Word of the Week: Team Work

Team work.  I think that the general consensus would be that team work is an important thing.  We urge kids to have good team work, there’s an emphasis on team work in jobs as you work together to make things happen and get things done, and what would organized sports be without team work.  So, why is team work this week’s word of the week (yes, I know it’s actually two words), if it’s already so well known?  Well, I think that, though people are familiar with the concept in general, there are areas where team work isn’t as emphasized as it is in other areas, though it should be.  And that’s what makes team work this week’s word.

Dictionary.com defines team work as cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause, or, work done with a team.

The area where I feel teamwork could be enhanced is within my own area, the nonprofit sector.  There are excellent cases where nonprofits work well together, United Ways are typically a good example of this.  Why team work is so important to nonprofits is the same as with any other group working together: nonprofits can get more done when we work as a team than we can if we work separately all the time.

In the end, it’s not the nonprofits that benefit most from team work, it’s the community.  When nonprofits combine their resources to work towards a common goal, or if nonprofits work independently of each other, but still side-by-side to reach the same goal in a community, that benefits us all.

The reason behind everything we do at the Sherburne County Area United Way is to stop issues at their source, rather than merely treating the symptoms.  We are well aware that we cannot do this alone, and, thanks to many partnerships within the community, we don’t have to.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank the agencies, businesses, and individual community members that we are fortunate to work with.  And I would like to say that I am very excited to see how we can broaden our efforts through team work within the community.