Partnerships and Collaborations
Stephen M. Pratt, President
Dear Friends:Last week I was at a meeting of after school intermediaries in New York, swapping promising practices, sharing war stories, and figuring out how we can all do a better job of spreading the tacit knowledge about what works more broadly across the field. As with most meetings of this sort, one takes away one or two key ideas or quotes that stay with you long after you’ve tossed the nametags and binders.
One of my colleagues from New York talked about the challenges of organizing, facilitating, or managing (pick your verb) large, multi-stakeholder partnerships: “No one ever offered a graduate degree in this stuff, but if you think about it, at the core, that’s what we do.”
In a sector as diffuse as the out-of-school time sector, with a seemingly endless array of opportunities and unmet needs for youth, no single organization, big or small, can expect to realize its intended impact alone. In their best moments, partnerships realize what the author James Suowiecki has called The Wisdom of Crowds: their output is greater than the sum of the parts. For this to happen, partnerships need to be diverse, decentralized, and made up of largely independent members. And the group needs a way of capturing the knowledge of the group and disseminating it.
Not all crowds are wise, though. Suowiecki notes that some produce the worst sort of group think, “when diverse opinions are either frozen out or squelched when they're voiced, groups tend to be dumb. And when people start paying too much attention to what others in the group think, that usually spells disaster, too.”
In this issue, we take a look at some efforts to build wise partnerships for Boston’s youth, by providers (Sociedad Latina’s founding of the Boston Youth Services Network) and funders (the United Way’s work to facilitate deeper connections between schools and community organizations). We hope that all of us can benefit together from the wisdom of our crowd in the after school field.
Thanks for reading, 
Guest Column
Read what Boston Teens Adrianna, Michael, Tevin and Cisnelli have to say about the value of summer jobs for youth.
By Boston Youth
New Additions on this Topic to our Online Research Library
Boston Youth Survey
The 2004 Boston Youth Survey aggregates information from Boston Public High School students (grades 9 – 12) on a variety of topics, including: out-of-school activities, school and educational aspirations, health and physical activities, mental health, relationships with others, and use of technology
Too Big to Be Seen: The Invisible Dropout Crisis in Boston and America
Boston Youth Transition Task Force
This report represents the first year of research and analysis conducted by the Youth Transitions Task Force, a coalition of non-profit organizations and government agencies convened by the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC). The report captures the first year of a two-year strategic assessment of the dropout problem in Boston, including results from quantitative data and qualitative research, as well as mapping of the education, recovery and support system for dropouts and recommendations for improvement.