What Makes Partnerships Work — and What Breaks Them
It starts with a simple truth: no big idea happens alone.
The most transformative work — in cities, nonprofits, and communities — happens when people choose to build together. But building together is rarely simple. Partnerships can unlock extraordinary impact or collapse under the weight of competing agendas, unchecked egos, and poor communication.
After years of helping design and support local partnerships, I’ve become increasingly curious about what makes some collaborations thrive while others falter. That curiosity led me to look beyond my own work; to examine partnerships around the world where governments, nonprofits, and communities came together to do something big.
What I found reaffirmed what many of us already sense: the strength of any partnership depends less on strategy or funding and more on how people show up. So many factors go into making partnerships work, and not all of them are contemplated here. What I’ve focused on instead is the people aspect because in every successful partnership, it’s the people at the table, not the resources, that ultimately drive both the purpose and the sustainability of the work.
Below are five key indicators that consistently emerged across successful partnerships — and several lessons from those that fell apart.
1. Shared Vision
Every successful partnership begins with a clear and shared purpose. When everyone sees the same destination, the “how” becomes negotiable. But when that purpose is cloudy or fragmented, even the most well-funded effort can unravel.
One example of shared vision done well comes from East Africa. Bridges to Prosperity (B2P), a U.S.-based nonprofit, partners with local governments to build pedestrian bridges that connect rural communities to essential services. In Rwanda, many villages were cut off during the rainy season when rivers swelled and roads became impassable. Farmers couldn’t reach markets, children missed school, and pregnant women were unable to access clinics.
In 2019, the Government of Rwanda signed an agreement with B2P to construct over 350 footbridges across multiple districts. The shared goal was straightforward but transformative: safe, year-round access. The Ministry of Infrastructure provided political and logistical support, district governments identified sites and coordinated local labor, and B2P brought engineering expertise and fundraising capacity.
What made this partnership thrive was not just resources, but alignment. Every partner could articulate the “why.” Data collected later showed meaningful impact: a 12% increase in wage labor participation and a measurable rise in school attendance. When the pandemic threatened construction timelines, the partners didn’t fracture — they adjusted schedules, redirected funding, and doubled down on training local crews to ensure long-term sustainability. Their shared purpose provided a compass through uncertainty.
The opposite dynamic unfolded in the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), a high-profile collaboration across sub-Saharan Africa launched in the mid-2000s by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The MVP sought to demonstrate that coordinated investments in agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure could rapidly end extreme poverty. Dozens of villages across Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia, and beyond became test sites, supported by governments, universities, and major donors.
At first, the initiative drew global attention for its ambition. But as the project expanded, cracks appeared. The central question — “What does success look like?” — no longer had a single answer. Some partners prioritized quick, measurable outcomes; others focused on long-term capacity-building. Donors emphasized data; governments wanted replicable models. The result was a fragmented vision that pulled in competing directions.
When external funding began to wane, many of the local systems created under MVP couldn’t sustain themselves. Infrastructure remained, but the collaborative spirit had eroded. The partnership hadn’t failed because of a lack of resources — it failed because its shared purpose wasn’t truly shared.
By contrast, the My Brother’s Keeper Challenge in the United States illustrates how a unified vision can galvanize partners across sectors and cities. Launched in 2014 under the Obama Administration, the initiative encouraged local governments, nonprofits, and private foundations to commit to improving life outcomes for boys and young men of color. The national goal was clear: reduce opportunity gaps through education, mentoring, and workforce access.
What made MBK distinctive was its structure. It wasn’t a single program but a framework — each city or county could design its own strategy, as long as it aligned with the broader mission. That flexibility allowed innovation without diluting the vision. Over time, cities like Oakland, Birmingham, and Chicago developed local MBK coalitions that survived administrative changes and political shifts. The vision endured because it belonged to everyone at the table.
