We featured a nice post about the benefits of collaboration by Lois Savage, president of the Phoenix-based Lodestar Foundation, in December. To help encourage beneficial collaborations within the sector, Lodestar, in association with the Arizona-Indiana-Michigan (AIM) Alliance, initiated the Collaboration Prize, a $250,000 award to the best U.S. nonprofit collaboration in early 2008.
After receiving 644 nominations, Lodestar has announced the eight finalists in the competition. Selected by a panel of leaders from the nonprofit and business world, the finalists are strikingly diverse in their locations and areas of focus. "The missions of these eight finalists are so different, and yet each found a way to utilize a collaboration strategy -– ranging from joint programming to administrative consolidation to merger -– to maximize their resources and impact," said Savage. "We hope that these finalists will serve as a source of inspiration for other nonprofits."
The finalists (in alpha order) are:
- Chattanooga Museums Collaboration, Chattanooga, Tennessee -- administrative collaboration among the Creative Discovery Museum, the Hunter Museum of American Art and the Tennessee Aquarium
- Crittenton Women's Union, Boston, Massachusetts -- merger of two organizations serving low-income women
- Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, Texas -- merger among the Dallas Children’s Museum, the Science Place, and Dallas Museum of Natural History
- New York LawHelp Consortium, New York, New York -- collaboration among legal services organizations providing online resources
- Ready, Set, Parent, Buffalo and Lackawanna, New York -- collaboration between organizations supporting at-risk new parents
- ShoreBank Enterprise Cascadia, Ilwaco, Washington -- merger of two community development financial institutions
- YMCA/JCC Integration, Sylvania, Ohio (Greater Toledo) -- merger of Jewish Community Center and Young Men’s Christian Association in Greater Toledo
The winner of the $250,000 will be announced at a luncheon in Scottsdale, Arizona, on March 5, 2009.
-- Mitch Nauffts
