How can partnerships sustain their commitment to collaborative action?
What techniques help maintain a partnership during periods of membership and leadership change?
How can partnerships deal with community controversy over school-linked strategies?
How can staff working in comprehensive strategies be supported and validated?
Collaborations do not survive without thoughtful and continual attention. Sustaining a partnership--and the comprehensive strategies it promotes--requires flexibility and resourcefulness.
Partners must meet regularly to communicate and to reexamine their goals in order to keep programs focused on a shared vision and connected to the communities they serve. Partners also must adapt to changes in membership, leadership, and funding. They must support front-line staff members who work under stress. And they must respond to any controversy in the community related to comprehensive strategies.
This chapter examines issues and solutions involved in sustaining strategies over time.
Long-lasting, productive partnerships suggest it's important to review--and, if necessary, refocus--the partnership's vision regularly. A comprehensive partnership's vitality depends on its continuing ability to identify important issues and harness the creative energy of stakeholders in schools, in community agencies and organizations, and in the community for long-term change. Does the original vision still accurately reflect community conditions and concerns? Are the partnership's strategies for addressing these conditions still on track? What changes in funding sources and levels, staffing, political support, or other factors have occurred or may occur within the partner agencies? What impact will these changes have on children and families and on the comprehensive strategies?
Use public celebrations of your partnership's accomplishments to keep interest in your partnership alive. Invite agencies and individuals whose ideas have been successful to turn their energy to new undertakings. Remember that many small successes fit into a larger strategy of strengthening a community--that creating one safe intersection can lead to making an entire community safe for children.
Remember that many small
successes fit into a larger strategy of
strengthening an entire community.
Partnerships need to be aware of new challenges and opportunities. Is the police department beginning a program of community policing that could build connections between community members and police? Are new highways being planned that will cut through the community? Is the board of education planning to close a local school? Have sudden layoffs by a major employer put families under stress? How will these events affect the community--and how can your partnership attract new collaborators to help address them?
It can be hard to take time to focus
on future issues or to reflect on past
progress when current activities
demand immediate attention. Many
partnerships schedule special meetings
two or three times a year that are
devoted to assessing their program's
progress, pace, and direction.
Finding time to focus on future issues or to reflect on past progress is difficult when current activities demand immediate attention. Many partnerships schedule special meetings two or three times a year that are devoted to assessing their progress, pace, and direction. Consider scheduling these meetings for an entire day or weekend, so participants are not distracted by other obligations.
During these periodic meetings, use the assessment and evaluation information that programs have collected to focus on measurable results. This information can broaden the discussion by indicating issues that are not readily observable. For example, records may show a drop in participation at a counseling or health center, alerting partners to the need to find out why.
Be sure to include all members of the partnership--not just a few leaders or a small committee of partners--in periodic focus groups, community forums, site-based meetings, or retreats to assess progress. Otherwise, your partnership may lose the support and voices of the children and families at its core.
A Time for Action and a Time for Reflection
Agency directors, county commissioners, parents, program staff, and the policy board from one comprehensive partnership hold retreats at least twice a year to assess the progress and direction of their partnership toward agency and school reform and toward meeting its goals. At the retreats, all stakeholders reflect on issues that have surfaced during the last six months, such as staff turnover or changes in funding levels. They also consider trends, successes, new ideas, and concerns that families and staff bring to the table. The partners rarely need to implement major shifts in program direction because they maintain their connection to the community and responsiveness to its needs. At a recent retreat, the partners decided they had been so successful in meeting their initial goals that they would begin to tackle more challenging, broader problems in the school community.
All partnerships eventually experience change among participating agencies, leaders, members of councils, and parent groups. Agency directors may move on to other positions, alliances with new agencies may form, or longtime leaders may choose to leave. Within programs, some attrition among parents, committee members, and volunteers is also inevitable (for a discussion of staff turnover, see Chapter 5).
Change within your partnership need not be disruptive if your strategies are designed to accommodate it. Successful partnerships use the following techniques to accommodate change:
Involve a large number of individuals in leadership. Working by consensus from the inception of a partnership prevents factions from developing among agencies or individuals; shared leadership ensures that many partners understand their organizational history and that the partnership does not depend on any one person or agency.
Use structured orientation sessions or mentoring systems to ease new partners into their roles. One school-linked program holds monthly seminars to explain the partnership's vision and design to new volunteers, partnership members, parents, staff, interested community members, and agency personnel. This system orients new participants and also keeps the community informed.
Mentoring Systems Ease New Partners into New Roles
One highly effective school-linked partnership had experienced a complete turnover of agency executives by its third year. Partners found it was necessary to invest a large amount of time and energy to orient new directors during these leadership transitions. But because the partnership had established a truly collaborative operating style, the effectiveness and continuity of the effort was not interrupted.
The same school-linked partnership found that changeovers in middle management within participating agencies did not happen as smoothly as those at the executive level. To improve these transitions, the partnership's governing council created a "buddy system" to orient new middle managers working with the partnership. Established members were asked to mentor new members for several months. The new system minimized the time it took new members to become productive.
