Synergy -- combining energies and talents to create a whole greater than its parts -- is more important than ever in today's funding climate. Yet community-based groups often don't realize that they have skills and information valuable to others, or that the answer to one of their problems might be in a neighboring organization. Or that, in many cases, the best consultant to a project may be a peer. Recognizing that grantees possess multiple talents, resources and skills to offer one another, the Foundation has made collaboration a key component of capacity building, funding regular communication, meetings and training to build a learning community among and across its programs. Formal gatherings such as retreats and workshops bring those working on similar issues together from across the state to explore avenues for mutual support, and often continue as informal collaborations. Computer training, so easily available to the middle class and so often inaccessible to the working class and poor, also facilitates collaboration among grantees and with the Foundation and technical advisors. The Foundation's Health Improvement Initiative has funded 13 multi-agency community health collaboratives, in which many interests such as public health, law enforcement, local employers and the community develop partnerships for preventive health services and system reform. Some collaborations have resulted in mergers, such as the one between the California Reproductive Health Association and the Network for Women and Children's Health. Now called the California Women and Children's Health Coalition, it develops community coalitions around women and children's health issues. Collaboration doesn't always come easily. It has taken several years for the 60 clinics in Los Angeles to transcend differences based on race, neighborhood and needs, and come together to form a single regional association. This group effort is expected to yield multiple benefits in the current competition with for-profit organizations for Medi-Cal patients. Even competitors can build alliances on issues of mutual importance. A Los Angeles County re-employment program that wanted to recruit more clients teamed up with a former competitor, Women at Work. Even though WAW didn't get a Foundation grant, its staff was invited to attend workshop sessions -- and then began referring its clients to the Foundation-funded program. Said Sharon Rowser of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation who was working with the groups, "The bottom line is about serving people."