Transcript
IAN REVELL:
I think traditionally organisations would do a lot of things on their own. Or they may be seeing it as other voluntary sector organisations as competitors, especially if there's funding available. But we're not in that world anymore. We've got less resources than perhaps we had once upon a time. And we need to be using what we've got to the best possible outcomes. And you never know, you might even create alliances that go on to the next project or the next opportunity, things that you didn't realise existed.
In the voluntary sector, in some respects you kind of understand what your voluntary community sector partners might be wanting or how they might work. But if you're working in collaboration with other sectors, it could be corporate, private, it could be individual donors, or it could be the statutory sector; again, you've got to spend a bit of time working out what it is they're trying to achieve. And then, although you might come at it in a different way, different angle, different approach, again, you'll find different ways of working it out.
And if you're going to work collaboratively, you've got to all achieve something in the end. There's no point one person achieving and the other partners not achieving, because then they won't work with you again in the future. So it's a slightly more nuanced.
And people may get things that you wouldn't have wanted, but that's OK. We need to sort of let go a little bit and try to work together to achieve a greater outcome.
I make a lot of energy and effort to get to know the person, not the job that they're doing. Because often when you do that, when it comes to having difficult conversations, the shorthand is done, you know the person. And they would appreciate that you're doing it for the right reasons. The old meetings and agendas are a little bit out, I think, nowadays.
I very much believe if you’ve got a group of wise people, and most people in the sector, most people that are coming to a cause or of an issue will be wise or experts in those field, looking at a problem in a collaborative way, you will get solutions you didn't expect. So you've got to be open to work in a different way. And you mustn't be precious about which sector you represent or what fund you're trying. No, it's about solution focus. You focus on that and all partners might have something to offer. And it might be different to what they were traditionally offering, but that doesn't matter, because it's the outcome that's important.