Higher Education Webinar: Cross-Sector Collaboration in Higher Education

Neil Britto, adjunct assistant professor of public service at New York University and lead on The Intersector Project in the Philanthropy and Social Innovation program at the Aspen Institute, leads the conversation on cross-sector collaboration in higher education.

Speaker
Neil Britto
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Service and Lead, The Intersector Project
New York University; Aspen Institute

Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations

FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you for joining us today.

Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, education.CFR.org/events, if you would like to share it with your colleagues. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We’re delighted to have Neil Britto with us today to discuss cross-sector collaboration in higher education. Professor Britto is an adjunct assistant professor of public service at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He’s a cofounder and lead on the Intersector Project in the Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper Community, and he serves on the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance, which is focused on public-private partnership models. He previously served as a research fellow at the Institute for Business and Society at the University of Virginia, as a member of Concordia’s Public-Private Partnership Index Task Force, and principal researcher for the Social Investment Organization of Canada. And he is coeditor of The Intersector: How the Public, Nonprofit, and Private Sectors can Address America’s Challenges, which was published by Brookings Institution Press in 2021. So, Neil, thanks very much for being with us today.

I thought we could maybe start with you giving us an overview of the current trends in cross-sector collaboration in higher education, and where you see it headed.

BRITTO: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. And I’m excited about this discussion.

I think the primary trends, especially over the last, I’d say, ten years or so, at a macro level, are growing student interest in this topic across multiple faculties. So I think what was historically the domain of traditional public administration, we’ve seen a rise of courses, certificates, programs launched to cultivate a cross-sector skillset, especially among graduate students as they aim to enter the workforce.

I think there’s a couple reasons why we’ve seen this. With more and more students seeking to have certain values present in their career, as they might explore using business for good, for example, they might encounter smaller, more niche spaces, such as social enterprise, as being perhaps not always well-suited to a broader career post-graduate school. Instead, this notion of cultivating skillsets that will allow you to work in government, in business, in the nonprofit sector, I think has lent itself towards popularity for cross-sector course.

I think another dimension is over the last ten years when we think about the major macro challenges where many graduate students are going to orient their careers—climate change, for example—these are intrinsically multisector issues. And to cultivate student preparedness to address these types of issues requires some multisector mindsets, some systems thinking, and the ability to speak the language of policy and commerce in order to have any material impact in these areas.

Another dimension is the historical rhetoric around public-private partnership, perhaps one of the most dangerously ambiguous phrases when we think about how government, business, and the nonprofit sector work together. Has evolved slightly from “why do we take this approach” to “how do we do it better.” Across the political spectrum, I’ve encountered throughout my career, folks stating: I want to see more collaboration among sectors. The rationale and the reasoning might be different based on where you sit across the spectrum, but within agencies, within elected office, you’re seeing this approach happening at an international level through various international funding and financing initiatives towards the SDGs, all the way down to the local level, where you’re seeing innovative governance models using different cross-sector approaches to address challenges. And so the overarching trend of greater interest in this area I think reflects some of these domains.

If I go back about ten to eleven years ago, when I started to first focus on this topic, a key flagship event was the White House Office of Social Innovations inaugural Forum on Cross-Sector Leadership and Collaboration. This was under the Obama White House administration. And it aimed to collect organizations, including the Intersector Project, that wanted to advance an agenda to improve thinking and practice around cross-sector skillsets and mindsets. And many different organizations, including those with ties to academia, including those that worked closely with academia, found different pieces of the pie to advance. For some, it was cultivating major case study libraries of examples on how this innovation works in practice, because there is a lot of murkiness to how some of these arrangements work from a governance standpoint, from a technical standpoint, from a financial standpoint.

The quantity of university courses that we saw rise following that summit was also notable. Increased recognition within the kind of labor market for valuing a—what I would call, a multisector language fluency, is notable. I have observed over the last seven years at NYU’s Graduate School of Public Service more and more students attracted to building a core technical skillset and then working across sectors. This notion of a triple strength leader and a triple strength manager who builds an ability to work across sectors throughout their career, and the hypothesis that you may be better positioned to address some of these challenges.

