Chipping Away at a Grand Challenge: Aligning Goal and Governance to Reduce Homelessness

When many of today’s deepest problems are intractable, the question arises of how public, private, and nonprofit actors can collaborate in earnest to mitigate negative local effects. Given the open-endedness of any collective effort to ‘chip away’ at a grand challenge, intersectoral collaboration must align the scope of a shared goal with the governance arrangements distributing decision-making authority. By juxtaposing insights from fieldwork on intersectoral collaborations formed to aid local homeless communities in São Paulo (Brazil), California (USA), and Manchester (UK), we propose four goal-governance alignments to achieve coordinated collective action. To pursue a targeted goal, an organization can set up or join a local structure of centralized (Partnerships) or distributed (Coalitions) decision-making authority. To pursue broader goals, an organization can evolve into a Mission by adapting its own managerial hierarchy to engage simultaneously in multiple, mutually reinforcing local partnerships and coalitions. Or evolve into a Movement by not only engaging in multiple local partnerships and coalitions, but also adopting a participation architecture to encourage collaboration at scale from third parties outside the organization’s managerial control.