Live United by Ann Austin

The first Community Connect event was on Thursday of last week. Community Connect is a half-day gathering of local service providers intended to help people navigate the social service sector and better coordinate services for people in our community who need help.

The event has been going on in other areas, such as Owatonna, for several years and was also held for the first time in Austin last November. It’s been an effective way of helping people understand the breadth of services available in communities and removing barriers such as transportation.

Local organizations work well together — and most understand where to refer people who need help and which services are available at different offices. Cooperation is essential between nonprofits and human service organizations because not one organization is suited to fill all of the needs that people have. Coordination of efforts, such as the Community Connect event, is the next step. Working together, we can perhaps understand the connections that can be made and how we can develop common tasks to address together, such as resolving local transportation barriers.

Collaboration is the final step in this process of creating trusting and long-term relationships. It involves a lot of time and effort to understand the mission and value system within different organizations and the commitment to discovering and carrying out common goals. Collaborations are sustainable, even if there is transition in staff, because it addresses the fundamental nature of how a program is being delivered, not who is providing the service.

Our United Way has encouraged cross-sector collaboration and provided training and initial tools for how organizations can be effective with collaboration. Collaboration is not an easy task, but it is needed more now than ever before.

We are facing unprecedented challenges as a community and as a nation. When I started, at the height of the Great Recession, unemployment rates were high. Now, we are faced with another scenario — there are less people to fill jobs, and workplace turnover is increasing.

It is time we take a look at how our system is functioning and ways we can better work together, across all networks.

Innovative thought is found, not through the gathering of like-minded people in the same space, but through engaging with people from different perspectives and meeting them where they are at. When we are faced with challenge, we tend to revert to what we know has worked in the past or what we are comfortable with. This, however, is a sure way of meeting with disaster, especially when conditions have changed around us.

I challenge our community to think differently about how we can address local issues. Things aren’t going to be like they were in the past, and that’s OK. We can navigate these challenges better, together. I see opportunity to engage on another level, a more meaningful level — and perhaps create better systems moving forward.

Ann Austin is the executive director of the United Way of Freeborn County.