Messages by Hack, Tricia

Last October, the City of Hamilton Public Health Services offered a Building Community Partnerships Workshop where everyone had a great time sharing recommendations for partnerships, discussing partnership challenges and brainstorming solutions. At the workshop, we announced that we would send a summary of our group discussions, workshop and toolkit evaluations. Then--- H1N1 hit! Although long overdue, I would like to share key highlights from our discussions.

Factors for successful Partnerships:
• Key people/stakeholders, including a motivational leader
• Clear, realistic, goals aligning with partner mandates
• Effective communication that builds respect and support
• In-kind resources are a necessity

Challenges in Partnerships:
• Lack of leadership, decision making power
• Lack of community engagement
• Commitment by partners change which slows down work
• Unbalanced responsibilities in partnership
• Lack skills for proposal writing, evaluation
• Organizational barriers
• Differing Goals in partnerships
• Funding challenges

Recommendations for Partnerships and Solutions for challenges:
-Define roles, goals at beginning of partnerships
-Celebrate successes, appreciate partners
-Strive to maintain community engagement
-Review partnership functioning, Terms of Reference, timelines frequently
-Build public support for project/program
-Engage decision makers into partnership in some role
-Build in training for partnres to increase skill set
-Ensure effective communication and co-ordination in partnerships

Thanks for the great discussions at the workshop. Let's carry on the discussion here. What do people think? Any other recommendations and solutions?

Hi Susan,
I have a two articles listed below that provide insights into evaluating partnerships. One has a tool included. I would also look at the references listed in these articles as they include other resources, including tools and websites. I think the THCU may have some partnership resources but I think the focus is on engaging partners.

Butterfoss, Frances Dunn. Evaluating Partnerships to Prevent and Manage Chronic Disease. Preventing Chronic Disease 2009; 6(2).


Butterfoss, Frances D., Francisco, Vincent T. Evaluating Community Partnerships and Coalitions with Practitioners in mind. Health Promotion Practice April 2004 Vol. 5, No. 2, 108-114.

I would like to know and learn from what others are doing to maintain partnerships while being deployed in H1N1 activities.

What we have done is to give partners information about H1N1 while explaining that our program has been deployed. We included information as to our various roles in H1N1 and provided our City website and PHAC website that community partners may go to for information. We also gave a number for our adminstration staff to call for any issues while we are out of office. I probably should have sent this out earlier but I was not able to until just this week.

We may try to do an update again in a few weeks to just try to stay connected.

I really liked the article: "Partnership Synergy: A Practical Famework for Studying and Strengthening the Collaborative Advantage" by Lasker, Weiss and Miller (2001). This article is listed in NCCMT resources.
I was able to identify aspects from the article that we experienced in our present partnerships. I wish I had known of this earlier in our partnership formation.

Another article that was also informative is: "Making the Most of Collaboration: Exploring the Relationship Between Partnership Synergy and Partnership Functioning" by Weiss, Miller Anderson, Lasker (2002)."

The Partnership Assessment Tool is very comprehensive. I have not formally used it but I think it would help partnerships in improving functioning.