The continuum of linkage efforts is commonly categorized as cooperation, coordination, and collaboration.
- Cooperation implies staff of separate programs are aware of and knowledgeable about each other’s resources and services and refer families to them as needed. For example, ECFE staff are aware that Head Start is planning a major workshop in the near future so they refer families to the workshop and avoid scheduling a conflicting activity on that day.
- In coordination, staff build on cooperation and interact with other programs to enhance others efforts. For example, an ECFE staff person is an active member of the local Interagency Early Intervention Committee, which plans how best to serve children with developmental delays. This ECFE staff person invites other committee members to attend an upcoming ECFE regional inservice training on a relevant topic.
In collaboration, in addition to cooperating and coordinating, staff of separate programs actually work together to create a new or enhanced resource for families. For example, ECFE staff decide with child care center staff to jointly offer parent education groups to employed parents once per week at the end of the standard workday. ECFE provides a parent educator and organizes a light supper, and the child care center provides space for the parent group and extended day care for the children of participating families.
Each of these three types of linkages is valuable and important. To maximize any linkage efforts, program staff should approach other organizations with an open mind, guard against competitive feelings, expect that building trust takes time, anticipate setbacks, and work hard at ongoing, effective communication. Of the three linkage categories, collaboration requires the most time and work. It also raises the most issues, which include ownership, governance, supervision, balance of effort and cost, accountability, flexibility, trust, and conflict resolution. If organizations are open to planning a collaboration, it is advisable to put collaborative agreements in writing and to include the following elements:
- Who will be responsible for leadership of this collaborative venture?
- What authority will each organization exercise?
- Which responsibilities will each organization fulfill to plan, implement, and evaluate the collaboration?
- What specific resources will each organization contribute? Include staff time, money, and in-kind contributions such as space, meeting refreshments, participant transportation, publicity, etc.
- If applicable, what important policies, procedures, and operations must be changed in each organization to support the collaboration and how will these changes be implemented?
- How will differences and issues be negotiated among the member organizations?
- Which key people must sign this agreement and how will their support be secured?
(Adapted from Winer, M., & Ray, K. (1994). Collaboration handbook: Creating, sustaining, and enjoying the journey. St. Paul, MN: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.)
Click here for Chapter 6 (Community Linkages for Families) of the ECFE Implementation Guide.
The following was adapted from a handout created by Darrin Hicks (University of Denver).
Collaboration can be defined as a problem-solving process and a structure through which programs are implemented. First and foremost, it is a communicative process of bringing together diverse agents with different interests, backgrounds, and types of expertise to work together to invent new ways of understanding the root causes of social problems and to design novel solutions to address those problems. It does not stop here. Collaboration is also a means of formaing new partnerships to implement programs designed to increase the scope of services, eliminate waste and duplication, and to ensure that the necessary resources are in place to deliver those programs with fidelity.
There are three elements of this definition that are crucial to understanding the nature of collaboration and how it can be measured in terms of influencing program outcomes.
- Collaboration, in essence, is a communicative process. Hence the types and quality of that communicative process need to be identified and measured.
- Collaboration, as anyone who works in the field will tell you, is all about relationships. What we call collaborative structures are really relationships that have been institutionalized. We should not forget that relationships are dynamic, living entities.
- Collaborative relationships are built on commitment. It takes a great deal of commitment to collaborate, but if it is done right, collaboration also generates mutual commitment.
Darrin Hicks and Carl Larson (also at the U of Denver) have spent the last 10 years working to understand how the quality of the collaborative process impacts the outcomes of collaborative partnerships. They measure this impact in terms of how well the programs implemented by collaboratives perform. Specifically, they are trying to understand what accounts for the varying levels of success collaboratives have in improving the health and well-being of the people they serve.
In their work, they have found that the key ingredient is commitment. That is, the success of a collaborative seems to rise and fall with the level of commitment the stakeholders who are part of it bring to the table as well as the new forms of commitment the collaborative is able to generate.
Commitment takes several forms in collaboration:
- The commitment that stakeholders have to the quality of the collaborative process.
- The commitment that stakeholders have to each other.
- The commitment that stakeholders have to the new group identity that is formed in collaboration.
- The resource commitments that each stakeholder must make for the group to succeed.
- The commitment that stakeholders have to the integrity and fidelity of the programs they implement.
- The commitment of the people delivering the program to those they serve.
The consistent finding of their research is that these levels of commitment are all related. The initial commitment to using a high-quality collaborative process sets the stage for all of the other forms of commitment, even the level of commitment that a caregiver who was never present for those initial meetings has to those he/she serves. This is why the variance in the commitment to cultivating a high-quality process predicts the variance in program success.
A high-quality collaborative process is inclusive, treats stakeholders as equals, if focused on the root problem, and is authentic.
An inclusive process is one in which those affected by the problem, those who are charged with responding to it, and those responsible for implementing programs are invited to collaborate. A process feels inclusive when it actively seeks to include unusual voices.
A process that treats stakeholders equally not only affords stakeholders equal opportunities to contribute irrespective of who they represent, but any stakeholder feels that they could contribute in a way that causes everyone else to reconsider their position.
A process that is problem-focused consistently asks its members whether or not they are making headway on responding to the root problems they face and not simply meeting to secure its institutional power and/or continued funding. That is, stakeholders doe not feel that they are meeting simply to fulfill a mandate.
An authentic process is one in which stakeholders can make binding commitments without fear that those commitments will be rescinded by agents with higher levels of authority.
CASE STUDIES IN COLLABORATION
