Developing Collaborative Partnerships :: Workforce Work Essays

Developing Collaborative PartnershipsCollaboration has become the byword of the mid-nineties as a strategy for systemic change in mankind go, education, government, and community agencies. Increasingly, public and private funders atomic number 18 rewarding or requiring cooperative efforts. The advent of block grants is creating an urgent need for integrated, locally controlled services. Shrinking resources are causing many organizations to consider the potential benefits of working together. States are looking at at ways to integrate their economic, work force, and technology developing efforts (Bergman 1995). perhaps most important is the realization that the complex problems and needs of families, workers, and communities are non being met effectively by existing services that are fragmented, crisis oriented, discontinuous, and periodic (Kadel 1991, p. vi). Collaboration involves more intense, long-term efforts than do cooperation or coordination. Collaborating agencies m ake a formal, sustained commitment to accomplishing a shared, clearly defined mission. Collaborative efforts puke overcome much(prenominal) problems as fragmentation of client needs into trenchant categories that ignore interrelated causes and solutions. They green goddess make more services easy or improve their accessibility and acceptability to clients (Melaville and Blank 1993). Collaborations require a change in thinking--the ability to see the big picture--and in operating--alteration of structures, policies, and rules to make service delivery seamless. Such changes, or paradigm busting (Bendle/Carman 1996) can be intimidating or threatening in addition, other barriers must be overcome in order to make partnerships work disallow past experiences with collaboration difficult past/present relationships among agencies competition and sod issues personality conflicts differing organizational norms, values, and ideologies lack of precedent and fear of risk (Anderson 1996 i ssue Assembly 1991). This Brief looks at prospered collaborations involving work force development, family literacy, and eudaimonia 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 exposit to help adult, career, 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 employment and training services such as information, counseling, referral, and placement U.S. Department of Labor funding has supported their development in several states. Before the federal initiative, a prototype 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 st ate blood service, a technical college, child care center, labor organization, and county health and piece services department.