The alignment with the career motivations and, I think, values of rising generations is one major force within the term. I think at another level, you can look at the quantity of organizations in the nonprofit sector, in the public sector, within the corporate philanthropic sector, that are hiring partnership officers. If you do a LinkedIn search for this job term, you will see a notable amount and a notably diverse range of organizations hiring in this space. As organizations all seek to leverage their existing financial or nonfinancial assets to address their mandates, this type of cross-sector fluency is increasingly recognized.

And, to get a bit more specific and reflecting on some of the course syllabi and the leadership development programs that we’ve had the privilege of being a part of or having exposure to, when we talk about cross sector skillset a few of the specific areas that I think educators and those in the leadership development space have been attentive to fundamentally relates to solving problems, building teams, and achieving impact of some type. When we double click on that, some of that work includes how you’re learning to use data and communicate success in the language of multiple sectors. It involves building systems lenses that are actually considerate of the incentives, cultures, the workflows of multiple organizations. Managing teams that are going to be cross sector in nature. Some of the, I think, fundamental challenges that we see in multisector collaboration is that everybody believes their organization should be a great partner, a great collaborator, but we often overestimate how strong we are.

And on the achieving impact piece, there’s a particular skillset in understanding where and how to leverage an organization’s assets, where its constraints and incentive structures are limited. And I think students are both attracted to learning about this space, and organizations, especially in the public and nonprofit sector, increasingly need this space and this skillset. There are—I mentioned over the last ten years there’s been a growth in coursework in this space. I think as of 2019 a count that we had done is around seventy-five courses, at a bare minimum, across different faculties in the United States, likely from academic institutions represented today.

A couple that I think really deserve kind of flagship recognition is the way the University of Virginia cultivated a program across some of their graduate students from different faculties to assemble in a leadership development program and build this cross-sector mindset collectively. The University of Minnesota has a longstanding history of scholarship in this space, and adding important public research to this domain, coursework that was inspired. There are many institutions, both public and private, in the academic space that have really advanced this field.

If we think about the last ten years and what’s happened in higher ed and start to think a little bit further about the future, some of my work has provided exposure to how government agencies, major philanthropies, corporate foundations, financial institutions, are thinking about this topic of cross-sector collaboration. How it—what it means to them. Some of the issues that I hear most frequently cited as being challenging and what needs to be addressed—whether that’s through research, whether that’s through improved program design, whether that’s through funding innovation—include a few key areas that I’ll speak to now.

One, forecasting the collaboration tax. What I mean by “collaboration tax” is that in many circumstances organizations seek to work with others with the underlying premise that more collaboration is always good. When, in fact, greater quantity doesn’t always lead to greater quality. And in fact, the organizational frictions can actually be quite challenging at times. One of the most useful experiences that I had to look under the hood of collaborations was in the development of a case study library, but also serving previously as a judge on a global public-private partnership prize where you got to speak to managers and executives about the specific data points that were being collected or were not being collected, and, frankly, the larger nonfinancial cost, especially labor allocation of executive time, in making these multiyear, complex collaborations work.

And so when we think about forecasting this collaboration tax, how do we help organizations have the foresight to identify with greater precision if this collaboration is likely going to produce a good return on public or private investment? I think there’s a reality as well that many public-private partnerships at the global level and at the local level are not always held accountable to report on their results. As more capital flows into this space I think this becomes of greater significance. In certain domains of cross-sector activity, such as climate, I think we’re more likely to see stronger performance reporting, just given the nature of the issue, the nature of the organizations involved.

I would add that there needs to be a more candid study of failure and the mixed results that inevitably happen in any type of public service delivery innovation. If cross-sector issues, by definition, are involving multiple sectors, often governments, they’re fundamentally addressing public challenges. And no agency has a 100 percent success rate, nor should they be expected to. In the same way that a venture capitalist really only needs to hit a home run ten percent of the time to make their portfolio, a public sector agency is held to a different standard. But with its public-private partnership innovations and its different forms of cross-sector activity, not all of them are going to be successful.