When they are kept informed about program progress and activities, most parents, community members, local officials, and agency directors support comprehensive strategies. Even so, comprehensive strategies can provoke controversy in some communities.
Such controversy is usually caused by misinformation and misunderstandings. Some community members may think that these programs dilute the primary instructional mission of schools and insist that education funds should not be diverted from academics to support more holistic activities, such as health care and human services.
Your partnership can reduce the chance of controversy through proactive efforts to communicate with community members through the following actions:
Reach out to your critics. Bring them to see the program. Listen to their concerns and answer their questions openly. Provide opportunities for them to contribute to decisionmaking.
Develop good written communication. An inexpensive newsletter that clearly highlights short, positive news items is an effective way to tell the story of your partnership. It should convey the partnership's vision and mission in easy-to-understand language. Print the newsletter in English and any other major languages spoken in the community. Distribute it widely--to parents, business owners, religious leaders, community advocates, and agency representatives.
Designate a spokesperson who is easily accessible and can provide a consistent response to questions. To prevent the community from receiving incorrect information from an uninformed source, designate one person to answer inquiries from reporters and other sources and to speak at public gatherings. However, do not inhibit other partners from talking openly about the strategies in the community.
Keep participants well informed. Parents and community members are part of an information grapevine flowing with news. They can promote and describe the program through word of mouth, which is perhaps the best publicity a program can have. Nurture this unofficial flow of positive information by being sure parents and community members are involved in all phases of the effort and by keeping them informed about current activities.
Parents and community members are
part of a community grapevine
flowing with news. They can promote
and defend the program through
word of mouth, which is perhaps the
best publicity a program can have.
Keep local leaders informed. Community leaders, including elected officials, should know about the partnership's progress because they may need to answer questions from the media or concerned constituents. Newsletters are one effective communications tool, but personal contact and invitations to visit program sites make a more lasting impression on policymakers. Hold open house events to brief officials and to provide an opportunity for parents and community members to interact with policymakers.
Make good communication a priority. Designate a troubleshooter for each program within the comprehensive partnership--the program coordinator or another staff person--who will keep information flowing and address any internal misunderstandings. Matters as simple as receiving copies of meeting minutes can take on significance if individuals or agencies sense there is unequal access to information and decisionmaking among partners. The troubleshooters can confront these brewing tensions and prevent them from erupting into public controversies.
Disseminate pertinent data from assessments and evaluations. Share details on how your strategies have improved academic performance, school attendance, student health, or other conditions. Compare the costs to what it would cost the community if the comprehensive strategies were not available. Keep this information updated and available to use in presentations, newsletters, meetings, and press releases.
Share The Bottom Line: Show That Programs Are Cost Effective and Get Results
In New Jersey, 42 School-based Youth Service Centers offer supports and opportunities for children and youth to help them graduate from school and lead healthy lives. Students can drop in at the centers or be referred by teachers, parents, or the courts. Last year, the state-funded program reduced pregnancy at one high school from 20 to two cases a year. The centers spend $200 a year on each child or youth who participates, while Aid to Families with Dependent Children spends approximately $91,500 a year to support a teenage mother and one child.
In 1992 Vermont expanded its home visiting service by introducing a Success by Six program to reach every family in the state with a preschool child. Home visits are conducted by school nurses and by staff from parent/child centers and health departments. The program resulted in a marked decrease in the number of child abuse victims in the state during a two-year period, including a 17 percent decrease in abuse of children between birth and age six.
School-linked comprehensive strategies are fortunate to attract staff who are hard-working, optimistic, and committed to working with children and families. Yet several factors can create stress for these key players, making it essential to provide them support. These factors include:
In an environment of uncertainty or change, partners will feel more comfortable if they understand which elements of the program they can influence. Include front-line staff in the partnership's decisionmaking and other events, so they feel informed and empowered.
Communication also helps alleviate the tensions caused by cultural differences. If staff can come together in support groups or meetings to discuss their insights, philosophies, and methods of working with children and families, they are more likely to bridge the differences in their organizational cultures and work together smoothly.
Open communication alleviates the
tensions created by cultural differences.
Cultivate open lines of communication among all levels of staff--from the front lines to the director's office--and among partner agencies so all staff know that their concerns are heard and that they will have help in handling problems. Take time to convene staff in support groups, meetings, and conferences where they can communicate with their partners. And encourage program administrators within the partnership to listen to staff at every level and to make communication a priority.
As your partnership works to sustain its momentum, remember to pause periodically to reflect on the progress and direction of your effort. Many partnerships schedule "retreats" several times a year. In a retreat, partners set aside a block of time (from half day to a long weekend) away from the usual business location to renew their commitment to the strategies. A retreat does not require a long trip or a fancy location, but it does require attention to people and to issues. In a retreat, partners often:
The qualities that make school-linked strategies effective--collaboration, creativity and openness to change--also help partnerships maintain strength and momentum. As partners become more adept at tackling challenges, the partnership becomes increasingly effective and efficient. The satisfaction of crafting productive, responsive strategies for children and families helps move a partnership forward. Specific techniques that also maintain a partnership's vitality include revisiting shared goals, supporting staff, and dealing with controversy.
