NCREL's Policy Briefs

Integrating Community Services for
Young Children and Their Families

Guidelines for Effective Collaboration

Many factors are likely to influence the success or failure of interagency collaborations, and no two collaboratives will progress in exactly the same way or within the same time frame. Each effort must find a way to proceed that is consistent with its unique circumstances and composition. Nevertheless, the literature on collaboration offers some suggested guidelines that have wide applicability:

• Involve all key players so that collaborative decisions and activities will receive widespread support and recognition.

• Ensure that the collaborative's leadership is visionary, is willing to take risks, and facilitates change rather than directs it.

• Establish a shared vision of how the collaborative should progress and of the expected outcomes for children and families served by the collaborative partners.

• Build ownership at all levels. Commitment to change must be mobilized at all organizational levels of member agencies and among community members involved in the collaborative.

• Establish communication and decision-making processes that accept disagreement among actors as part of the process and establish ways to address conflict constructively.

• Institutionalize change by encouraging member agencies to include collaborative goals in their own institutional mandates and by earmarking funds to carry out collaborative activities.

Finally - and perhaps most important - remember that change begins with individuals, not institutions. It is essential that agency representatives be allowed to take the necessary time from routine responsibilities to meet and interact with one another so that trust and respect on an individual level can be generated. Personal interactions across agencies nurture trusting relationships that will sustain the growing pains naturally associated with systemic change.

Clearly, the road to successful school readiness involves a new vision that encompasses not only children and their environments, but the roles that schools, communities, and service agencies must play in the healthy development of children and their families. Rearing and educating healthy children who are able to succeed in school and society require new strategies for communitywide commitment to address the needs of the whole child.

Posted on March 23, 1995

URL: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/go/93-3guid.htm