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As the country faces challenges in response to the current political climate, societal tragedies, and environmental disasters, citizens are besieged by nonprofit organizations requesting donations. In response to these requests, individual citizens are seeking out innovative ways to engage in philanthropy. One recent innovation in grassroots philanthropy is giving circles where individuals pool their money, knowledge, and resources to make a social impact. The functions of giving circles can be likened to collaborations in that giving circles encompass the key characteristics of collaboration including communication, consensus decision-making, focusing on common goals, a shared vision and ethical approach, pooling of resources, depending on social capital, and trust. The proposed framework of philanthropic collaboration creates an intersection between the collaboration, philanthropy, and social movement literatures by proving an innovative lens through which to view giving circles. The conceptual framework provides a tool for scholars and practitioners to define and operationalize this new innovation in grassroots philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the case studies on collaboration tout the success of collaborative efforts, and theory building efforts focus almost exclusively on conditions for successful collaboration. Notably missing from the literature are efforts to comprehend why collaborations fail. Given that participants in a collaboration are invested in the collaborative effort, why does a collaboration fail? In addition, does the membership of the collaborative effort impact the factors for success or failure? By examining extant literature on both collaboration success and collaboration failure, we seek to identify a set of factors common across the literature that are foundational to a framework of collaboration failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on previous models of collaboration processes, this article expands and revises the antecedent-process-outcome framework used to explain collaboration. The article discusses why this framework needs to be expanded to include the element of institutional structure. We propose a modified framework to explain collaboration that includes a typology of citizen-based, agency-based, and mixed partnerships. Furthermore, the article draws from the expansive body of literature on watershed collaboration to propose additional antecedents that influence institutional structures and, in turn, alter the process patterns in the collaboration “black box.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]