Partnerships or collaborations among agencies or programs are most effective when connections are established early in a project and cultivated throughout its life cycle. Strong partnerships involve others who are interested in the goals of your project, those who are best situated for effectiveness, groups that are affected by the problems you are addressing, and those who are essential players. Leadership of a collaborative partnership involves clarifying roles, running meetings, and in general having or developing a model of how to work together towards your goals.
How can partnerships and collaboration be used to sustain your program? Here's an example: Delivering mental health services to children and youth in preschool or school settings usually involves a partnership between the school setting and a mental health provider. If your partnership has the goal of sustaining these services beyond grant funding, you can work together to create a service delivery system that is sustainable. Working together, school settings and mental health providers can often figure out how to maintain services through establishing revenue streams such as third party payments or local mental health funding. Through an active collaboration, both sides can see how small changes in the way services are delivered may make such sustainability possible. Having a partnership where both parties share the goal of sustainable services makes that more likely.
For examples of how grantees have used Partnerships & Collaborations as sustainability tools, read the following Grantees at Work stories:
- Using a Survey to Promote Collaboration, Solve Problems,
and Sustain Your Program Activities - PATHS to Success
- Collaborating for Impact
- Creating a Cohesive Implementation Team
Click on any of these listings for more information:
- Identifying strategic partners
- Managing partner roles and expectations
- Continuing partnerships/coalitions beyond funding
- Identifying models of effective partnerships
- Using tools for coalition building and coalition evaluation
Identifying strategic partners
Strategy and Competition Books
http://www.meansbusiness.com/cc.asp?L1Guid=E1BFBAF0DB8F11D1B
7781C6C07C10000&Lstart=1&L1=7Strategies for capacity building activities
http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/filemanager/download/
online/sustainability_strategies.pdf
Managing partner roles and expectations
The Collaboration Challenge: How nonprofits and businesses succeed through strategic alliances
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/06/
07879522/0787952206.pdfJoint fundraising: Promises and Pitfalls for Coalitions
http://mosaica.coure-tech.com/resources/jfundr.pdf
Continuing partnerships/coalitions beyond funding
Sustainability of community coalitions: an evaluation of communities that care (Report)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x342459j20574077/
?p=d590c1ce14824370ad38ccd7980a92da&pi=0Coalition Sustainability: Long term successes and lessons learned(Article)
http://www.joe.org/joe/2002february/a2.htmlMaintain coalitions and partnerships (Toolkit)
http://ctb.ku.edu/tools/coalitions/expand/index.jspSuccess and Sustainability of Effective Coalitions
http://healthvermont.gov/adap/prevention/NOVTRAININGCOALITIONS.docCADCA teleconference: Sustaining: The future of Community Coalitions. Ncadi. (Webcast)
http://cadca.org/CoalitionResources/SBArchives/OM2.02.doc
Identifying models of effective partnerships
Sustaining school-community partnerships to enhance outcomes for children and youth. Adleman, H., Taylor, L. (Report)
http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/sustaining.pdfPrevention Works through Community Partnerships Findings from SAMHSA / CSAP's National Evaluation (Monograph)
http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/govstudy/ms666/findings.aspx?
Using tools for coalition building and coalition evaluation
Child Survival Technical Support. Sustaining Child Survival: Many roads to chose, but do we have a map? (Report)
http://www.childsurvival.com/documents/CSTS/csts_new.pdf
