Preserving Energy and Enthusiasm
A challenge to keeping the momentum of your partnership healthy and strong is community fatigue. Partner exhaustion and burn out is common. As noted above, the capacity of your partnership to be flexible and respond effectively to transitions can help to minimize the fatigue of partners and community members. Understanding community history is essential to sustaining your partnership and your initiatives over time. Some partners and community members may have made several past attempts to create change in the health, social, economic and environmental conditions in the community with varying degrees of success. Because of barriers that may have been encountered during these attempts, these individuals may feel that their energy and efforts were in vain, creating a sense of community fatigue. |
Some helpful hints to maintain your energy and enthusiasm:
- Continue to encourage participation by all partners and ensure their perceived ownership of partnership activities.
- Check in to make sure that realistic roles and responsibilities have been taken by each partner so that no individual or organization feels overburdened.
- Develop easily completed; shorter-term goals that can be expected to produce “small wins” that will keep the members of your partnership motivated and optimistic.
- Anticipate and plan for training and resources needed in your partnership or the community to enable you to accomplish your initiative.