Root Cause’s Purpose: Fostering Effective Collaboration

The writer adrienne maree brown says in her book Emergent Strategy, “Change is constant, be like water.” Here, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it would be hard to dispute this principle.  We find ourselves in a period of big and unpredictable change.  Organizations that are focused on the well-being of the people in their communities face uncertainty about what big challenges may lie around the corner and what sources of funding and support they may (or may not) have to address those challenges.  

For 20 years, Root Cause has focused on providing services that improve the nonprofit sector and the public agencies that work to help people and their communities thrive. Over those 20 years, Root Cause has changed a lot. This is because we have always been an organization that is committed to learning and improving our own practices.  In December, on the cusp of our 21st year, the Root Cause team gathered, took a step back, and asked ourselves, “What is our purpose?”  

This is where we landed: The purpose of Root Cause is to foster effective collaboration. 

Through intentional facilitation, training, and strategic design, we foster greater effectiveness within and among nonprofits, social service agencies, schools, hospitals, and their ecosystems to accomplish common goals. We do this work in ways that show care for the people involved, and with an intention to improve their skills, build the capacity of organizations, and maximize the use of limited resources. We are spacemakers, designers, implementers, and practical partners working to carefully organize the work of varied and heterogeneous groups, organizations, and people toward a greater good. 

This is our purpose because decades of combined experience show us that when people work together effectively within their own organizations and come together with other organizations, positive change begins to happen.  

We see the power of collaboration that is based on an understanding of interdependence and mutuality. Communities do not thrive based on the effort or genius of one person; nor do they thrive based on one set of tactics or strategies. Root Cause was founded on the idea that the strategies and tactics of the business world–  those used by for-profit businesses both large and small– would improve the outcomes of nonprofit organizations. Often, they really do. However, there are limits to these approaches when they are applied to the care of people and communities. They must be tailored to the context in which they are used in order to help in a sustainable way.  If the Root Cause of 2004 believed that people needed better tools and efficient business-minded approaches in order to solve big problems, the Root Cause of today knows that those tools, no matter how useful, must be used in connection with a deep understanding of why people and communities suffer and also must be paired with tools and approaches from other disciplines– design, education, community organizing, and wisdom and faith traditions.

This is one small part of the story of how Root Cause is committed to change. With our varied backgrounds and our synthesis of effective tools and approaches, we will continue to be adaptive and to be committed to fostering collaboration that helps our clients and their partners to effectively solve complex problems and offer care to their communities and the people they serve.