Developing Collaborative Partnerships :: Workforce Work Essays

Developing collaborative PartnershipsCollaboration has become the precept of the 1990s as a strategy for systemic change in human go, education, government, and community agencies. Increasingly, public and private funders argon rewarding or requiring collaborative efforts. The advent of block grants is creating an urgent need for integrated, locally controlled operate. diminish resources atomic number 18 causing many organizations to consider the potential benefits of exiting together. States be looking at ways to integrate their economic, work pull up, and technology developing efforts (Bergman 1995). Perhaps most important is the realization that the complex problems and take of families, workers, and communities are not being met effectively by alive services that are fragmented, crisis oriented, discontinuous, and episodic (Kadel 1991, p. vi). Collaboration involves more intense, long-term efforts than do cooperation or coordination. Collaborating agencies crap a for mal, sustained commitment to accomplishing a shared, clearly defined mission. Collaborative efforts can overcome such problems as fragmentation of client needs into distinct categories that ignore interrelated causes and solutions. They can make more services available or improve their accessibility and acceptability to clients (Melaville and Blank 1993). Collaborations admit a change in thinking--the ability to see the big witness--and in operating--alteration of structures, policies, and rules to make service delivery seamless. Such changes, or picture busting (Bendle/Carman 1996) can be intimidating or threatening in addition, some other barriers must be overcome in order to make partnerships work negative past experiences with collaboration difficult past/present relationships among agencies aspiration and turf issues personality conflicts differing organizational norms, values, and ideologies lack of precedent and fear of assay (Anderson 1996 National Assembly 1991). This Brief looks at successful collaborations involving work force development, family literacy, and welfare reform to identify the elements that make collaborations effective. Based on existing guidelines and successful programs, the steps needed to create and sustain collaborative relationships are described to help adult, move, and vocational educators forge the linkages that could improve services. Collaborative Examples One-stop career centers are collaborative efforts among agencies that have traditionally provided economic consumption and training services such as information, counseling, referral, and placement U.S. Department of Labor funding has back up their development in several soils. Before the federal initiative, a simulacrum arose in Waukesha, Wisconsin (Anderson 1996), where the Workforce Development Center provides an integrated, seamless system of employment services through the joint efforts of nine public and private agencies, including the state job service, a technical college, child care center, labor organization, and county health and human services department.