Building and Sustaining Partnerships includes the skills to develop and maintain relationships with community partners.
Skills for Building and Sustaining Partnerships
Communication:
- Communicate about expectations
- Engage in deep listening
- Speak without using jargon
- Read signals about when our requests might overwhelm a community
- Ask questions
- Use language that reflects authentic partnership
- Communicate clearly, without “dumbing down” language
- Communicate clearly about resources that are available
- Learn from story
- Value story as medium for shared power
- Negotiate about problems in relationship, and about differing priorities
Project management:
- Discuss roles in project
- Be flexible about roles
- Project management, eg., checking in with partners about project progress
- Bring groups together, and facilitate co-working
- Involve partner from beginning of planning project
- Negotiate differences in rhythm on and off campus
- Transition from consultation to collaboration
Relationship skills:
- Practice perspective-taking
- Share authority—intellectual, financial, etc.
- Navigate cross-cultural partnerships
- Preserve relationship even when project does not work out
- Behave appropriately in other people’s space—be a good guest
- Work through transition of relationship at the conclusion of a project
- Develop/restore trust in you and institution
Learn about community and university
- Understand history of community relationship with university
- Learn basic “lay of the land” of community, but understand that your knowledge is incomplete
- Work with community navigator
- Avoid involvement in community politics
- Examine power relations
Understand how pieces fit together
- Understand and collaborate to achieve mutual benefit
- See how university and community assets complement each other
- Listen to interconnections among issues, and also see starting points