Charities often feel uncomfortable about investing in internal resources required to increase collaboration, foundation and trust leaders have said.

At a panel discussion at the Association of Charitable Foundations’ Leaders forum in central London this week, Josh Cockcroft, data lead at the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, said good collaboration among funders could be difficult.

“It takes time, effort, resources and very careful management of stakeholders and the programme,” he said.

“But it’s worth it. Good collaboration can lead to an impact far greater than the sum of its parts.”

Cockcroft said foundations often felt uncomfortable about putting resources into the type of work collaboration needs or the “overhead requirements for the grantees who are otherwise taking this on”.

During the discussion, points were raised on the wide-ranging impact of climate change and how it affects multiple aspects of society, such as inequalities and economic issues.

Nezehat Cihan, vice-chair of the Cripplegate Foundation, which addresses poverty in Islington, north London, said it was difficult for charities to work on tackling systemic and structural inequalities alone.

“This requires a collaboration and partnership with everyone working together to actually make a systemic change that can be lasting and sustainable,” said Cihan.

“In that sense, it’s really worth it – worth the pain, time and investment.

“A lot of collaboration is happening already, we can see through our networks and forums, we are members in our boroughs and nationwide.

“It’s just we need to approach those collaborations more structurally and systematically.”

Carol Mack, chief executive of the ACF, said its members were wary of duplicating each others’ methods when collaborating.

Mack referred to the Funders Collaborative Hub, which includes 170 of the ACF’s members and provides an opportunity for funders to speak on important issues.

“Our members also said they didn’t want to leave gaps by oversight so they wanted collaboration to be really visible.

“I think transparency is one of the key conditions of collaboration, because before that hub it depended on who you knew whether or not you were able to collaborate.”