Training Guides for the Head Start Learning Community:
Community Partnerships
Module 4

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Practicing the Collaborative Process

Handout 5: Engaging Partners and Learning About Each Other

Overview
Once potential partners are identified, attention turns to building trust and ownership by engaging them in the collaborative and developing a base of common knowledge. In the most effective collaboratives, partners take time to understand each other's organizations and explore their differences to avoid misunderstandings. This requires learning about each other's services and resources, goals and objectives, and work cultures and constraints. Developing common knowledge also means understanding personal similarities and differences.

ENGAGING PARTNERS
Look over the strategies listed below. There is space at the end of each list for adding strategies that have worked for you or for others in your group.

• Research on organizations and individuals that you want to recruit for the collaborative before you approach them;
• Get to know the key players in the organizations; that is, the people who do the day-to-day workload. Invite them to visit your program;
• Present information about your program in a way that can be easily understood. Explain your program and what you do without professional terms or acronyms;

• If possible, present the collaborative effort as a win-win situation. Point out the potential benefits of working together;

• Do as much preparation as possible so you can show potential partners there is an easier or better way of doing business;

• Be willing to listen to and understand the needs, interests, goals, and missions of potential partners;

• Offer to share a resource, assist in an activity, or try a different way;

• Give people credit for what they have already achieved for children and families;

• Make it clear that the purpose of initial meetings is to explore mutual concerns and collaborative possibilities.

Additional Strategies:

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DEVELOPING/EXPANDING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE⁷
Some strategies for learning about each other are:

• Hold meetings at each other's organizations to give people a sense of the scope of the collaborative;

• Plan visits to programs operated by partners. Make sure the visits are more than just a quick walk-through. Take time to talk about what you learned;

• Ask partners to discuss views about each other's organizations. Then have partners describe their own organizations. Begin to separate fact from stereotype;

• Have everyone draw a simple picture of how they see their organization in relation to the community, families, and other partners. Discuss the variations and their implications;

• Describe how children and families receive services in each organization;

• Make an "alphabet soup." Have partners list acronyms and key phrases they use daily and define them;

• Set a "no numbers/no letters" rule to encourage the use of words instead of shorthand terms that few people understand;

• Arrange for day-long visits between organizations to create knowledge, trust, and commitment among direct-services staff;

• Use qualified trainers to run workshops for partners on team dynamics, consensus building, diversity, and conflict management; or

• Use social activities to promote different kinds of conversations and alliances among partners.

Additional Strategies:

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⁷Adapted from Atelia Melaville and Martin Blank with Gelareh Asayesh, Together We Can: A Guide for Crafting a Profamily System of Education and Human Services (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education and U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1993).

Handouts

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