Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/building-collaborations-between-programs-and-within-the-community/5013255/
There is no question that the concept of collaboration among programs serving children and families has value. Collaborations among individual child care providers or between child care and the public schools, child care and Head Start, providers and child health organizations, providers and training institutions, and among funders have repeatedly fulfilled their potential to leverage scarce resources, eliminate unnecessary duplications, reach larger markets, and increase families' access to a wider range of services than they might otherwise use or even know about. Collaborations are encouraged across the country by public and private funding sources alike. It appears that plays well with others is a measure on which early childhood professionals are still graded.The question attached to the concept of collaboration is how to make it work. Business collaborations occur all the time. They're known as strategic alliances, partnerships, joint ventures, cooperative agreements, consortia, or similar terms. Why and how they work provides some useful guidelines.
Lessons From the Corporate World
Corporations collaborate when it will help them meet their own strategic objectives. There is something of measurable value in the collaboration for each partner . . . they're not collaborating to please someone else or just to be nice. Instead, they enter into ...