Building the Bridge: The Human Work Behind Cultural Partnerships
“The glue that holds things together may not often be seen, but when it is missing, it is felt” (event participant)
This blog brings together two perspectives on partnership working. Paola writes from her experience as Partnership Manager for a strategic collaboration between the University of Reading and the Natural History Museum. Alys writes as an NCACE Research Associate exploring collaboration, participation and partnership working across higher education and cultural contexts.
The opportunity to connect these perspectives emerged through an NCACE Festival of Cultural Knowledge Exchange workshop, where participants reflected on what it actually takes to build and sustain successful partnerships. While the language of collaboration is now commonplace, the discussion revealed how much of the work that enables partnership remains invisible, relational and difficult to describe.
Building the Bridge
In 2023, the University of Reading and the Natural History Museum (NHM) each created one part-time 3-year role, with the broad remit of supporting and driving their newly established institutional partnership, and of delivering added value for both institutions. After three years, Paola - who worked at NHM - and her counterpart in Reading can reflect on their joint roles as Partnership Managers, effectively acting as a bridge between the two organisations at both a strategic and operational level. These paired posts were recognised as forming an effective bridge between the organisations and as being key in developing and delivering collaborative activities. Paola and her colleague found themselves acting as research and researcher developers, translators, workshop facilitators, agenda setters, problem solvers, people finders, opportunity spotters, risk managers, and knowledge transferers. They provided connection and institutional knowledge, and kept things moving forward for and with busy colleagues juggling multiple projects.
‘Bridging’ roles, if set up right, provide crucial continuity at an institutional level, meaning that connections don’t need to cease when individual members of staff at either institution move on. Crucially, in their case it was incredibly useful to have two half-time roles, each set up in one of the two partnering institutions, which developed organically in an informal, cross-institutional job-share. With this setup, Paola and her colleague were able to offer more extended ‘cover’ of their shared inbox across periods of annual leave, more robust support during in-person events, and crucially the ongoing work did not stop when Paola left her role at the museum, as her colleague was able to bridge the gap whilst a replacement could be found.
The Social Infrastructure of Partnership
Paola's experience highlights something that emerged repeatedly throughout the workshop discussion. While partnerships are often described through their outputs, participants were much more likely to talk about the work that makes those outputs possible: building trust, maintaining relationships, translating between organisational cultures, spotting opportunities and solving problems before they escalate.
These activities form what might be thought of as the social infrastructure of partnership working. What interested Alys was how consistently participants returned to relational themes. Institutions often describe partnerships through structures, agreements and deliverables. Participants described relationships, trust, conversations and connection. This distinction feels important because it suggests that many challenges commonly framed as operational may actually be experienced as relational
Translation as Partnership Practice
An understanding of how different types of organisations work, and what their key drivers are, is crucial to the success of cultural (research) partnerships. Both academics and professional services staff need the time and motivation to develop this cross-institutional and cross-sector understanding. One of the key tasks of those working in ‘bridging’ roles is providing a ‘translation service’ between colleagues working in different institutions.
In this context, translation is not simply about explaining terminology or organisational processes. It is also about helping people understand different motivations, constraints, timelines and definitions of success. Several participants described partnership working as an ongoing negotiation between professional cultures rather than a straightforward collaboration between organisations. Effective partnership working therefore requires curiosity, empathy and the ability to work across and embrace different ways of thinking.
Translation emerged as more than a practical task. Participants described it as an ongoing process of helping people navigate different motivations, expectations, timelines and ways of working. Yet these activities are rarely recognised as expertise in their own right. Translation, facilitation, negotiation and relationship-building require judgement, practice and experience, but are often treated as personal attributes rather than developed capabilities. As research and knowledge exchange become increasingly collaborative, institutions may need to think more carefully about how these collaborative capabilities are recognised and developed.
Partnerships as Assemblages
Participants rarely described partnerships as formal agreements between institutions. Instead, they spoke about evolving networks of relationships, expertise, opportunities and shared interests. Staff move on, priorities shift and funding landscapes change. The challenge is therefore not simply creating partnerships, but building enough continuity, trust and shared understanding for collaboration to survive change.
