Otis Johnson

Otis Johnson, executive director of the Chatham-Savannah Youth Futures Authority in Savannah, Georgia, emphasizes the importance of building a collective vision among participating agencies. Excerpted from NCREL's videoseries, Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference 8, Integrating Community Services (NCREL, 1992).

"I think one of the things that helps collaboration happen is that you have to develop a community vision of what you want out of this collaboration and then that begins to let you see that you can't achieve this vision by yourself. One agency simply can't do it, but working together and getting past the turf issues, we all can achieve the outcome we want, but the vision piece is very important up front in the beginning."

This Critical Issue summary was researched and written by Kent Peterson, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Date posted: 1995