So what’s a Collaborative anyway?
A Collaborative is a network.
Collaboratives provide an infrastructure to help people:
connect across sectors and scales,
tackle common challenges,
align strategies, &
advance common goals.
For us, that means working together to ensuring the Blackstone Watershed is a healthy and resilient place for people and nature.
Specifically, the Blackstone Collaborative is an impact network.
An impact network promotes learning and coordinates action to work together to more equitably solve complex issues that no one organization could solve on its own.
Impact networks perform the 5 C’s:
Clarify purpose and principles (see the Needs Assessment)
Convene the people (here’s a list of our Collaborators)
Cultivate trust (join our monthly meetings to get to know us)
Coordinate actions (see some of our work)
Collaborate for systems change (contact us to see how we can work together)
Impact networks provide outsized value for their small teams through collaboration.
The Blackstone Collaborative helps facilitate connections and communications across diverse systems and scales.
Not only do we help coordinate within our watershed, we also serve on many other networks to bring what we hear from our communities into the larger picture and bridge different partnerships region-wide. For example, we are a part of the Southeast New England Program (SNEP) Network, Mass Ecosystem Climate Adaptation Network (MassECAN), the Regional Conservation Partnership (RCP) Network, and the Massachusetts Community Climate Advisory Council.
By working with diverse actors across silos on a common purpose, we help build relationships that lead to innovative solutions.
Relationships are at the heart of what we do. We want our partners to know one another and form a connection that can lead to kind and efficient improvements in our work. By focusing on what we share an interest in instead of how we are different, we help foster an inclusive and effective setting for innovative solutions.
By staying small and working outward versus upward, our decentralized structure allows us to efficiently respond to urgent needs and opportunities.
The Collaborative has a list of 20 priority actions, collectively created by partners over the course of three years, facilitated by the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program. However, many other topics are of interest to our partners and have taken a lead role, including addressing Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO). We hadn’t anticipated working on this issue at the start, but after a very wet 2023, it rose to the top of concerns for our partners and we organized tours, interviewed community members, and created a working group on the topic, followed by a new webpage and outreach documents. This work inspired a UMass Amherst student to create a documentary on how CSO disproportionately affects environmental justice communities - helping fill a need to explain this complex issue.
Think of a murmuration of starlings - flocking together and creating a beautiful and unexpected shape. That’s an effective network - bringing individuals together to give space to make something meaningful, together.
“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.”
“When you embrace a network mindset, you stop working in isolation. Instead, you turn your focus toward cultivating connections, strengthening flows, and sharing resources to do more together than is possible alone.”
“[The Collaborative is] really a leader in terms of being out there and spreading the word about watershed-scale collaboration, and what it takes- what it means- to be a Collaborative.” - Melissa Ocana, Climate Adaptation Coordinator, MassECAN