The candid study of failure and mixed results is something that I’ve heard cited by operations, by foundations, by agencies, by grantees of those institutions, as being we need more work on this. And, of course, many organizations, understandably, need to be cautious in how they speak about failure, or challenged programs. So I think those actors that have financial protections on their future ability to deploy capital—looking at public sector agencies, thinking of major philanthropy—they have a responsibility, but also an opportunity through different collective mechanisms, of sharing some of their insights with their peer groups to understand how we can better design, implement, and evaluate these multisector collaborations.

A couple other forces that I’ll briefly mention before referencing a few specific resources that might be useful to folks on this webinar, and then opening up for questions. I would highlight that something I reflected on deeply four years ago when I was working on editing a book with Professor Dan Gitterman at the University of North Carolina was the state of public understanding and support for cross-sector collaboration as a public solving tool. We’ve yet to hear, understandably so perhaps, anyone seeking office to talk about how they will bridge the divide between government, business, and the nonprofit sector, that will have an exceptional capability to navigate the different language, culture, and practices that characterize these sectors to forge more innovative solutions. This is not the rhetoric that we—that we hear.

However, when we reflect on focus group research that we had been a part of commissioning, we think about public support for this method of problem solving across the political spectrum, anecdotally, there is research to suggest that it’s quite positive. And so as a way to increase public understanding and support, we also have to look at how do we support media and journalists who are covering civic stories in this space? The public-private partnership, I think, most elevated in public consciousness recently is how we had a COVID response in the United States. A collection of many sophisticated, multisector, cross-sector collaborations led us to have a kind of impeccable response. Not with—not perfectly, but many organizations—from community foundations, to global health organizations, to pharmaceutical companies, to public sector agencies—found new ways of working together.

And you can see in presidential statement releases the way in which public-private partnership is used with an intrinsically positive connotation. Journalism and media coverage, justifiably so, needs to have some healthy amount of skepticism. If you go back pre-pandemic and Google search, “public,” “private,” and “partnership,” what will most often come up is something from the transportation infrastructure finance domain, where in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the United States, this was the rhetoric of kind of mixed results of public-private partnerships. When in reality, now public-private partnership is used to describe everything from the governance of Central Park, in some ways, to global health responses to a pandemic, to how we’re combating the climate challenge. It’s just used in so many ways.

So one of the resources that we worked on developing years ago is just questions to understand a public-private partnership. And this is a resource that’s public. It’s available. And I’ve used it in my graduate school class, and say: These are the questions that you may want to ask on who’s involved, why is a cross-sector approach used, resources involved, the risks and rewards, how partners work together. There’s kind of five to seven subset questions within these, that if you start to ask these questions you will begin to understand the actual mechanics of that partnership. So I think this is a great opportunity for more support, for media and journalism, that’s looking kind of critically and productively at these partnerships, to speak about them in an appropriate manner.

I think the last comment I’ll make before opening it up to any questions is simply about how we advance kind of thinking and practice in this field, particularly from the lens of higher ed. And there’s an abundance now of case studies that are touching on this topic. One of my favorites is the P-TECH case study. Some of you might already be aware of this. It was mentioned in two State of the Union addresses under President Obama. It was sponsored by a public university, involved private corporations, and is one of the few examples of where there’s been a longitudinal data collection.

This is what I highlight as one of the biggest challenges for understanding how we improve public-private partnership performance, is choosing spaces where we actually have data and a narrative to understand how these partnerships perform over a five-plus-year time span, when needed. And currently, there is not a substantial amount of attention in this area. So this is the kind of thinking that we can encourage, that we can spotlight, and that we can develop in our—in our own work. So those are my, hopefully, brief but useful comments. I’ll pause there.

FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Neil, for that overview. And now we’re going to go to all of you for your questions and comments, and to share what you’re doing on your campus.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

So we have two raised hands already. Fantastic. I’m going to go first to David Hudgkin—Hudgens, excuse me, from the University of South Carolina. And please correct my pronunciation. (Laughs.)

Q: Thank you. Can you hear me?

FASKIANOS: We can, yes.

Q: Thank you. David Hudgens from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. I’m in the—I’m a professor in the department of international business.