The lesson across these examples is consistent: partnerships don’t fail because the vision was too small — they fail because it wasn’t shared. When the “why” is clear, partners can adapt to almost anything. When it’s not, even the best-resourced collaboration eventually fractures under its own weight.
2. The Right Mix of People and Temperament
Partnerships are living organisms. They depend on chemistry — not just the organizational kind, but human chemistry. The right balance of personalities, leadership styles, and decision-making instincts often determines whether collaboration flourishes or fractures.
The My Brother’s Keeper Challenge offers a powerful look at what happens when the right mix of people come together around a shared purpose. When it launched in 2014, hundreds of cities and counties across the United States signed on to improve life outcomes for boys and young men of color. But the national vision alone wasn’t what made it work. It was the people leading it — mayors, nonprofit directors, and community advocates — each bringing different strengths and temperaments to the table.
In many cities, success came down to humility and alignment. Elected officials who might have been used to steering every initiative instead took on the role of convener, allowing community organizations to lead. Foundations offered technical support rather than dictating strategy. Mentorship groups and youth advocates became the moral center of the work. The mix of policy leadership, lived experience, and philanthropic capital created a kind of ecosystem where no single partner dominated the conversation.
When leadership transitioned at the national level, many feared MBK would fade. Instead, the network evolved into the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, now housed within the Obama Foundation. That longevity came from the diversity and temperament of its people — leaders who believed in collaboration more than credit.
The Better Care Fund in the United Kingdom, created in 2013, reveals what happens when the mix isn’t quite right. The Fund was designed to bridge the long-standing divide between the National Health Service (NHS) and local governments responsible for social care. The goal was noble: integrate systems so that patients — particularly older adults — experienced seamless care instead of bouncing between bureaucracies.
But culture and temperament clashed. The NHS, a national body known for its structure and hierarchy, often struggled to work alongside local councils that operated with more flexibility and community orientation. In some regions, leaders found a rhythm. They established joint planning boards, shared data, and even co-located teams to improve coordination. In others, mistrust grew. Hospital administrators questioned local spending decisions, while council officials pushed back against what they saw as top-down mandates.
The unevenness of outcomes wasn’t due to policy failure — it was human dynamics. Where personalities complemented each other, integration advanced. Where they collided, progress stalled.
Nowhere is the cost of imbalance clearer than in the London Underground Public-Private Partnership (PPP): one of the most ambitious infrastructure collaborations in modern British history, and one of its most visible failures. In the early 2000s, the U.K. government launched a 30-year, £30 billion plan to modernize the Underground system. Private companies, including Metronet and Tube Lines, were contracted to upgrade tracks, stations, and trains, while Transport for London (TfL) retained operational control.
On paper, the arrangement promised efficiency and innovation. In practice, it became a cautionary tale about temperament and alignment. The public and private partners approached the work with fundamentally different mindsets: TfL prioritized safety, long-term reliability, and public accountability; the private consortia focused on cost recovery, profit margins, and contractual interpretation.
Tension turned to hostility. Communication broke down. Disputes over costs, timelines, and responsibility became routine. In 2007, after years of missed targets and mounting losses, Metronet collapsed into administration. The government eventually brought the work back under public control, absorbing billions in losses.
The failure wasn’t about engineering — it was about people. Two cultures, both capable but incompatible, tried to share a table without ever truly sharing a mindset.
The takeaway: the best partnerships don’t just combine capable organizations. They curate the right people to lead them. The mix matters — not just in skill, but in temperament. Because when collaboration depends on trust, who’s in the room can matter even more than what’s on the agenda.
3. Mutual Respect and Open Communication
If shared vision is the foundation of a partnership, communication is its oxygen. It keeps ideas moving, conflicts from festering, and trust from eroding. Without it, even the most promising collaboration begins to suffocate.
