Small Wins, Big Lessons: The Partnership That Made Both Organizations Bigger
What Ocean's Eleven can teach small arts nonprofits about collaboration, capacity, and the power of bringing the right people together.
One of my favorite scenes in Ocean's Eleven comes near the end, when Danny Ocean and his crew gather in front of the Bellagio fountains, quietly admiring the results of their “perfect heist”. After all the planning, improvising, and close calls, they've actually pulled it off.
What I love about that moment is the collective satisfaction. Danny had the vision, Rusty knew how to manage the moving pieces, Linus had something to prove, Basher brought the technical wizardry, and everybody else contributed something the operation needed. No single person could have pulled it off alone, regardless of how talented they were.
I've always had a soft spot for these kinds of characters: Danny Ocean, Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith from The A-Team, Nathan Ford from Leverage. Masterminds who look at a seemingly impossible situation, assemble a crew with complementary skills, and figure out how to make something extraordinary happen.
Which got me wondering: What would happen if we brought a little more of that mastermind energy into our small nonprofit arts organizations?
Welcome to the second installment of Small Wins, Big Lessons, where we're exploring the partnership that made both organizations bigger.
Everybody Brings Something to the Table
If you've spent any meaningful time working in a small nonprofit, you've probably experienced the familiar frustration of having a terrific idea and approximately three people available to execute it. One of those people is already managing six other projects, another is a volunteer, and the third is you.
Meanwhile, there's another organization across town with a similar challenge, different resources, and perhaps exactly the expertise you need.
I've watched organizations approach collaboration primarily through the lens of shared expenses. Can we split the venue rental? Share advertising costs? Combine mailing lists? Those are legitimate considerations, particularly when every dollar has several competing destinations.
But the more interesting opportunity is what happens when organizations combine their strengths to create something neither could accomplish independently.
Research from the Urban Institute, supported by The Wallace Foundation, offers compelling examples. In Partnerships Between Large and Small Cultural Organizations: A Strategy for Building Arts Participation (2004), researcher Francie Ostrower examines collaborations that expanded access to facilities, strengthened community connections, and introduced cultural programming to new audiences.
One example involved a small African American classical music organization partnering with a historically Black college to secure space for a music program serving talented, underserved teenagers. Another paired a large children's museum with a small Latine theater organization, helping bring hundreds of Latine community members into museum events.
These partnerships combined different kinds of organizational strength to accomplish something meaningful.
Trust Is a Resource, Too
Let's talk about something that doesn't always appear on a nonprofit's balance sheet: community trust.
A large institution might have the impressive building, development staff, established donor relationships, and marketing budget. A smaller, community-rooted organization might have spent decades building relationships, understanding cultural nuances, and demonstrating that it will consistently show up for the people it serves.
Both bring tremendous value, although our sector has a habit of assigning greater importance to the resources that are easiest to count.
In my experience, you can purchase advertising, hire consultants, and rent beautiful facilities.
Building genuine trust requires time, consistency, and relationships that cannot simply be acquired.
Consider a museum interested in engaging a community that has historically felt excluded from its programming. Partnering with a trusted neighborhood arts organization could create opportunities for meaningful exchange, provided that the community partner has a real voice in shaping the experience.
The Wallace Foundation's 2014 case study, Someone Who Speaks Their Language, by Bob Harlow and Cindy Cox Roman, offers another interesting example. Minnesota Opera partnered with local radio personality Ian Punnett, whose established relationship with listeners helped introduce opera to women ages 35 to 60 who might otherwise have considered the art form inaccessible.
The collaboration illustrates how a trusted messenger can help an institution connect with people beyond its existing audience.
For smaller organizations, that should also be a reminder of the value they already possess. Your relationships, cultural fluency, and community knowledge are meaningful organizational assets, even when they don't come with a six-figure budget.
Make Sure Everybody Gets a Share
Look, we live in a highly transactional world. How many “pay to play” scenarios have you heard of in the past 10 years? This shouldn’t be transactional, nor one-sided. Mutual reciprocity and benefit are the only way these types of relationships can be sustainable.
