Resources for Partnerships in Infrastructure and Public Education

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By The Intersector Project
October 25, 2016

At The Intersector Project, we recently began to think about the possibility of creating a resource hub for those interested in cross-sector collaboration — a section of our website where practitioners, researchers, and anyone exploring the field of cross-sector collaboration could search and filter through hundreds of quality resources (coming from research organizations, advisory groups, training organizations, academic centers and journals, and more) to discover findings, thoughtful commentary, examples, and tools to improve their cross-sector collaboration thinking and practice. Several piles of books, articles, reports and toolkits later, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve created exactly that.

Interest in cross-sector collaboration continues to grow. But the work is difficult. As new and experienced practitioners design collaborations and encounter obstacles along the way, and as scholars continue to research this topic, it’s beneficial to have an organized hub of existing thinking and resources on this topic. And we think we are well-positioned to do this work, having spent several years surveying the field and collecting everything we can find on the topic. Earlier this summer, we noticed that the platform we use internally to catalogue these resources contained more than 400 popular and scholarly articles, cases, tools, reports, books, and multimedia all related to collaboration and partnerships. We wanted to find a way to share this information with you.

After reviewing several quality resource libraries for insights into how we might want to shape our own, we worked to pare down our internal catalogue of resources based on their relevance to cross-sector collaboration (in all its forms, including some that were not strictly about cross-sector collaboration, but could be useful to those working in the field); relevance in a U.S. context (including some international resources that are broad enough to be applicable to a U.S. context); and whether a resource comes from a trusted source (the resources largely come from experienced practitioners, academics and experts in the field). We created something broad that includes resources spanning partnership types, issue areas, and sectors, and relevant to collaborations at the local, state, regional, national and international levels.

Our aspiration is for the library to be accessible and valuable to many types of practitioners. For example, those interested in infrastructure will find valuable results, including:

• Madeline Carr’s “Public-Private Partnerships in National Cybersecurity Strategies,” from International Affairs – a scholarly article that “draws on the extensive literature on public-private partnerships in order to assess the tensions and challenges of this arrangement in national cyber-security strategies.”
• The National League of Cities’ “Public-Private Partnerships for Transportation Projects,” an action guide that “describes PPPs, specifically for developing transportation and transit projects, [and] presents some of the common structures used for transportation financing and development, the benefits and risks, strategies for effective implementation and real-life examples that detail successes as well as challenges.”
• “The uncertain future of public roads” from CityLab, an article in which reporter Eric Jaffe takes a look at the history of P3s for transportation infrastructure development and examines both sides of the increasing debate on whether such partnerships are “a good or a bad thing.”
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Community Based Public-Private Partnerships (CBP3s) and Alternative Market-Based Tools for Integrated Green Stormwater Infrastructure: A Guide for Local Governments,” a report that presents a model Community Based Public Private Partnership (CBP3) program.

A search for education will yield similarly varied results, including:

• “Four Cross-Sector Leaders on the Changing Role of Business in Education,” a compilation of blog posts from keynote speakers at the “Transforming the Role of Business in Education” conference held at Stanford University on October 29, 2014.
• “Helping Underserved Students in San Diego,” a case study from The Intersector Project that tells the story of AVID – a program that focuses on teaching students the behaviors and skills necessary to achieve academic success, allowing teachers to mentor students and letting students make decisions regarding their own academic goals.
• “Data Drives School-Community Collaboration: Seven Principles for Effective Data Sharing,” an online tool that provides a solid foundation that communities can use to effectively share data across organizational boundaries to improve student supports.

This resource library is a living resource that we will continually refine and update. If you have any thoughts on how the library could be more helpful to your work, we invite you to contact us at [email protected].

To learn more about how we chose and organized the resources in our Library, visit About the Resource Library or go to the Resource Library to start exploring.

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Author: The Intersector Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing cross-sector collaboration as a way to address society’s pressing issues. We work to provide practitioners in every sector with the tools they need to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. 

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