Bridges to Prosperity offers one of the clearest examples of how mutual respect and consistent communication can anchor a partnership for the long haul. Early in its work in Rwanda, B2P realized that local officials had little experience overseeing the kind of technical engineering the bridges required. Rather than viewing that as a liability, the nonprofit treated it as an opportunity for shared learning. Each project began with an open planning session where district engineers, community representatives, and B2P staff mapped the terrain, discussed budgets, and agreed on timelines.
That process wasn’t always smooth. There were disagreements over costs, materials, and construction priorities. But those disagreements happened in the open. When pandemic restrictions threatened the 2020 construction season, partners held virtual briefings with each district to realign goals and modify work plans rather than delay indefinitely. That level of transparency and respect created a pattern of collaboration that sustained momentum even under pressure. Today, the program’s continued expansion, and the fact that local governments have adopted bridge maintenance as a permanent line item, speaks to the trust that communication built.
Global research on cross-sector partnerships shows how quickly the opposite dynamic can emerge when openness disappears. A 2021 comparative study of more than 40 government-nonprofit partnerships found that the earliest warning sign of collapse was what researchers called “declining relational dialogue.” It doesn’t start with open conflict — it starts with silence. Partners stop meeting as frequently. Difficult updates are softened or delayed. Shared data becomes selective. Slowly, the collaboration begins to function as performance instead of partnership.
One case from the study detailed a multi-country health partnership where ministries and NGOs once met weekly to coordinate vaccine distribution. As challenges mounted — funding delays, logistical hurdles, political shifts — those meetings grew shorter and less candid. When problems were raised, they were often reframed as “communications issues” rather than operational breakdowns. Eventually, trust eroded completely. Each partner began operating independently, and by the time leadership tried to course-correct, the network had fractured beyond repair.
The lesson was simple but sobering: lack of communication doesn’t just reflect a failing partnership; it creates one.
Even in successful collaborations, communication demands humility. In the Better Care Fund, for example, the regions that saw the most progress didn’t necessarily have more resources, they had stronger habits of conversation. NHS leaders and local council officials established shared dashboards, daily check-ins, and cross-team “huddles.” That kind of intentional communication blurred institutional boundaries and reminded everyone that their purpose was human — delivering care, not defending territory.
Open communication doesn’t mean comfort. It often means confrontation — but confrontation rooted in respect. It means being willing to have hard conversations early rather than postmortems later.
When communication is open, respect follows. And when respect is mutual, partnerships can endure just about anything.
4. Balanced Egos and Shared Leadership
Big visions attract big personalities. That’s not a flaw — it’s often what drives bold ideas forward. But when leadership turns into control, or ambition overshadows collaboration, even the most promising partnership begins to strain. The best partnerships find equilibrium — leaders confident enough to take initiative and self-aware enough to make room for others to lead too.
The My Brother’s Keeper Challenge is one of the best examples of that balance. From the outset, it required mayors, nonprofits, schools, and philanthropies to align around a national goal while tailoring it to local needs. The federal government, under the Obama Administration, set the framework and offered visibility, but resisted the urge to dictate outcomes. Cities were encouraged to shape the work around their own context.
In practice, that meant leadership often shifted hands. In some places, community advocates took the lead in mentoring and education. In others, local government coordinated data and funding. Foundations helped design evaluation frameworks but didn’t demand control over the agenda. That fluid, shared leadership structure created space for local innovation while still advancing national progress. When the administration ended, the model proved resilient enough to continue under the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, housed within the Obama Foundation. The structure had outlasted the personalities because it was built on balance, not hierarchy.
The Better Care Fund again offers a more mixed example. The Fund’s intent — to unify health and social care systems — demanded co-leadership between two large bureaucracies: the National Health Service and local councils. In areas where leaders treated each other as equals, progress followed. Local authorities often had deeper relationships with patients and communities, while NHS bodies brought technical capacity and funding. When both voices were heard, programs thrived.
