Select a section: Creating Your Partnership Identifying the Vision and Mission for the Partnership Building Partnership Capacity Printable Partnerships Worksheet Next, the group will need to create a shared vision for the general direction of the partnership and who needs to be involved in working on the goals and objectives for your intervention. For example, partnerships can help identify community health needs or to create and carry out interventions that bring together community members and needed health services (Gamm, 1998).

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Try to hear from everyone and create a balance between groups who have already been involved in these conversations and those who may be new to these discussions. It is important to remember to work from the list of identified health conditions and risk factors identified by partners to help guide the partnership's decision regarding the mission and vision as well as the most important areas for intervention development.

Before you begin the dialogue, work with your partners to define a decision-making process that works for the group so that everyone involved feels that they can have an active role in creating the shared vision.

When working to create change in an organization, you may already have a common mission and vision through the organization. In this case, you can build from what you already have and highlight what is not currently being practiced in the organization or how the existing mission and vision needs to be changed to better meet the needs of stakeholders in the organization.

To get your discussion started:

1. Review health information about your community of interest identified through other MICA tools (i.e., Community Profiles and MICA).
2. Ask your partners to write down the top 3 most important issues affecting health in the community.
3. Discuss different criteria that can influence your selection including community support, amenability to change, death rates, disability rates, hospitalizations and racial disparities. Use the Priorities MICA system to identify needs in your county.
4. Examine the findings from Priorities MICA and ask your partners to name their top priorities.
5. Ask the group to describe what the partnership would look like in order to address a specific health condition or risk factor.
6. For each one, have partners describe the community needs or what should look different.
7. Try to have the group agree on what could be done in one year and in five years.

To help fuel your discussion, remember that partnerships can be used to:

• increase access to information;
• increase understanding of community needs and assets;
• improve public policies and health systems;
• get involved in new issues without having sole responsibility for managing or developing those issues;
• develop widespread public support for issues, actions or unmet needs;
• develop a critical mass (talents, resources) for action and problem-solving;
• minimize duplication of effort and services;
• recruit participants with diverse backgrounds and beliefs;
• share resources in order to respond to changing situations;
• emphasize community wide change through the use of a multiple approaches including representatives from different sectors of the community; and
• enhance success through increased trust in a broad-based coalition of partners.