Staff move on, priorities shift and funding landscapes change. A tension runs throughout many discussions of partnership working. Institutions often talk about partnerships as agreements. People experience them as relationships. The challenge is therefore not simply creating partnerships, but building enough continuity, trust and shared understanding for collaboration to survive change.
Power, Recognition and Invisible Labour
Unbalanced power dynamics are a clear pathway to unsuccessful partnerships. Workshop participants spoke about the importance of recognising different forms of expertise and ensuring that collaboration does not become extractive. Effective partnerships require more than goodwill; they require intentional conversations about expectations, decision-making, ownership, resource allocation and credit. Without these discussions, the invisible labour of partnership working often falls disproportionately on a small number of individuals.
This reveals a persistent challenge. Some of the work most critical to successful partnerships is also the least visible. Convening, connecting, translating and maintaining relationships frequently sit outside formal measures of achievement, making them easy to rely upon and easy to overlook.
What Benefits Do Partnerships Create?
Benefits identified by professionals with an experience of partnership working centre around three key areas:
- Enhanced learning, skills, and interdisciplinary opportunities for staff and students
- Increased access to expertise, resources and collections not available in house
- Additional collaboration, impact, and funding opportunities
Many of the benefits identified are relational rather than transactional. While funding opportunities and access to resources are important, people spoke just as frequently about expanded networks, exposure to different ways of thinking, new perspectives and unexpected opportunities. These outcomes suggest that the value of partnership working lies not only in what is exchanged, but in what becomes possible when different forms of expertise, knowledge and experience are brought into conversation.
Paola’s experience also suggests that it is important to find a good balance between pursuing strategically aligned, planned benefits with intentionality and the ability to identify and capitalise on serendipitous outputs and outcomes. It is the human element of partnerships, and humans’ ability to creatively connect seemingly unrelated strands of thought and activity resulting in innovative outputs, that often leads to their most significant and long-lasting impact.
What Gets in the Way?
There are many barriers to benefits realisation, which most often relate to:
- Resource and capacity constraints
- Cultural and operational differences between partners
- Weak engagement and lack of strategic alignment
Many of these barriers identified, and the way they are discussed, mirror the capabilities discussed earlier. Resource constraints, cultural differences and weak strategic alignment are rarely described as purely structural problems. More often, they reflect challenges in coordination, communication, relationship-building and shared understanding. In other words, many of the obstacles to partnership working are themselves relational.
Final Reflections
Perhaps the strongest message to emerge from the discussion was that successful partnerships depend on work that often remains difficult to see. Convening, connecting, translating, negotiating and maintaining relationships across organisational boundaries are rarely treated as outputs in their own right, yet they are fundamental to collaboration.
Beneath discussions of trust, translation and connection sits a deeper question about capability. Many of the activities discussed throughout the workshop are often treated as personal qualities rather than areas of expertise. Yet participants repeatedly described them as central to successful partnership working.
As institutions continue to invest in partnership working, there may be value in paying greater attention not only to partnerships themselves, but to the collaborative capabilities that make them possible. Translation, facilitation, relationship-building and boundary-spanning work are not simply interpersonal skills. They are core capabilities that enable collaboration across organisational, disciplinary and sectoral boundaries.
The bridge may not always be visible, but it is often what enables ideas, knowledge, resources and opportunities to move between worlds.
This blog post was prompted by reflections made by the authors in preparation for Building the Bridge: The Human Work Behind Cultural Partnerships, held as part of the NCACE Festival of Cultural Knowledge Exchange in April 2026. You can listen to the event here. We acknowledge contributions made by the event co-leads, Dr Beth Steiner (University of Reading) and Dr Isabel Davis (Natural History Museum), as well as insights shared by event participants and by the 20 respondents to two online surveys shared in September 2025 and April 2026.
Photo by Kelly (https://www.pexels.com/photo/aerial-shot-of-a-park-3997056/)