But in places where one side tried to dominate the process — typically by controlling resources or decision timelines — integration faltered. One senior official described early meetings as “a series of polite power struggles,” with each side hesitant to relinquish authority. Over time, that lack of balance hardened into institutional defensiveness. The structure remained, but the spirit of partnership weakened.
The London Underground Public-Private Partnership illustrates what happens when shared leadership is missing entirely. When the U.K. government launched the PPP in the early 2000s, the ambition was enormous: modernize one of the world’s oldest transit systems by merging public oversight with private efficiency. The contracts were designed so that private consortia — primarily Metronet and Tube Lines — would finance and carry out the upgrades, while Transport for London (TfL) maintained operations.
On paper, both sides had leadership roles. In practice, they never truly shared them. The public and private partners approached the project from opposing philosophies. TfL focused on safety, reliability, and long-term asset stewardship. The consortia were accountable to shareholders and bound by rigid contractual terms that prioritized profit and timelines.
As costs rose and maintenance schedules slipped, finger-pointing replaced collaboration. Disputes over responsibility grew so toxic that, by 2007, Metronet went into administration and the government was forced to absorb billions in losses. A review later found that the core issue wasn’t mismanagement or lack of skill — it was an unbalanced relationship where neither side trusted the other enough to lead jointly.
Partnerships thrive when leaders understand that power is not a zero-sum equation. Shared leadership doesn’t dilute authority — it deepens accountability. When everyone at the table can both lead and follow, vision stays intact even when circumstances change.
Balanced egos don’t mean quiet voices. They mean voices tuned to harmony instead of volume.
5. Willingness to Pivot
Every partnership begins with a plan. But plans live in the real world — where budgets shift, leadership changes, and unpredictable challenges emerge. The best partnerships aren’t defined by how perfectly they execute the first plan, but by how wisely they adjust the next one. A willingness to pivot is not weakness. It’s a sign of maturity.
The partnership between Bridges to Prosperity and the Government of Rwanda offers one of the clearest examples of this principle in action. When the two first began working together in 2019, their agreement set ambitious goals: more than 350 pedestrian bridges in five years, connecting thousands of residents in rural communities to jobs, schools, and health care. But within a year, the COVID-19 pandemic halted construction, disrupted material supply chains, and limited travel between provinces.
For many partnerships, that kind of disruption would have created paralysis. Instead, B2P and its Rwandan partners adjusted almost immediately. They shifted from a centralized build model to one that emphasized district-led implementation. B2P trained local engineers and crews through virtual instruction, sourced building materials locally, and revised project sequencing to align with changing community needs. The pivot not only kept the work alive but strengthened it. By empowering local leadership, the partnership became more sustainable — a living example of adaptation guided by shared purpose.
The Better Care Fund faced a similar test of flexibility, though its results were mixed. Created to bridge the divide between the NHS and local social care systems, the Fund initially set strict parameters for how money could be used. Yet as the U.K.’s social care crisis deepened — fueled by austerity measures and demographic shifts — local areas found the rules too rigid to address emerging needs.
In Greater Manchester, local leaders negotiated with national officials to pilot a different approach: pooling additional resources and sharing governance through a combined authority structure. This pivot turned the city-region into a model for integrated care. Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, leaders clung to the original guidelines, fearing audit backlash or political criticism. Those partnerships stagnated. The difference wasn’t context — it was courage to adapt.
In contrast, the Millennium Villages Project shows how the inability to pivot can erode even the most well-intentioned collaboration. Conceived as a bold demonstration that coordinated investments could end extreme poverty, MVP launched across a dozen African nations with an integrated plan: boost agriculture, improve education, build clinics, and deliver infrastructure all at once.
The model worked in pilot villages, where resources were concentrated and teams were cohesive. But scaling the approach required flexibility — adapting to local politics, economic variation, and community preferences. Instead, the project largely stayed rigid, adhering to a centralized design. When early results didn’t meet expectations, some partners pushed for narrower focus; others wanted to expand faster. Without consensus on how to adjust, the partnership fractured. Governments hesitated to adopt the model nationally, and when donor funding tapered, many programs faltered.
