Collaboration, Co-optation and Authentic Power Sharing

Currently, my clients include two community based programs. Both of these programs have a thirty year track history in their communities, both of them received grants to implement culturally specific sexual assault services and both of them ended up seeking my services after attempting to collaborate with a rape crisis center.

• In both cases the collaboration went well as long as the services proposed and the decisions were largely directed by the rape crisis center 
• In both cases, the critique given by the rape crisis center was that the services proposed were not best practice
• In both cases the collaboration dissolved when the community based program proposed services that were not "traditional"
• In both cases, the rape crisis center declined to continue the collaboration when the community based organization decided to go forward in implementation of the strategy.

Looking at the proposed strategies, it is true they may not meet the textbook definition of best practice, but they were evidence informed.  One of the reasons culturally specific funding was developed was to define what is best practice (evidence based and/or evidence informed) in historically marginalized communities. These community based organizaitons were seeking to implement strategies that were directly in line with the goal of the grant program. 

The rape crisis centers were struggling.

• They were struggling with the idea that culturally specific strategies would not look the same as mainstream, just dropped into a CBO.
• They were struggling with the fact that someone other than a rape crisis center could decide what was programmatically appropriate.
• They were struggling with how to be an "allied" organization around the issue of sexual violence.

Ultimately, in these two cases I think the rape crisis centers dropped the ball.  I think they missed an opportunity to share power authentically, to work in true collaboration with communities of color, to expand the repertoire of best practice and to create innovate programs,  My hope is that these two unsuccessful collaborations are an anomaly, that the majority of the rape crisis centers and community-based organizations engaged in the creation of culturally specific services are experiencing this collaboration as mutually beneficial, successful and ultimately empowering.