And super grateful for all of your comments today. You’ve provided me with even deeper language to put around and shape some of the courses that I teach to undergraduate and graduate students. In fact, I teach in my department this semester what we would call a special topics course on public-private partnerships in international development. And it speaks exactly to what you said earlier, which is basically, you know, you need to develop a proficiency for—students need to develop a proficiency for working across sectors and understanding, you know, the very discourses out there—multistakeholder discourses. And that’s kind of the mission of my course.

My question is, many of my students, who are fourth-year students, are either going ahead to work with consultants in the private sector or maybe going into service—public service within, say, the United States government, State Department, or others. So you helped with that with that a lot. My question is, what very primary resources at that level could I, you know, as a regular go-to—I know the Aspen Institute and some other areas. But with respect to international context, anything that comes to mind that we could use?

BRITTO: Yeah. And do you mean in terms of kind of resources to support student learning, or places that they could look to work in and grow with that skillset being applied?

Q: Maybe an example of both—just one example of either, yeah.

BRITTO: Yeah. On the latter element, I think when you think about international organizations that are forging, you know, multiple types of public-private partnership and you observe that discourse, I think a great place especially for graduate students to be launching their careers are places like the World Economic Forum, that do a large amount of hiring, they have an increased number of U.S. offices, and you can have that exposure to everything from digital, urban, infrastructure, to climate. And I’ve heard just really wonderful things from people that have had that experience there.

I think on the former element, the resource that I have found the highest amount of traction with, and I think it’s partly due to the accessibility of it and kind of clarity of it, is this kind of guideline of questions to ask to understand the collaboration. Because even at a senior undergraduate level, being able to ask the right questions to understand a dynamic is a healthy skillset if they’re going into consulting, it’s a healthy skillset if they’re going into public service. And it will also kind of help unpack, I think, for the student, some of the sometimes, like, fluffy language that’s used to describe these types of civic innovations. Like, you know, I come back to when I see student interest in partnership and collaboration, it’s very understandable given, like, the intrinsically good quality of it. But really, we’re pushing on, how do we do it better? And so that would be one resource that I would particularly highlight.

And I would encourage students that are really interested in this space to look at the leadership development programs that might be—that are civic-oriented—that might be good places for them to engage with their first, you know, two to five years following graduation. But sometimes I feel, as faculty, it’s our responsibility to put that on their radar, to help them think a little bit about their next steps, and where they go. And so some of those programs include Coro Leadership, which is around the country. There’s a number of different cross-sector fellowship programs that we can highlight.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next a written question from Ibtissam Klait, who’s an instructor at University of the People: What governance models, incentive structures, and accountability mechanisms would be required to ensure equitable participation from diverse stakeholders, including underserved communities, in shaping these collaborative frameworks?

BRITTO: Yeah. I appreciate the question. The power dynamics of many partnership structures, justifiably, come under, you know, substantial scrutiny. I think a practical case study where this was done well over the long term with a partnership that delivered mixed results but sustained community support, is this P-TECH case study that I highlighted. A couple features, though, when you think about governance models, incentive structures, and accountability mechanisms. I think the first place is often kind of representation, which is in some ways a statement of the obvious but in other ways often a mistake that I think those organizing the governance structures make, in not necessarily being attentive to who needed to be at that—at that table, versus who need to be consulted. Incentive structures in public-private partnership contexts, I think, are highly dependent on the specific issue or the area of focus.

And then on accountability mechanisms, I would highlight, what can nurture a greater sense of equitable participation is if the primary funders of that partnership, or the capital structure assuming multiple funding sources from, could be philanthropy, could be government, could be the private sector, have a precise requirement on reporting on this, and that the performance evaluation is attentive to it. Many public-private partnerships do not have those elements in them. But thank you for the question.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from NagaLaxmi Raman, who’s the director and head of the Amity Institute of International Studies at Amity University. So if you can unmute yourself and ask your question, that would be great.

Q: Thank you so much. Very good evening, Mr. Neil. It was great listening to you.