The inability to pivot became the story.
In the end, every successful partnership shares one quiet but defining trait: the courage to change course without abandoning purpose. Adaptability isn’t an admission of failure; it’s the discipline of staying faithful to the mission while being honest about what it takes to achieve it.
Supporting Pillars: The Often-Overlooked Indicators
Beyond these five core elements, a handful of quieter forces consistently show up in partnerships that stand the test of time. They rarely headline the press release, but they shape whether collaboration deepens or dissolves.
Clear Governance and Accountability
Even the most visionary partnerships falter without structure. In both My Brother’s Keeper and Bridges to Prosperity, clarity around who was responsible for what created the conditions for trust. Memoranda of understanding, shared data platforms, and transparent progress reports kept everyone aligned and accountable. Partners knew what decisions they could make — and what required consensus.
Contrast that with the London Underground PPP, where decision rights were distributed through dense contractual language rather than shared governance. Private contractors answered to investors; public agencies answered to the public. The absence of a unified accountability framework turned disagreements into crises. What began as a modernization effort became a case study in miscommunication.
Sustainability and Long-Term Thinking
Partnerships often chase quick wins, but endurance comes from planning for what happens when the spotlight fades. Bridges to Prosperity intentionally embedded training and local maintenance funding into its model, ensuring bridges would remain functional long after the nonprofit’s direct involvement ended. By contrast, the Millennium Villages Project struggled to sustain outcomes once initial donor support expired, revealing that sustainability must be built in — not added later.
Cultural Competence and Context Awareness
Understanding context is an act of respect. In Rwanda, B2P adapted its bridge designs and communication strategies to local geography, customs, and government processes. That sensitivity strengthened relationships. In the Better Care Fund, regions that respected local differences — acknowledging that rural areas and dense cities required distinct approaches — achieved more lasting integration. Partnerships that ignore context rarely earn trust.
Transparency in Decision-Making
The best partnerships don’t hide the hard calls. When decisions are made openly — even unpopular ones — credibility grows. In MBK’s local coalitions, public dashboards and progress reports became a tool for shared learning rather than judgment. Transparency reminded every participant that accountability is collective.
Measured Ambition
Grand visions inspire, but unrealistic timelines or inflated expectations can quietly poison trust. Partnerships that test, learn, and scale thoughtfully — like Bridges to Prosperity’s phased construction model — sustain energy and funding longer than those that overpromise and underdeliver. Millennium Villages is again the cautionary tale: ambition without pragmatism turns partners into critics.
These supporting pillars may not make headlines, but they are often the quiet differentiators between partnerships that grow stronger over time and those that collapse under pressure.
Closing Reflection
Strong partnerships don’t just happen. They’re built brick by brick, meeting by meeting, decision by decision. They are sustained not by flawless planning, but by the people who bring their integrity, curiosity, and humility to the table day after day.
The partnerships that succeed are rarely the ones with the most money or the flashiest plans. They’re the ones where purpose is shared, communication is open, leadership is balanced, and flexibility is seen as strength rather than compromise.
If you’re part of a partnership today, whether in government, a nonprofit, a business, or a neighborhood, take a moment to pause and look around your table.
- Is the vision truly shared?
- Are the right people leading the work?
- Is communication honest, and leadership balanced?
- Is there room to adapt when the world changes?
Those questions aren’t just strategic — they’re personal. They ask each of us to examine not only how we lead, but how we show up.
Because partnerships rise or fall on what happens in the moments between the meetings: the calls returned, the tone of the email, the grace extended when something goes wrong.
The courage to look honestly at your own patterns — the times you’ve led too tightly, communicated too little, or hesitated to pivot — is the first step toward building partnerships that last.
No big idea happens alone.
And the partnerships worth building are the ones strong enough to change, humble enough to listen, and grounded enough to endure.