Partnerships between organizations with dramatically different resources can produce extraordinary outcomes, but they can also reproduce the very inequities that arts organizations frequently say they want to address.
Imagine a large cultural institution inviting a small neighborhood arts organization to help develop an event intended to attract new audiences. The smaller organization contributes its relationships, cultural knowledge, artistic talent, and credibility. The event succeeds, attendance increases, and the larger institution celebrates its expanded reach.
Wonderful.
Now, what did the smaller organization gain?
Was its staff compensated for their time? Did it receive meaningful visibility and recognition? Were new relationships established that it could sustain independently? Did it influence the programming, or was it primarily asked to deliver an audience?
These questions deserve answers before anyone starts designing the promotional materials.
Ostrower's research on cultural collaborations acknowledges that differences in resources, influence, and organizational priorities can make mutually beneficial partnerships difficult to sustain. Even well-intentioned collaborations can struggle when expectations and benefits are poorly defined.
I believe equity becomes much more practical when we build it into the working relationship itself.
That means discussing compensation, decision-making authority, ownership of creative work, audience relationships, and long-term benefits while everyone is still excited about the possibilities.
And yes, that might make the first meeting a little uncomfortable.
I'd argue that a slightly uncomfortable conversation at the beginning is considerably less expensive than resentment six months later.
The Real Win Is What You Can Do Next
One of the more revealing lessons from the Urban Institute's Cultural Collaborations: Building Partnerships for Arts Participation (2003) is that successful activities do not automatically produce lasting partnerships.
Some collaborations created valuable programming and opportunities, yet struggled to continue after their original funding ended. In one documented partnership involving a ballet company and Latine cultural organizations, scholarships continued even though broader audience-diversification goals remained unmet.
That example raises a question I think deserves more attention: What remains after the event, exhibition, or grant-funded project is finished?
Perhaps a small organization has developed new administrative expertise, established relationships with funders, or gained experience producing programming at a larger scale. Perhaps the larger institution has developed deeper community relationships, learned to approach programming differently, or built a more inclusive understanding of its audience.
Those outcomes can strengthen both organizations long after the original collaboration concludes.
And sometimes the smartest partnership is modest in scope. Two organizations might co-produce a workshop, share specialized expertise, coordinate complementary programming, or jointly develop an audience engagement initiative.
A small, thoughtfully designed collaboration can provide enough room to learn whether the relationship deserves a second act.
For already stretched nonprofit teams, that can be a much more sustainable approach than launching an elaborate partnership that requires more capacity than either organization can realistically spare.
Assemble Your Crew
I keep coming back to that scene at the Bellagio fountains.
Each member of Ocean's crew brought a specific capability to the operation, but their real achievement came from understanding how those capabilities worked together. Everybody had a role, everybody contributed, and the outcome depended on the collective effort.
Obviously, I'm encouraging nonprofit collaboration rather than casino robbery. Our insurance policies are complicated enough.
Still, there's something useful in the comparison.
The strongest partnership isn't the one where one organization borrows another's audience. It is the one where both become capable of something new.
For small arts nonprofits navigating limited resources, growing expectations, and communities with evolving needs, collaboration can be an opportunity to think beyond the boundaries of our individual organizations.
We can approach potential partners with curiosity about their strengths, clarity about our own, and an honest understanding of what mutual benefit should look like.
And we can give ourselves permission to start small, learn together, and build relationships that respect the identities and missions of everyone involved.
So here's the question I'm sitting with this week, and I invite you to consider it, too:
What could your organization accomplish with the right partner that it couldn't build alone? And what would it take to ensure that both organizations emerged from the experience stronger than when they began?
Maybe your next big win begins with figuring out who's missing from your crew.
Research and further reading
Francie Ostrower, Partnerships Between Large and Small Cultural Organizations, Urban Institute, 2004.
Francie Ostrower, Cultural Collaborations: Building Partnerships for Arts Participation, Urban Institute, 2003.
Bob Harlow and Cindy Cox Roman, Someone Who Speaks Their Language: How a Nontraditional Partner Brought New Audiences to Minnesota Opera, 2014.
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