The Role of Tri-Sector Partnerships in Singapore: Youth Corps Singapore Leaders Immersion

Asia P3 Hub
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Contributed by A Very Good Company

We recently supported Youth Corps Singapore to run their Leaders Immersion Programme, which brings together like-minded individuals to co-create sustainable community projects with industry partners.

Singapore has big aspirations to be a leading smart, sustainable and livable city in Asia. At the same time, we also have a strong interest to be an innovator and exporter of urban solutions for the region and beyond.

Critical challenges our society faces — such as water scarcity and the rising cost of healthcare — increasingly require the business, government and non-profit sectors to work together to create lasting solutions. This is only possible if leaders are able to engage and collaborate across all three sectors.

It is important to invest in the next wave of leaders, to help them harness the power of collaboration, to achieve their impact goals. The Youth Corps Leaders Programme is designed to develop lifelong leaders of change who ignite transformation in the society by catalysing collaboration between youth, community service organisations and wider society.

Tri-sector partnerships bring together the skills and resources of diverse partners (across the public, private and civil society sectors) in joint activities to maximise the impact it brings about to the society. Reasons to partner often include wanting to drive innovation in problem solving, maximising on complementary resources, or adding quality, legitimacy and sustainability to processes.

Private Corporate Businesses

Social issues increasingly affect a corporate operation’s core business. Whether it is to demonstrate compliance to manage the social impact of operations on communities, to reduce risks to production brought about by local stressors or to increase contribution to the local environment’s development — evidence is growing that these issues can be addressed through a collaborative approach between business and the wider society.

Civil Society Organisations (NGOs, Community Groups, VWOs)

Partnerships can boost advocacy work by raising the profile of beneficiaries and drive transparency so that issues are not only discussed and stuck within the sector. Working with the private sector can help in capacity building by improving technical and project management skills, whilst close relations to the public sector can result in funding to scale up community work and provision of services.

Government
Governments are often the stewards of regulations and policy making around key societal issues. Working with businesses and civil society organisations will help the institution outline and understand the activities happening on ground to better mobilise and deploy resources.

Partnerships can happen whenever and are often very context driven so there isn’t a one size fits all model for how tri-sector partnerships should be structured. The rule of thumb is that it should at least cover a sufficient alignment of interest, the willingness to commit complementary resources or in each partner gaining net value out of the relationship.

‘Pooling’ of resources by different sectors signals a commitment to go beyond consultation and dialogue. It means that partners are looking to do something practical, together. We need to realise that the three sectors (private sector, civil society organisations and the government) can no longer afford to promote separate agendas if we want to effectively tackle the key issues faced by society today.


A Very Good Company is a global social innovation agency that designs, delivers, and evaluates strategies that enable their clients to achieve social impact. One of its founders, Melanie Yap, is a volunteer consultant to the Asia P3 Hub on impact measurement.

Asia P3 Hub

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An open space to spark and incubate shared-value, market-driven solutions for transformational change. http://asiap3hub.org/

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