A Continuum of Collaboration

It is in this space, and at this particular moment, that community collaborative efforts to serve veterans have emerged around the country. These efforts mostly have arisen spontaneously and endogenously within communities, rather than as the result of deliberate planning or outside intervention. These collaboratives span a broad landscape that can be defined in multiple dimensions: size, infrastructure, degree of public-private interaction, subject-matter focus, geographic focus, and integration into other networks and collaborative systems. All of these efforts share an intent to serve veterans and an explicit or implicit desire to do so through better coordination, resource allocation, and improved support services (including referral services) for veterans. However, these collaborative efforts differ greatly in their approaches, reflecting the diverse circumstances of their communities.

This paper will examine the development of community collaboratives across the country to serve veterans, and will propose a framework for better understanding what these efforts are, how they operate, and how they relate to each other, as well as how they relate to other private and public initiatives to serve veterans, such as DoD and VA programs. To the extent that there are opportunities to improve public, private, and nonprofit activity in this sphere, this paper will make policy recommendations as well.

Among this paper’s findings:

• Notwithstanding the recent history of “collective impact” efforts, collaboration (broadly defined) has a long history among nonprofits, including those focused on veterans.
• A significant majority (67 percent) of the nation’s 100 largest communities have some type of collaborative activity underway to serve veterans.
• Collaborative activity to serve veterans exists on a spectrum. Some communities have informal collaborative activities that consist of political commitments and regular meetings, without formal infrastructure. Others have more robust collaborative efforts that include permanent infrastructure, staff, information sharing, and shared outcomes.
• Barriers to cooperation between public, private, and nonprofit actors have been reduced in recent years, but these barriers remain. Formal barriers include federal ethics rules, federal acquisition regulations, and federal data-sharing regulations, all of which impede government partnerships. Informal barriers include leadership risk aversion, conservative legal interpretations of existing authorities, and a subtle, competitive dynamic that exists among public, private, and nonprofit actors vying to serve veterans.
• There is no set of common outcomes or performance measures being pursued by public, private, and nonprofit actors across the country. This is a missed opportunity for alignment between these sectors in their efforts to serve veterans. Public, private, and nonprofit sector organizations should develop and use common outcomes for veterans, in order to drive better alignment between their efforts.