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Coordinating: A Partnering Primer

Partnering is a complex process that entails many related activities. You may never complete each stage of this process with each potential partner. However, each step strengthens your Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) unit and community, as partnering offers many benefits.

Five Stages of Partnering

The five stages of partnering include:

1. Understanding your system
2. Establishing and sustaining contact
3. Identifying needs and negotiating differences
4. Resolving conflict
5. Optimizing shared resources

Understanding Your System

Partnering begins with identifying potential individuals or groups with whom you might want to work. Partnering begins prior to establishing contacts—simply being aware of the organizations and groups in your area will change your vision of your MRC’s contribution. Community building extends your vision of who you think belongs in your community. An expanded vision improves your understanding of constraints, available resources, and the reality of situations.

Establishing and Sustaining Contact

The next step in partnering is contacting the potential partners you identified, which can take time and persistence. Some prospects are more promising than others. If contacting potential partners becomes challenging, be patient and revisit the possibility of a more substantial engagement in the future. Maintaining open communication is important in the event there is a more pressing need for interaction in the future.

Identifying Needs and Negotiating Differences

Partners in potential working relationship have different needs. Ideally, these needs are complementary; however, differences may exist. Partnering is negotiating and working with or around these differences. Dialogue includes much discussion among partners, but it also involves sharing resources. In exchange for what your partner brings, you offer what you have to give.

Ideally, partnerships benefit all involved, but achieving this agreement is seldom easy. This process requires persistence, clarity, ingenuity, flexibility, generosity, and faith that all involved want the best for themselves and their partners. This will not always be the case, but we extend the benefit of the doubt to engage partners with whom we anticipate creating something productive.

Sending follow-up letters after a meeting is an effective way to outline and document discussion points, any action items, and any agreements reached.

Once you have a clear agreement, ask your partner for a letter of intent, explaining that such letters help with your other fundraising and network-building efforts. They can offer concrete evidence of community support for the MRC.

A letter of intent can take time to develop, depending on the complexity of factors involved in working together. A letter of intent does not always guarantee that a partner will commit. Partners may be unable to fulfill their agreement for several reasons. In many cases, however, MRC units benefit from maintaining positive relationships with such organizations, particularly because they may be willing to participate in the future.

Resolving Conflicts

Resolving conflicts is perhaps the hardest aspect of partnering, as it can be uncomfortable, but conflicts are part of community life. The faster you resolve conflicts, the better you become at solving them. Conflicts that are resolved amicably allow for sturdier and more flexible working relationships. Rather than spending time in conflict with one another, learn how to resolve difficulties. This will strengthen trust, which is essential when working together in emergencies.

Optimizing Shared Resources

Working with others can become a creative, community-enlivening process. Because collaborative efforts optimize resource sharing, everyone can benefit. Resources also are more easily distributed once a community network has been established.

Partnering can eliminate community divisiveness and isolation. Because partnering networks strengthen over time, they represent one of the most important forms of investing in our communities’ futures.

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Last Updated on 8/18/2006