A Conversation About Grant Collaboration Across Different Nonprofit Sectors

Elijah: Elise, it’s good to be back in touch and to talk about grants again, especially after our last exchange about grant readiness. One topic I think about a lot is grant-funded collaboration. It comes up frequently in nonprofit conversations, often framed as something organizations should do more of.

A parallel that often comes to mind for me is the corporate world. Once companies reach a certain level of maturity, they often grow by acquiring or merging with other companies. That strategy does not always succeed. The AOL and Time Warner merger is a well-known cautionary tale. But sometimes it pays off spectacularly, like Facebook acquiring Instagram and later WhatsApp.

In the nonprofit sector, mergers do happen, but far less often. When they do, they are usually driven by financial stress, such as one organization absorbing another to prevent collapse, or as a defensive move to consolidate staff and overhead. Much more common, especially when nonprofits are trying to grow revenue or expand reach, is collaboration through grants.

Over my 20 years as a grants professional, I have noticed that collaborative grants seem more common in some sectors of nonprofit and government work and relatively less so in others. I want to explore why that is, and how differences in problem structure and funding shape when collaboration actually works.

Elise: Right. Grant-funded collaboration is often treated as a default best practice, but how often it actually occurs varies widely by sector. In environmental work and in human services, collaborative grants are encouraged. In arts and culture, much less so.

And that difference is not just about organizational culture or leadership style. It has a lot to do with how problems are structured and how funding flows through systems.

Elijah: The environmental example is the easiest for me to picture because my first grant writing job was at American Rivers. I learned quickly that rivers and watersheds do not align neatly with counties, cities, or even states. They cross jurisdictions by definition.

So whether you are removing a dam on a small tributary, negotiating a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing agreement for a hydropower dam on a major river, or running a conservation advocacy campaign across the Great Lakes region, you almost always need multiple organizations involved. There is no plausible single-actor solution.

I wrote many proposals that included several nonprofit partners, and funders expected that. Budgets routinely included subawards that transferred funds directly to partner organizations to carry out specific parts of the work.

One of my first grants was a small collaborative award of about $25,000. It involved American Rivers working with a local watershed nonprofit in Wisconsin to reduce stormwater runoff into the Great Lakes.

Elise: So collaboration was not something you opted into. It was baked into the problem itself.

Elijah: Exactly. I was looking for funders in the Great Lakes region and identified the Brico Fund, a local family foundation. They supported environmental work tied to specific geographies, including small-scale conservation projects in Wisconsin, and they had a particular interest in the health of the Great Lakes.

American Rivers was leveraging its network of local river groups around the Great Lakes to build public pressure and awareness to advance stronger water conservation policies. We partnered with Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers, a local watershed nonprofit, to develop a project in a small town outside Milwaukee and successfully secured funding from The Brico Fund.

The project centered on a vacant lot surrounded by apartment buildings and single-family homes. During rainstorms, water from nearby roofs flowed into this empty lot, where it pooled like a shallow lake before surging into storm drains on the lot and the surrounding street. During heavy rains, this kind of runoff increased the volume of water entering local sewer systems, regularly overwhelming treatment plants and forcing the discharge of untreated water into nearby waterways and, eventually, into the Great Lakes. Our goal was simply to slow that water down and filter it. Building rain gardens and swales on the lot helped slow and filter the water while also beautifying the neighborhood.

We realized early on that measurement would matter, both for credibility with funders and for learning. So we reached out to a local university. Their engineering department agreed to contribute pro bono labor. Graduate students were interested in using the site as a real-world learning opportunity, and they helped us design a method to measure the actual reduction in stormwater volume resulting from these natural infrastructure interventions.

The Brico Fund funded the initial $25K grant. After that award came through, I went looking for ways to leverage it. Using the Foundation Directory database, I identified a small family foundation called the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust. They were based in New York, but they had a stated interest in environmental issues in Wisconsin. I cold-called them, explained the project, described the collaboration, and walked them through the early results and the design.

After several back-and-forth conversations, and because the project was mostly funded and clearly collaborative, they came in with an additional $10K. All told, grant funding came to around $35,000. This was back in 2005.

