Equitable Partnerships
Power is often the elephant in the room when it comes to partnerships for public good. While collaborations between grassroots organisations and established institutions are essential for accessing resources and creating impact, inherent power imbalances affect both outcomes and the wellbeing of those involved. Too often, it's the partners with fewer resources and less proximity to power who navigate these dynamics alone.
This project, a collaboration between Dr Andreana Drencheva and Rising Arts Agency, examines how power manifests in cultural sector partnerships for public good and how imbalances can be reduced or removed. Through co-created research centering marginalised voices, we've developed practical tools and insights that organisations can use to build more equitable collaborations.
Partners
Aims
This research set out to make power dynamics visible and actionable. We aimed to:
Examine how power imbalances manifest in partnerships between grassroots organisations, marginalised creatives, and cultural institutions.
Understand the real-world impacts of these imbalances on project and organisational outcomes, relationships, and wellbeing.
Develop practical, accessible tools that organisations can use to reflect on, navigate, and transform power dynamics in their partnerships.
The ultimate goal: equip organisations with evidence-based approaches to share power more fairly.
Methods
This indictive qualitative research was designed as a collaborative investigation with Rising Arts Agency. We centered marginalised voices throughout - compensating participants for their expertise, commissioning marginalised creatives to produce outputs, and ensuring co-authorship to challenge academic monopolies on knowledge production. Creative labs and collective sensemaking sessions placed individual experiences of power imbalances within wider sector contexts, revealing systemic patterns.
Our approach embedded reflective practice and an ethics of care, generating insights that are both academically rigorous and practically relevant for grassroots organisations and institutions navigating partnership dynamics.
Summary of Findings
Partnership doesn't automatically mean equity. Through examining real collaborations between grassroots organisations and established institutions, we discovered that power operates on two levels: the visible (who holds the budget, who’s named as lead) and the invisible (whose expertise counts, whose ways of working are “professional,” what labour gets resourced). Time and again, we witnessed talented grassroots leaders spending unpaid hours translating, advocating, and absorbing institutional friction, while their institutional partners remained largely unaware of this hidden work.
Yet, some partnerships broke this pattern entirely. They compensated all contributions fairly, created genuine space for different ways of working, made power dynamics a regular topic of conversation rather than a crisis response, and designed decision-making processes that valued all voices equally. These partnerships didn’t just feel better; they produced more creative outcomes, built partnership resilience, and created genuine social change.
The pathway from extractive to equitable partnership exists; it requires intention, honesty, and practical tools.
Impact
The research has catalysed open conversations about power in partnerships across sectors. Organisations we’ve worked with are moving beyond good intentions to concrete action by embedding equity practices into their partnership work, redesigning decision-making processes, and developing new resourcing strategies.
Principal Investigator
Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship