The strength of a community is found in the form and function of its partnerships. So, when institutions become invested in distressed communities, it is important to understand that conditions in these areas are likely such that its organizations are fragmented by individual efforts to secure resources. This results in poor coordination among agencies and subsequently among residents, equaling poor function. Then where coordination is stronger, it is likely the same age-old partnership structures that place traditional power at the center and puts “inside people” on the outside, often screened them for limited access to the structure, equaling bad form. It is attributes like these found in our partnerships that have driven the race and class inequities that are showing up in every sector, including healthcare, education and employment, criminal justice, housing and financing. These old institutionalized ways promote competition, division, elitism, and many other isms. Many communities by and large will just as soon avoid them and remain in their current under resourced state.
Although strengthened partnerships should be a desired outcome for communities, partnerships continue to be used only as inputs to achieve some smaller resource-oriented goal. The purpose of this Partnership Equity Framework is to serve as a tool to help major institutions, agencies, and community members measure their current partnerships and apply a partnership equity lens in their thinking when forming new ones.
The Partnership Equity Framework
and the 6 Partnership Equity Attributes
Is the Partnership Continual?
This asks the question, is the partnership intended to outlast the project and it suggests making stronger community partnerships an intended outcome rather than solely an input. This is a first step in using partnerships to build learning communities that grow stronger as they face challenges. It represents a commitment to investing in people rather than problems and allows local organizations to together set the standard for how their communities should function.
The difficulties in building this attribute into community partnerships often lie within the culture of larger organizations. Organizational leaders are often held to a standard of producing material wins on community projects at the rate that reporting meetings are held and can feel pressure to abandon partnership efforts that are not producing material wins.
Is the Partnership Bilateral?
Many community efforts rely on financial and other forms of support that come from outside institutions. These supports are certainly necessary inputs for work done at the community level. This question asks if any of the outputs from these community projects are serving as direct inputs for work happening at institutional levels. This is an opportunity to bridge a huge gap between under resourced communities and the institutions that serve them. Often these gaps are geographic, economic, and social, which altogether sets the institutional spaces where the resources live and the community spaces where the resources are lacking worlds apart. Establishing operations that allow valuable contribution to be carried both ways across those gaps works to erase the gaps more than unilateral funding for community projects ever could.
The difficulty in this is that organizational leaders will need to think through establishing community-based operations, which is a lot tougher than granting funding for community efforts.
Is the Partnership Accountable?
Good collaboration requires separate parts moving in sync, which requires reporting and accountability. Another feature of new collaboration in a community is that it also represents a new resource altogether. As a developing resource, a new collaboration becomes a strong cogwheel in its community’s larger working order and synchrony is extremely important. This only works with accountability. The accountability question asks if each partner has personnel assigned to the partnership? If so, how much many personnel hours are being contributed? Is there a reporting mechanism? How often does that reporting take place?
Smaller community organizations can be halted in their tracks by being tied to partnerships with large entities that move at their own pace and have extended to executive power to middle management to act quickly to keep pace with the smaller organization. Institutions and organizations need signature power to charter good partnerships but will need executive management power to carry out partnership responsibilities. There are many partnerships that have executive management power, but no signature power and then there are others with signature power but no executive management power. Both will be required to make partnerships exist on paper and in action with agile community organizations.
Is the Partnership Communal?
This is the most important attribute in speaking to form, because forming solid community partnerships is the same as forming community. The kind of community you want should inform the kind of community partnership you build. Many partnering institutions and organizations will miss out on establishing good form, even while maintaining a strong focus on building good partnership function. It’s easier to build a well-functioning partnership that puts the same profiles of traditional power at the top and the same underappreciated value contributors as those with lived experience at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Where does community fit in the partnership form? Is community at the center of the operation or on the outside? Although many community partnerships acknowledge the importance of community engagement, it’s easier to satisfy the “community engagement” piece by conducting community forums or hosting some type of input sessions without establishing active roles that make the community central to the actual operation. The ideal form is when the operation is in fact a community-based operation maintained by community members or community-based organizations but that can be grown in capacity with structural support from outside entities forming around it with not only funding, but integrated tools and training. Again, it’s a lot easier to place outside better-trained people at the center of community projects and only leverage community members for trust brokering, which fails in embeddedness, sustainability, and ultimately fails in community.
It is worth noting again that any new community partnership altogether represents a new resource in its community. Such a new resource can naturally spur competition and increase fragmentation. Does the partnership address that in its form with a standard for instead spurring collaboration to protect the integrity of good community form? Partnerships must model what we want our community to look like and leverage its influence to achieve that impact.
Is the Partnership Materially Beneficial?
Anti-poverty is big business. One of the great structural inequities is the amount of dollars that pour into distressed communities while much of it is absorbed by non community member salaries and never touches the hand of a community resident. It will always prove difficult for community members to work side-by-side with professionals who are on the clock and drawing large salaries for each minute, while community members’ basic needs are not being met. Any small community can be host to 3 or 4 community facilities, which can represent the presence of many millions of dollars annually. Are there First-Source Hiring policies or other hiring quotas in place to recruit and train community residents from the target population? Are there creative compensation packages designed and attached to resident participation? Are there opportunities to hire better trained community members as independent consultants for projects. Is professional inclusion facilitated in any way for community members to grow as professionals through their roles in working with larger organizations and institutions? Creative human resource executives and other decision makers can be thoughtful about finding ways to ensure that these partnerships provide material benefits to community participants.
Is the Partnership Transformational?
Any partnership that has established even a couple of the partnership equity attributes in its forming will stand a great change of having transformational impact on their target community. This question still has a more particular ask. If continual and bilateral pillars have been established, if the work in community is creating outcomes that are then converted into inputs to drive work at the institutional level, is that work informing any change in institutional policies or structure? We must remember that when we work to address structural inequities, our major institutions by nature of their size are likely the largest proponents of structural inequities. If their work in communities is not informing policy change that addresses structural barriers, then the partnership has not achieved its fullest promise of equity.
Also, by their prominence, major institutions have the ability to effect change at the institutional level in their respective region and beyond. If their work in communities is not leading to advocacy to other major institutions to inform policy change and address structural barriers, then the partnership has not achieved its fullest promise of equity.
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