My question is regarding—you talk about PPP model, right? In that, my question would be, like, at the undergraduate level, especially the liberal arts domain, where we find difficulties since we have opted for multidisciplinary approach. So in this, if we have to include the PPP model, the sector that we get from the universities abroad or from—(inaudible)— also, it becomes very difficult. Now in this, just guide us, how do we approach in terms of PPP model, especially the liberal arts? So that is where we find it difficult—like political science, or public administration, or international relations. I’m talking about these domains as the liberal arts.

BRITTO: Yeah. Well, I can appreciate that there’s certainly a benefit to a multidisciplinary approach to examining the kind of what, why, how, and when of public-private partnerships. I think in fact, a multidisciplinary approach has an advantage over a strictly management school approach to thinking about public-private partnerships. I think at the undergraduate level it might be useful to have resources that speak to the history and the why of why public-private partnership approaches are being used. I think it’s sometimes useful to ground this very abstract process in the context of a specific local issue that would be visible to a student, so that they can begin to imagine the various actors.

There’s political philosophy that would address kind of the prospects and the perils of this type of problem-solving approach. There’s management school and economics arguments that could scrutinize this. So I think fundamentally drawing resources from those multiple disciplines would be an advantage, although I can recognize that it would be a challenge. And I would think that any comprehensive course at the undergraduate level around public-private partnership would kind of benefit from drawing from these different academic disciplines.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

Next question from David Kim, who’s the associate vice provost of the International Institute and professor in the department of European languages and transcultural studies at University of California, Los Angeles: Many students in programs that I supervise are interested in learning from practitioners in the field. I would like to know what sort of skills such practitioners should ideally have in international sectors. You listed the skillset in your introductory remarks, but I wonder whether it’s transferable between local, national, and international partnerships.

BRITTO: Thank you for the question, David. I think there is an upper limit to that transferability, but there is some transferability of that skillset across geographic levels. The upper limit is likely, I think, defined, when working at the international level there needs to be some fluency in how different institutions, particularly government and philanthropy, are quite different from the United States in other domains. I think philanthropy is a really strong example of this, in that the U.S. philanthropic sector—which is a major catalyst and supporter of many different important public-private partnerships—is kind of structurally different than other spaces. And so even government approaches, various non-U.S. governments have different partnership structures. Some will have offices of partnerships. Others are going to be orienting their public-private partnership funding through an aid agency.

I think at the international level, you need to have some fluency in how different countries are engaging in this from a public sector standpoint. And then, secondly, how the non-public agency actors typically will participate. And there, I would look to evaluate the nature of how philanthropy is involved, the history of corporate foundations in those spaces, and if and how they participate in this space.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from Beverly Lindsay, who has a raised hand, and is also from—codirector and principal investigator at the University of California. So, Beverly, over to you.

Q: Thank you. I have two main questions. I’ve actually been in Montreal most of this month. And if I heard correctly, although it’s noisy here, did you say you had an affiliation with Concordia?

BRITTO: Concordia, the global affairs organization.

Q: Oh.

BRITTO: I used to volunteer with Concordia, yeah.

Q: OK, because I’ve been spending some time with undergraduate and graduate students at Concordia University in Montreal and McGill University. The reason I mention that touches upon the last question that you responded to. As you probably know, a number of the major research universities also include Canadian universities. To what extent did your data look at those kind of cooperative endeavors that already exist, for example, with AAU, the American Association of Universities? That’s the one question.

The second question, because I have had our grant at University of California, Riverside—which is a minority-serving institution, and there are tribal institutions, and I was the president—I’m the president. I elevated myself. I was a dean at an HBCU. So to what extent did you take into account, or the team take into account, the kind of endeavors that are happening at MSIs, HBCUs, tribal institutions, et cetera? So two main questions.

BRITTO: Thank you for—thank you for the question. On the former question, I did not have explicit exposure to that data. And so I don’t think it incorporated—necessarily incorporated it exceptionally well. On the latter question, when we began to survey the academic courses that were across the country, and the programming and the initiatives, it definitely was inclusive by intent, but it was by no means exhaustive. So I referenced these seventy-four courses, and there’s a shareable weblink. That was updated as of 2019. Since then, I know a lot has changed. And so kind of the most recent exposure to that domain of mine is, personally, a bit more limited.