Elise: And each partner had a clearly defined role.

Elijah: Yes. American Rivers handled grant writing, reporting, and overall coordination. The local watershed group did most of the on-the-ground operational work. The university contributed research and evaluation capacity. Local families participated directly by installing rain barrels on their homes and helping build rain gardens on a nearby vacant lot.

It was truly collaborative, as no single organization could have done it alone. The geography demanded collaboration. The funders expected it. And the outcomes depended on multiple kinds of expertise.

Elise: Human services operate on a similar logic, but for different reasons. Families do not experience needs one at a time. Housing instability, food insecurity, mental health challenges, and job training needs often overlap. No single provider can address all of that.

Government grant contracts often require collaboration, and private funders expect it too. But in practice, many of these grants are more serial than truly collaborative. There is usually a lead agency and one or more subawardees delivering discrete services toward a shared outcome.

Elijah: That distinction is important. Collaboration does not necessarily mean people working together closely on the same tasks. Often it just means shared outcomes and formal commitments to pursue them together.

I tend to think of a wide range of arrangements as collaborative grants. A single awardee that subawards to another organization. A grant where there is one budget, but staff from another organization are listed as contractors or consultants. Two organizations can work toward the same goal without actually working together day-to-day. They can be working on entirely different projects independently, yet aimed at the same population or outcome. It is not that different from how departments inside a single nonprofit often operate, fairly siloed, but aligned around a common mission.

Elise: And that is actually the norm. Most so-called collaborative grants look like this in practice. There is a lead agency, one or more subactivities, and fairly limited interaction beyond reporting and coordination. For example, a community center might receive a grant to support families and then issue a subaward to another nonprofit to deliver karate classes, STEM programming, or some other enrichment activity. That subawardee is not collaborating day-to-day with the community center staff. They are providing a discrete service to the same population. It is collaborative on paper, but not deeply integrated in practice.

Which is why it is important not to romanticize collaboration.

Elijah: Exactly. I remember, too, from my days as a university grant writer, working on NSF grants to support researchers in Antarctica conducting STEM-based work. A senior researcher once told me a story about a grant that supported multidisciplinary research on an Antarctic vessel. On the boat, different researchers were funded, including a geologist working on one angle and a mammal researcher on another, yet they did not meaningfully collaborate beyond sharing meals. Eventually, they produced a monograph collecting articles from that voyage, but the pieces had little in common beyond their focus on Antarctica.

Even in the environmental sector, where collaboration feels natural, it does not happen as much as people assume. I saw a lot of collaboration at American Rivers because its work focused on convening, supporting, and galvanizing local watershed groups to advance state and federal policies. But many environmental organizations do not collaborate much at all, or just superficially, even when their missions and geographies suggest that collaboration could help them achieve greater impact.

Elise: Because formal collaboration is hard.

Elijah: Right. It requires sharing resources, sharing credit, and holding each other accountable. That is a human behavior issue as much as a structural one. It is hard to play in the same sandbox with other people – especially people you don’t know very well – and particularly when money is involved.

And that connects to another piece that often gets overlooked. Even though collaborative grants are often framed as a way to unlock new funding streams, in practice, grants are still a limited resource. 

The scarcity mindset is real. It pushes organizations to focus on risk factors rather than growth factors. True synergistic collaboration introduces unknowns. It requires trust, familiarity, and a willingness to accept some loss of control. Unless organizations already know each other well, that can feel like too much uncertainty, especially when leaders are under pressure to keep the lights on.

Elise: So it is not that collaboration does not work. It is that the conditions under which it works are difficult to create.

Elijah: Exactly. Collaborative grants do not fail because collaboration is a bad idea. They fail because they demand behaviors and relationships that are hard to sustain under conditions of competition and scarcity. And the further away that you get from essential services and into the realm of “nice to have but not necessary,” the less pressure there is to try to make collaboration work.

Which is why I think collaboration should be treated like a tool, not a belief. Use it when the problem structure, the geography, the service mix, or the research aim truly requires partners, and when the funding structure rewards the extra work. Otherwise, it is often more realistic to keep things simpler, deliver well, and build trust gradually before taking on the added complexity and risk of a formal collaborative grant.