Community Partnerships for Adult Learning

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS FOR ADULT LEARNING The Latest News from the Texas Education Agency Your State Adult Education Office by Sheila Rosenberg, Ph.D. Senior Director, Division of Adult and Community Education

Successful community partnerships require considerable effort to begin and continuous attention to sustain. Some success factors to consider for community partnerships and working collaboratively are environment, membership, process/structure, communication, vision, and resources.

Environmental elements often create the impetus for getting started and provide clues to gauging the degree of difficulty that might be encountered. For example, environmental factors in partnerships can be convergence of needs and interests or legislative priorities, or in order not to duplicate services and to share resources. Even when the environment is less than optimal, collaborating partners should consider strategies and tactics for improving the climate.

Manageable collaborations strike a balance between the breadth and depth of membership. Both providers and consumers of services are represented in the partnership. Most important is understanding how each of the partner organizations operate, their cultural norms and values, limitations and expectations.

Collaborating partners are cautioned not to create new bureaucracies. Instead, structures should be designed to facilitate information exchange, decision-making, and resource allocation.

Good communication is a key to building trust in collaborations. Communication is enhanced by setting up systems - personal, paper, and electronic - for information sharing, clarifying each entity's responsibilities, clearly expressing expectations, and listening. Collaboration requires that partners communicate their diverse customs and organizational cultures, use of language, preferred ways of working, and types of power.

Collaborative partners should have a shared vision of what they are trying to achieve, with agreed-upon mission, objectives, and strategies. Their purpose should be unique, that is, overlapping but not duplicating the mission of individual organizations. A shared vision builds trust and commitment. It should reflect responsiveness to the community and the big picture of which the collaboration should be an integral part. Concrete, attainable goals for accomplishing the vision heighten enthusiasm and sustain momentum.

Resources cannot be forgotten in the mix - funding, technology, staff, training, and contacts. Financial resources include those that member organizations are able and willing to commit and those the group obtains from outside sources.

The benefits of collaboration can include but are not limited to: perhaps the delivery of services for the first time where they have never been delivered before and often establishes a systematic and consistent approach to problem solving for the partnerships for future joint projects, can provide a cost savings and the potential for additional revenue generation, shared resources can also maximize capacity building capabilities, and provide added resources for the project.

A real partnership is more than a paper agreement. It demands time, resources, patience, flexibility, hard work, and commitment. Developing a real partnership is essential to successfully negotiating a set of common goalsfrom the different needs and agendas of the partners. The clearer the common goals, the stronger the partnership and vice versa. Trust, mutual respect, and understanding must be established, and long-range planning and open communication are key in achieving this relationship.