you I wasn't a STEM kid. I never felt at home in the STEM world, even though I'd grown up in Fremont, California, near the heart of Silicon Valley, when tech was the playground of ideas, entrepreneurs, and funders working at a fever pitch that I can only imagine people felt during the gold rush. Or even when I started adulting and took the job at Microsoft, I felt the imposter syndrome had somehow become a core part of my identity. I've since righted the ship and think others should have an opportunity to feel at home in STEM – that they belong, are included, and quite frankly, we need them to be here. NGC is working to change this so that "STEM experiences are as diverse as the world we live in" so everyone can feel belonging which can lead to great inclusive innovation. Through projects like FabFems, which provides industry role models available as speakers, mentors, or for events; or National Girls Collaborative Project, which is a "network of networks" across states in the US, Australia, and Canada – supporting practitioners to collaborate more effectively.

A social impact framework for collaboration

This brings me to the collaboration framework I want to share with you this week… an innovative collaboration model that helped to set the stage for National Girls Collaborative. It’s their superpower in PDF form – your welcome. You can find all the details on the NSF grant that helped to support this project here, but this is the organization’s special sauce. This model for collaboration which they’ve mapped shows how all of the parts work together. I believe this model can be scaled to support many other organizations and networks, and support broader theory of changes.

Noodle on this…

Sustainable development goal 17 is focused on partnership for the goals – “the SDGs can only be realized with strong global partnership and cooperation.” How can this collaboration framework be applied to your partnerships that you have an what would it mean you’d do differently if you did apply it? Can you switch out the parts and pieces and insert different stakeholders, leaders, organizations and leverage the loops of feedback and integration to design a more coordinated and cohesive system? How can a framework like this help to create and change culture from coopetition to coordination and collaboration?

I leave you with these thoughts to noodle on as we head into a long weekend. For those in the US, enjoy the Fourth of July!?

Andrea

P.S. I pen "The Friday Change" to spark change in social impact by sharing frameworks to develop strategy, models to scale up programs, partnerships to deliver effectively, and insights to learn and innovate. Underpinned with optimism, curiosity, and lightheartedness... while holding myself accountable to posting on Fridays.?