Blog Post 7: Partnerships, A Critical Aspect of Sustainability

What do hand sanitizer, tape, and a toy house have in common?

They all can represent partnerships!

In their 2011 book, A Guide to Building Education Partnerships: Navigating Diverse Cultural Contexts to Turn Challenge into Promise, Matthew T. Hora and Susan B. Millar identify three types of education partnerships: limited, coordinated, and collaborative. As grantees think about their own grant work, they likely can cite examples of each type of partnership, described below. The type of education partnership needed will vary based on the scope and nature of the problem the partner organizations agree to work on.

Reflecting on the nature of your partnerships in EED grant work is critical because once funding ends, the partnership organizations must assume the responsibilities of the grant work long-term. If, for example, robust and long-lasting partnerships are not built during the grant period, long-term sustainability is not likely.

The three partnership types – limited, coordinated, and collaborative – provide clarity on the partnerships currently operating in your EED grant:

A limited partnership generally centers on a technical problem. Limited partnerships are often short-term and transactional in nature. Few resources are needed to meet partnership goals, and partners work autonomously. Given the nature of a limited partnership, few if any organizational cultural tensions arise. An example of a limited partnership is a district or university contracting with a company to administer a validated climate survey. The company administers the survey and provides the results, but the district or university ultimately decides how to use those results, and the relationship ends once the survey analysis is complete.

A coordinated partnership focuses on a mix of technical and adaptive problems. To achieve the goals of a coordinated partnership, there needs to be moderate amount of time committed for the immediate or long term. There is a fair amount of capacity needed, in terms of material resources (e.g., money, supplies), human resources (e.g., skills and knowledge), and organizational capacity and resources (e.g., networks, political capital). Partners need to work collaboratively at times, but they generally work independently. At times, cultural tensions may surface, and the organizations need to navigate those to be successful. The relationship between a grantee and its external program evaluator is often an intentional coordinated partnership; the two may connect regularly to share status of work and may need to collaborate at key points, but generally the two entities complete their work separately. Once the study is complete, the coordinated partnership ends.

A collaborative partnership usually addresses intractable adaptive problems that require sustained, long-term engagement to be successful. These partnerships are the most difficult to implement successfully, but they also hold the most promise for creating significant change. Given the complexity of EED grant work, most EED grantees have at least one partnership that strives to be a collaborative partnership. For example, the most successful district-university partnerships usually are collaborative relationships.

Collaborative partnerships require significant investments of time, staffing, and material resources or funding. Usually, there are several partners involved, either multiple organizations or multiple departments within organizations. Both partners stand to benefit from the partnership and therefore have self-interest, but they are also committed to the greater good that will come from addressing the shared problem or challenge. To be successful, partners must operate interdependently, meaning that each partner must surrender some control. As a result, partners’ opinions differ or organizational norms clash at times—and that is okay. From discomfort and discussion can come progress. However, to be successful, partners need to have built foundational trust and rapport and use procedures or protocols to help navigate those tensions.

You may be wondering, “But what does this have to do with hand sanitizer, tape, and toy house?” During our EED TA Center Collaboration Hour on April 14, 2021, we asked for identified objects that could represent each type of partnership. Here’s what they shared:

• A limited partnership is like hand sanitizer. It has a clear purpose. You use it when you need it, and then you put it away.
• A coordinated partnership is like tape. It helps pulls separate pieces together and can become even stronger with more effort and time.
• A collaborative partnership is like a toy house. The foundation is the initial trust and work partners engage in to lay the groundwork for success. The house is where the hard, day-to-day work happens. The roof—the shared commitment to the work—secures the house and helps ensure the partnership sustains over time.

So, when you think about your partnerships, are they like hand sanitizer, tape, or a toy house?