I can say that in Canadian context, the practice and the education around public-private partnership has historically been in kind of more of the more traditional infrastructure domain, but it is starting to evolve specifically with attentiveness to the climate area. And I think there’s many different, kind of, facets of Canadian higher ed that have, kind of, opportunities to play in that space.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.

I’m going to take our next question from Richard Joseph, who is professor emeritus at Northwestern University: Can you identify a country in the developing world where this approach has been applied, and any specific partnership collaboration?

BRITTO: Yeah. One of the areas that I would highlight, and kind of my introduction to the topic of multisector collaboration, came in examining post-free trade agreement environments. And in Peru, for example, this is over a decade ago, following free trade agreements with countries like Canada, there were strong efforts to establish different offices of corporate social responsibility, and public sector entities to instigate, govern, support, and evaluate different forms of cross-sector collaboration, to address the intrinsic social and environmental challenges of extractives. I think the reality is, if you’ve seen one public-private partnership, you’ve seen only one. The governance, financial, and technical considerations do not always lend themselves well to being transferable.

I think a useful lens to apply when looking across different stages of economic development is to apply it in the context of a specific issue area. So currently there’s a lot of attentiveness to climate response, and what are the types of public-private partnerships that are needed there. One of the most successful partnerships globally, it’s more in the health space but it did touch, I think, the areas of the world that may be of interest, is the Gavi Alliance. And this has been around for multiple decades now, I believe, and has kind of a rich history in global health response. So that—at a large scale, that would be one that that I would encourage attentiveness to.

FASKIANOS: Fantastic.

We have a raised hand from Yonas Adaye, professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. And if you can accept—

Q: Can you hear me? Hello?

FASKIANOS: Yes, we can. We can.

Q: First and foremost, I’d like to thank you very much indeed for this opportunity. Thank you ever so much for, most of them, inviting us, engaging us, so as to bridge the gap between Global North and Global South.

So, just based on that and that excellent presentation made by the professor, is there any mechanism or scheme that you are thinking about Global North-Global South collaboration in terms of peace education, peace building, and human security in the post-conflict African context? Thank you very much, indeed.

BRITTO: Yeah. You know, admittedly, that is not necessarily a specific domain that I’m well studied in. But I can say that in various peace and reconstruction efforts there are a range of different cross-sector collaborations that will need to be structured, often involving international organizations, domestic civic sector agencies. And some of the cases I’ve had anecdotal exposure to I would say key feature when thinking about those is the governance design, and specifically the power and authority given to local agencies when interacting with international organizations as being, like, a key design process.

One of the resources that might be useful is kind of a toolkit for cross-sector collaboration that we developed at the Intersector Project, which tries to serve as a planning guide and kind of a meeting agenda for if you are starting to design your multisector collaboration. These are the questions you need to be attentive to. And then we pinpoint specific third party, freely available resources that would help guide your team in that area.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

We have an upvote on Eunice Kang’s question, professor from the department of history and political science at Vanguard University: I’m so inspired to seek more cross-sector opportunities for my university students from this talk. Thank you. My question is, how can we initiate cross-sector collaboration, specifically between universities and nonprofit sectors? Would you just cold call and cold email people, or how would you go about it?

BRITTO: Yeah. I would encourage consideration for identifying which local organizations are currently involved, implicitly or explicitly, in challenges that are cross sector in nature. I would imagine there’s a range of civic organizations that are working with public agencies. And to inquire about how students might be better engaged in those spaces. I think there’s a benefit to ensuring when you’re reaching out from a university to a nonprofit organization there’s an attentiveness to the history of that nonprofit’s experience with multisector collaboration, or inexperience. And so while the initial outreach might be slightly cold, I think a warming element is to be aware of how that organization or targeting is already involved in a multisector collaboration.

And that could be through a grant announcement. That could be through an announcement from a public sector agency. That could be highlighting kind of a workforce development program. There’s such a broad range of ways in which cross-sector activity manifests that I think choosing a specific issue area then finding the organizations that have recently engaged with this might be a useful starting point locally.

