When I was hired nearly 33 years ago, I knew relatively little about community development, reforestation, or nonprofit management. I had little cross-cultural experience and had spent one unfortunate summer working on a farm in Oregon. However, my time as a Navy officer taught me how to work as part of a team and how to rely on others with more detailed technical knowledge than my own. I knew that my skills alone were not enough to sustain our work—I needed to collaborate with other experts.
This lesson stood me in good stead during my first years in leadership at Plant With Purpose, as I realized our sister organization in the Dominican Republic was packed with experts. Often in the late 90s, people would look at the tiny Plant With Purpose staff and ask me, “Where is your scientific and agricultural expertise?” My response was that it came from the Dominican Republic.
As Plant With Purpose has grown, we have developed much greater depth here in the United States, yet our expertise is still very decentralized. We know that every member of every team brings a unique piece of the puzzle.
I am proud that many of our most important breakthroughs have come from our partners. We learned about community development from Haiti, holistic ministry from Mexico, savings groups from Tanzania, the Theology of Work from Burundi, and the importance of mapping and land tenure from Thailand. Very early on, I learned that while we brought funding, visibility, and accountability, we in the U.S. were utterly dependent on the quality and effectiveness of our local partners for our own success. We needed each other, and a collaborative relationship was the only way forward.
Over the years, this partnership has continued to deepen, as has our mutual trust. To this day, most of our initiatives continue to involve collaboration. The covenant that defines our relationship was written together. The curricula we use for regenerative agriculture and holistic ministry were written with the participation of agronomists and pastors from each of our partners. The result has been unique and truly international. Even our recent search for my successor has been collaborative, with our global partners helping to define the role's requirements and interview candidates.
Our collaboration does not end there. Perhaps the most important collaborative partnership is that between our local staff and the families we serve. Community members have the greatest stake in the outcomes of our programs. They are the ones planting trees, transforming their farms, restoring their watersheds, and investing in their communities through their savings groups.
Around the world, one of the most common critiques of tree-planting projects is that they do not take into account the desires of the people living where the trees are planted. The secret to our success is that we begin our work in partnership with these very people.
That is why we refer to our work as Community Designed Restoration, or CDR. Ours is not a transactional relationship, and we are not paying people to participate—transformation has to come from their own initiative. We continually remind ourselves that the people we serve are our partners, not our projects.
We also firmly believe that our collaborative partnership extends to our donors, supporters, and volunteers here in the United States. We could do nothing without your involvement—it is only together that we can bring change. I often visualize the role of Plant WIth Purpose as the connecting point between our partners who farm the hillsides of Burundi or Malawi, and our partners who attend churches in Texas or California.
Finally, we see the importance of collaboration with like-minded organizations. Over the years, we have been active in several alliances, including InterAction and the Accord Network. We have facilitated specific collaborative partnerships with organizations like ECHO, HOPE International, and Compassion International. Similarly, we have partnered with Christian environmental organizations, including A Rocha, the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the Au Sable Institute.
It can be tempting to think of other nonprofits as competitors, but we are working toward the common goal of making the world a better place. There is so much we can gain from collaboration! Outside of our local partners, our greatest source of learning has been from other organizations with similar missions.
Regardless of who we are collaborating with—our local partners, farmers, donors, or like-minded organizations—we realize that none of us, by ourselves, brings the whole answer. Instead, we each bring our talents, our gifts, and our expertise, and we combine them with others. Together, we can begin to do something truly remarkable. When we each bring our gifts to the table, by the power of the Holy Spirit, our five loaves and two fish are suddenly enough to feed thousands.
