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• Creating Your Partnership
• Identifying the Vision and Mission for the Partnership
• Building Partnership Capacity
• Printable Partnerships Worksheet

Partnership and collaboration are fundamental to success in developing interventions. Relationships between health behaviors and health outcomes are complex and affect everyone who is a part of the community. This section describes the process of creating your partnership, working collectively to identify the issues of greatest concern in your community and developing the shared vision and mission for the partnership.

Although it may sound obvious, the best way to start creating changes in the health of your community is to enlist the person power necessary to develop and implement (or put to action) interventions.

What are partnerships?
Collaborative partnerships are essential to achieving healthy people living in healthy communities. A collaborative partnership is a purposive relationship between partners committed to pursuing both an individual and a collective benefit. (Nelson et al., 1999)

When do you create partnerships?
Partnerships are formed for many different reasons, including increasing: (1) opportunities to learn and adopt new skills, (2) access to resources, (3) the ability to share financial risks and costs, (4) input from more or different members of the community, and (5) the ability to respond rapidly to the changing needs of the community. If any of these benefits seem like they might be useful in helping you move toward change, you might want to consider building or working with an existing partnership in your community.

How do you create partnerships?
The first step to creating a successful partnership is to gather a group of stakeholders from the community to come together to discuss their ideas and concerns. Ideally, individuals and groups may already be gathering in your community of interest and you can learn from what they are already doing. Try to invite people or organizations who have insight into the health condition, the risk factors and the social and environmental resources in your community of interest.

Together, with other members of your community of interest, you can begin to identify partners by engaging in the following activities:

1. Identify stakeholders in the community. Think about the different sectors of the community when making your list: local government, organizations (faith-based, volunteer advocacy), health services, schools/ universities, businesses, media, concerned citizens and others.
2. Determine an existing venue or plan a forum and agenda to convene stakeholders.
3. Prepare an invitation with a catchy slogan and reading materials that introduce the process and attract participation at the gathering.
4. Consider inviting a neutral facilitator for the forum discussion.
5. Create a set of ground rules for the forum (e.g., share information, respect others opinions, don't dominate the discussion, correct misperceptions and maintain confidentiality).
6. Ask participants to modify or add to the ground rules until everyone agrees on them.
7. Be prepared to deal with conflict as it arises.
8. Document what occurs at gatherings (e.g., minutes) and share with all attendees.

Some specific strategies for partnership building include (Kaye & Wolff, 2002):

• build relationships with others in the community before trying to tackle community issues;
• involve the community in defining the issues and identifying partners;
• have everyone participate in naming the partnership;
• create ways to meaningfully involve diverse groups by discipline (e.g., business, clergy, providers) and relative advantage or disadvantage with respect to social resources (e.g., income, race, gender); and
• craft settings and activities that encourage members to get to know each other and enable them to learn how to work across inherent power differences within the group.

Remember, your partners may already have identified priorities to work on in the community. In this case, you can think about ways that your intervention can influence these priority issues and share these ideas with your partners.

If you are working to create change within an organization, you should take into consideration the meaningful partners in this context (e.g., clients, staff, administrators, colleagues). It can be helpful to include partners who support creating change and those who oppose change to achieve consensus about your intervention and get buy-in from all members.

Identify a process that will (Baker et al., 1999):

• Begin by building relationships and establishing trust and credibility. Develop relationships based on mutual trust and respect.
• Acknowledge and honor different partner's agendas.
• Reinforce shared leadership.
• Acknowledge the difference between community input and active community involvement.
• Be aware of partnership maturation and that partnerships face different challenges at different stages of partnership development
• Plan for organizations within the partnership to go through internal transitions that may influence their involvement in the partnership. One way to do this is to ensure that more than one member of the organization is aware of and supports partnership activities.
• Ensure upstream thinking and action on the broader community issues that affect the community of interest.
• Consider multidisciplinary approaches.
• Document what has been learned in a manner consistent with the overall approach taken in the partnership.
• Demonstrate accountability to the community.

An Obesity Example
You work at a local public health agency and you have just received funding support for a community-based obesity prevention initiative. You can begin by making a list of all of the key partners that you want to involve in this initiative. Start within your organization and think about the expertise you have internally. For example, if you work in a health department, you may want to consult with experts in:

• community health assessment;
• epidemiology and surveillance;
• community outreach; and
• health education.

Next, consider partners in your community that can provide support for your initiative. Specifically, you may want to think about physical activity or diet and nutrition resources in the community. For example, you can talk to other professionals in:

• schools (e.g., to offer healthy choices in vending machines);
• worksites (e.g., to create policies supporting flex-time for employees to be physically active);
• health care settings (e.g., to train providers to counsel their patients on diet and exercise);
• parks and recreation (e.g., to build a walking trail in the community); and
• urban planning and transportation (e.g., to redesign communities for mixed-use and transit that supports walking and biking trips).

Keep in mind that you will always want to include community members and organizations that know the history, current activities and needs of the community. Finally, you may also want to think about partners that can provide technical support (e.g., program design, evaluation, statistics).