Cascade Alliance

Technique Tuesday: Collaborating with Organizations in Your City

What if our world was more focused on community and collaboration, rather than competition with one another?  A local donut shop in Portland, OR is doing just that – and so is St. Vincent de Paul and Cascade Alliance Members.

Pip’s Donuts features other local businesses on their Instagram, encouraging their customers to try out these places.  They created a hashtag #communitynotcompetition to further encourage people and to share photos.  Social media is a powerful tool – don’t be afraid to use it to share your efforts of collaboration – and possibly continue this trend of collaboration (read more about trendsetting in our past blog post).

Below are some ways we’ve collaborated with other organizations in our area.  These examples can be useful in brainstorming for your organization as well.

• SVdP works with area churches to serve homeless families at our shelter, the Annex.
• We collaborate with area church members who do house visits and help provide requisitions for those in need based on the information collected
• Women’s Space donates the clothing that is not useful, to us and we reciprocate by offering the women they are helping requisitions so they can select clothing of their style and size
• We partner with Food for Lane County; they collect the food and distribute it to area nonprofits who then provide it to those in need
• We’ve collaborated with local arts reuse store, MECCA, and BRING Recycling for our yearly Metamorphase fashion show event (pictured at the bottom) which features creations from local designers made out of unconventional, recycled material.

Our members have been hard at work with their efforts of collaborating in their communities, below are some examples from The Scrap Exchange:

• In the past they’ve traded items with TROSA — they received some of Scrap’s media and Scrap got some of theirs.
• They’ve swapped things with Reconsidered Goods in Greensboro, one of their bootcamper startups:
• They take in computers and save them for pickup by Triangle Ecycling, a for-profit social enterprise that trains high school kids how to work on computers. We get computers for our operations from them, some they donate some we buy at low cost ($60-$100 per computer).
• Their e-waste is given to GEEPT
• They just started donating towels and blankets to the Animal Protection Society
• They send things they don’t sell (e.g., personal care items) to the Durham Rescue Mission.
• They rent low-cost space to a nonprofit (Health Equipment Loan Program/HELP) that collects medical equipment and loans it out at no cost to Durham County residents.