Conflict and Change Valuing conflict as an opportunity for creative change

Partnership Toolkit

The set of exercises described here assume that you have a group of people, representing a number of community organisations, who have said they may be interested in working together for their community/ies.

The exercises are not meant to be used as a prescriptive process to be rigidly followed, but rather as a source of ideas, both about how partnerships can develop, and about specific ways of helping them to do so.

The heading for each exercise links to a one-page document explaining and illustrating how to facilitate the exercise.

Building trust

Meeting place

To allow participants to express their hopes and fears about sharing and working together from their different organisations.

Energy tree

To help participants identify what motivates them, and how they can work together.

Appreciative histories

To give all members of the partnership an understanding and appreciation of the other groups involved, their history, and what resources they bring.

Forming a partnership

Web of connections

To enable each group to baseline its connections, both to outside organisations and to its own community or target audience. This can be useful both at the beginning to assess what needs to be done, and later to measure how much has changed.

Ready to work together?

To give participants a way to indicate how they are now feeling about working together, and to assess overall whether there is sufficient commitment for a partnership to be viable.

Partnership roles

To help participants think more specifically about what they will be contributing to the partnership.

Group development

To help participants understand the “Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing” model of group development, and particularly to appreciate the Storming stage.

Developing a plan

Positive proposals

To generate a positive, creative space within which participants can propose ideas for shared projects which are in line with their own history and vision.

Planned planting

To get participants thinking about a range of different projects they might work on over different timescales.

Resources required

To help participants think about and plan for the practical resources that will be required to implement a project.

Dreamer, realist, critic

To provide a structured process for moving from creative “blue-sky” thinking about new projects to hard-nosed evaluation of potential risks and problems. This process could be regarded as a quick substitute for the three preceding exercises.

Next steps

To provide participants with a tool for project planning, to help them in thinking about specific tasks and task dependencies (the order in which things need to be done).

Making it happen

Action grid

To enable participants to develop practical plans so that they can carry forward work on multiple simultaneous projects.

Progress review

To help participants assess how far the group has progressed in achieving its aims, either in relation to a specific project or more generally. Note: this exercise is about specific practical actions. For a more generall assessment of how the partnership is getting on, see the exercises on subsequent pages.

Mobile phone

To help group members think about the strength of: (a) their connections with each other and with others outside the group, and (b) their energy, both as individuals and as a group.

Energy / trust diagram

Similar to the previous exercise; to help group members think about how well the group is functioning at present.

Moving on

Ready for independence?

To give participants a visual indicator of whether the group has sufficient energy and resources to be sustainable on its own. Generally a group will need considerable input of energy from outside in the early stages. This needs to diminish over time if the group is to become self-sustaining, though it will probably continue to need some outside resources, e.g. funding.