The Elephant in the Room: When Power Imbalances Shape Our "Collaboration"
Last month, I wrote about building trust in partnerships. It generated a lot of thoughtful conversations, including one that got me thinking more deeply about the relationship between power and trust. A leader at a local nonprofit reached out to share something that's been weighing on her: the inherent competition baked into our sector that can make real, authentic collaboration (and trust!) feel nearly impossible, despite our best intentions.
Her question made me realize we've been having incomplete conversations about partnership. We talk a lot about the power of partnership in the social impact space, but we talk far less about the power dynamics that shape those partnerships, often in ways that undermine the very collaboration we're trying to build and reinforce existing power imbalances.
The Competition Trap We've Built
Here's the uncomfortable truth: the nonprofit sector has created systems that reward competition over collaboration. Grant applications that pit similar organizations against each other. Funding cycles that create artificial scarcity. Recognition programs that celebrate individual organizational achievements rather than collective impact.
A set of gold scales
But the power imbalances go deeper than just competition for resources. In many partnerships, organizations from marginalized communities—who often have the strongest community relationships and deepest understanding of the issues—are expected to be the face of initiatives while rarely having the same level of institutional resources or infrastructure support.
They're asked to carry the emotional labor, the community engagement, and often the bulk of the implementation work, while better-resourced partners control the funding, the messaging, and the strategic decisions.
And then we wonder why partnerships feel forced, why collaboration feels performative, why that "equal partnership" agreement somehow always benefits one partner more than the other.
I've been on both sides of this dynamic, and am still learning.
When I Was the One with the Power (And Didn't Want to Admit It)
A few years ago, I was working for a national organization that provided strategic support, including funding, to grassroots organizations to collaborate on shared strategies. Having been on the other side of those funding conversations, I thought I understood how to do this differently. We prided ourselves on being "different"—we wanted to be partners, not just funders. We wanted to support the work beyond just writing checks.
But here's what I had to learn the hard way: when you control the funding, you're not just another partner at the table. No matter how much you say "we're all equals here," everyone in that room knows who can make or break their budget. My grassroots experience actually made this harder to see at first—I kept thinking, "But it's different with me."
It took honest conversations—and some uncomfortable feedback—to realize that my good intentions and shared experience weren't enough. The power imbalance was real, and pretending it didn't exist was actually making it worse. Organizations were saying what they thought I wanted to hear instead of what they actually needed, and that didn't serve anyone.
Real partnership didn't happen until we started naming that imbalance out loud and building structures to account for it.
Power-Conscious Partnership Strategies
So what does it look like to acknowledge power imbalances instead of pretending they don't exist? Here are some strategies I've learned through my own trial and error:
Start with the honest conversation.
Before diving into partnership goals, talk about what each organization brings to the table, including different types of power. Funding capacity, political connections, community trust, subject matter expertise, lived experience, and institutional infrastructure are all forms of power. Name them, and name the imbalances. We can't address imbalances if we refuse to admit they exist.
Design decision-making that redistributes power.
If one partner controls most of the resources, give the other partners greater control over how those resources are used. If one partner has the community relationships, give them the lead on community engagement decisions. If a grassroots organization is providing the community credibility for an initiative, make sure they have real decision-making authority, not just a seat at the table.
Learn more: Five Ways that Nonprofits Can Make Decision-Making More Inclusive and Effective | The Bridgespan Group
Create feedback loops that work.
Build in regular check-ins where partners can honestly assess whether the collaboration is working for everyone. And make it safe to say when it's not, especially for partners who might feel pressure to stay quiet about problems. For tips on building trust in partnerships, check out my last blog: The Three Layers of Trust and What They Mean for Your Partnerships.
Compensate fairly for different contributions.
Time, expertise, emotional labor, and community relationships are valuable. If a partnership asks one organization to contribute significantly more of any of these, figure out how to balance that out. This might mean higher compensation, reduced other responsibilities, or additional infrastructure support.
What Funders Can Do
Funders hold tremendous power to shape whether organizations see each other as competitors or collaborators.
When philanthropy rewards independent scaling over collaboration and requires organizations to hold separate pieces of funding even for joint work—where each partner manages their own grant with their own reporting requirements—it creates systems that sustain duplicative infrastructure rather than meaningful partnership.
Some funders are choosing a different path. I'm working with a client who is piloting an initiative to address gaps in the social safety net that requires collaboration as a prerequisite to access funding; real partnership with shared decision-making, not performative collaboration. They've hosted partnership labs, resourced the actual collaboration work, and provided time for meaningful cohesion and trust-building through convening. They recognize that meaningful collaboration requires investment in relationship infrastructure.
The results: organizations seeing each other as allies instead of competitors, with measurably stronger collective impact.
Other strategies shifting these dynamics:
Collaborative funding pools where multiple organizations manage resources together
Shared measurement systems that track collective outcomes rather than organizational metrics
Trust-based grantmaking that reduces the administrative burden of competition
Fund networks and collaboratives instead of individual organizations
The Work We All Need to Do
I've learned a lot about power dynamics through both mistakes and successes over the years. While I'm always learning and adjusting, I've developed some clear principles about what works when it comes to building more equitable partnerships.
The key insight I keep coming back to: ignoring power dynamics doesn't make them go away. It just makes them invisible to the people who benefit from them most.
Real collaboration requires acknowledging that not all partnerships start from equal ground—and then doing the intentional work to create more equitable structures anyway. That's not just an aspiration; it's a practical necessity if we want partnerships that actually deliver on their potential.
My offer: If you're wrestling with power dynamics in a current partnership, I'd love to talk through it with you. Sometimes an outside perspective can help identify dynamics that are hard to see from the inside.
My ask: Share this with someone who might benefit from thinking about partnerships through this lens. The more we talk openly about these dynamics, the better chance we have of building collaborations that actually serve everyone involved.
