Partnership and Collaborative Development
Around the world, organizations of all kinds are discovering that fulfilling their missions requires new ways of working together with other groups — enabling diverse stakeholders to join forces to realize successes that none of them could accomplish alone. These new relationships offer tremendous opportunities to complement skills and resources, reach scale and deepen impact, advance mutual learning, and attract funding. With so much at stake, the challenge is to ensure that this work is beneficial for all parties involved and an effective use of scarce resources. GPG utilizes Appreciative Inquiry and a full suite of techniques developed through its long experience facilitating groups to build and strengthen effective multi-stakeholder collaborative efforts, with a focus on shared purpose, principles, and relationships that are vital to results-driven networks, alliances, and partnerships.Key successes in GPG’s work in this area include:
- Enabling 50 organizations, 20 of which co-located in one building, to launch northern California’s first Family Justice Center, a one-stop service center for victims of domestic violence;
- Facilitating the inception phase for a regional fisheries project in Aceh Province, Indonesia, involving fisherfolk, communities, local NGOs, government agencies, and international donors in a united effort to rebuild fishery resources devastated by the 2004 tsunami; and
- Facilitating universities, local school districts, and community-based organizations to create a network advocating for statewide after school programs.