FASKIANOS: Great.

So I’m going to take the next question from María Carla Chicuén, who is the executive director of cultural affairs at Miami Dade College.

Q: Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you very much, Irina. And thank you to the speaker, Mr. Britto, for all your insights.

I wanted to share, first of all, that Miami Dade College—it’s Miami’s community institution. We were founded as a community college. Now we offer bachelor’s degrees. So we’re not technically a community college anymore, but we do exist to serve our community directly. The secret sauce to our success, we serve over 130,000 students. We are the institution that awards the highest number of associates degrees to Hispanic students in the nation. We operate across eight campuses all over Miami. It’s really been inter-sector collaboration, particularly with our local government agencies, nonprofits, and other universities.

I lead the digital—sorry, I was—my question is about digital. I lead the cultural affairs department at the college, which includes the Miami Book Fair, the Miami Film Festival—just examples of how the college has really taken a nontraditional and outsized role in fostering Miami’s arts and culture community. And through this area, or any others, I would be more than happy—I know we have colleagues from many different universities on the call—just to share experiences and, you know, help one another, if you would like to reach out. I’ll leave my email on the chat.

But I wanted to also ask Mr. Britto, if I may, have you seen any interesting collaborations or frameworks for private-public sector partnerships specifically within the university context to support digital transformation initiatives? Which, for us, is increasingly an emphasis to support students, faculty, and staff, but also to connect more effectively with our community partners through digital systems. And we see that there is generally a lack of funding available for these initiatives. We were fortunate to get an award recently of $2 million from the Knight Foundation, but it’s really been a unique resource that we have found, and it’s a priority for the college. Thank you.

BRITTO: Yeah. Congratulations on that recent grant. And thank you for the question and the context. I think for partnerships between universities and the technology sector to support digital transformation, especially given the important mandate of your institution, you may benefit from looking at what some of the larger technology corporate foundations have offered, and ways in which their service capability and/or their product may be useful to that aim. There’s also a growing number of technologists who are interested in the civic space and civic mandates that, both through formal structures and informal structures, kind of lend their capabilities. And so depending on the precise needs of the digital transformation, you might be able to orchestrate a kind of multisector working group to implement that.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to Susan Knott, who is part of the department of educational leadership and policy and higher education administration at the University of Utah: I’ve actively advocated for education and support for marginalized populations, including lobbying for the Pell Grant and Utah’s in-state tuition for refugees. I’m also involved with the Governor’s Task Force for New Americans. I’ve learned that nationally HEIs do not focus on providing or supporting childcare infrastructure that allows women to enter the workforce or higher ed, especially refugees. Who would you suggest to connect with to change this?

BRITTO: Yeah. This is a domain that I don’t necessarily have substantial exposure to. But I would be attentive to those civic organizations that share this mandate of refugee-related services. And I do know that some of those organizations are quite actively involved in a range of different types of public-private partnerships in the workforce development space. And so perhaps that could hopefully be useful.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. That would be great.

We have—people are sharing email addresses in the Q&A box. So people should look there. There’s also—was a comment from Dr. Raman, who I’m just going to—got three upvotes. So I’m just going to read it in case people aren’t looking: The increasing complexity of societal challenges has prompted a growing recognition within higher ed, especially in the realm of liberal arts, that collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries is essential for addressing these multifaceted issues. However, the implementation of successful cross-sector collaboration in higher ed institutions, particularly those focused on liberal arts, presents a unique set of challenges. One of the primary barriers to effective collaboration in this context is the persistence of disciplinary silos and distinct cultures within higher education.

I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, Neil, comment.

BRITTO: Yeah. I mean, the issue of siloing—whether it’s by discipline, whether it’s by agency within a government, whether it’s by business unit within a company—this is a common barrier to effective, you know, intra-organizational partnership, much less inter-sectoral work. I think one area of opportunity, especially within higher ed, is ensuring there’s a clearinghouse-style resource, or a centralized unit or team, that’s sharing or aware of some of the lessons learned around how that institution has been involved in the different partnerships. And sometimes this can be a responsibility of a senior—a senior official, because the spectrum of multisector collaboration initiated by a university is everything from how private student housing is potentially governed through a public-private partnership, through research partnerships, through different services offered to the university. So there’s truly a spectrum of collaborations and different agencies and organizations within the university implementing them. But having some centralized resource can be a useful design feature.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

We’re almost out of time, so if people have last questions, you should raise your hand or write them. And I will ask a question. In your opinion, Neil, how does cross-sector collaboration in American higher education institutions—what does that do for America’s global image abroad?

BRITTO: You know, it’s interesting hearing from international peers their perception and experience interacting with U.S. higher ed on this space. I think in many ways, some of the research centers and programs offered by our universities in the United States often have global reach. And I think one of the areas that’s deeply respected is that in some of these programs and centers they’ve managed ways to gain the trust and confidence of different international entities over sustained periods of time. And the capacity and capability of some of our programs is deeply respected. I think the challenge, and perhaps the opportunity, is still to increase the amount of shared learning on public-private partnership performance in higher ed across different institutions, across different countries. There’s some challenges to that, but it’s kind of an area for future opportunity.

FASKIANOS: Great.

And I’m just seeing if there are any other questions. I thought it would be great if you could just talk a little bit more about your—the book that you coedited, The Intersector, and some of the findings that you put in there of how the public, nonprofit, and private sectors can address America’s challenges. What did you identify as America’s challenges? (Laughs.) And what policy recommendations did you have?

BRITTO: Yeah. So this book was an effort, in close coordination with a dear colleague, Dan Gitterman, at the University of North Carolina. And the intention was to summarize what we had learned over, at that time, the last eight or nine years of working on the topic of multisector collaboration through the Intersector Project. And we chose a model for the book as an edited volume to capture the perspectives of different practitioners, funders, and those who had been involved in different multisector collaborations. And it outlined a few specific areas of need and opportunity for future attention—while not necessarily advocating for any specific policy intervention—areas of future opportunity. Began to highlight at that time the rise of data collaboratives.

And so, prior to, you know, the most recent years, where generative AI has made data an issue that is aware to the broad public, many organizations were starting to explore and flirt with data-oriented public-private partnerships, and sharing between public, private, and in some cases civic sector organizations. And this was an area that we highlighted as being kind of essential for future work. You saw more and more organizations cultivating data strategies within, of all types and all areas. And that fundamentally data-oriented, multisector collaborations were going to be, you know, a rising type, with its own set of governance, financial, and technical configurations.

And so while the book had contributors from Federal Reserve Banks, from foundations, from corporate environments, from think tanks, there were a few key thematic areas. Data center collaborations being one of them, the types of collaborations to address the kind of prospects and perils of the sharing economy being another. And then fundamentally, around performance improvement and evidence-based approaches to multisector collaboration, which are still talked about yet not always kind of incentivized in practice, and not always necessarily reaching the domain of the public.

And so I think academia has historically had an important role in delving deeper into some of these multisector collaborations. But there are many other initiatives that are multiyear, sometimes multimillion, that just don’t have the rigorous evaluation that we need to better understand how do we do this better. I think we’re increasingly past the era of why we should do multisector collaboration, and it really needs to be centered on how do we do it better, because it’s going to be happening, effectively, no matter what for these challenges.

FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Well, with that, we’re nearing the end of our hour. Neil Britto, thank you very much for sharing your terrific insights with us today, and for all your work in this area. We really appreciate it. As I noted at the beginning, we will send the video and transcript for this and some of the resources—links to the resources that Professor Britto mentioned.

And I encourage you all to follow us at @CFR_Education on X and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org, for research and analysis on global issues. I know that many of you are gearing up for the students returning to your campuses, if they haven’t already. I think this is a prime week. But hope you enjoyed this last week of August, and wishing you a happy Labor Day. And we will reconvene in a couple of weeks. So thank you, again, Neil Britto. We appreciate it.

BRITTO: Thank you so much for having me.

FASKIANOS: Take care.

(END)