New Partnership Tool Released

On Thursday, June 20, 2002 at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health at The New York Academy of Medicine will launch its new web-based Partnership Self-Assessment Tool.  The launch will take place during a live satellite broadcast from the Albany studios of the New York Network.  This one-hour presentation will be a part of the T2B2 (Third Thursday Breakfast Broadcast) series of video seminars on public health issues, coordinated by the School of Public Health, University at Albany.

The Partnership Self-Assessment Tool is a unique resource for partnerships.   Unlike most evaluations, which focus on a partnership’s programs or goals, the Tool assesses how well a partnership’s collaborative process strengthens its ability to achieve those goals.  The Tool shows a partnership how well its collaborative process is working and what it can do to make the process work better.  In this way, it enables partnership members to get more out of their collective efforts and make more of a difference in their community.

The Tool is free and easy to use.  Also, since it is based on rigorous research and extensive piloting, it gives partnerships reliable information that can help them deal with many of the challenges they face.  To use the Tool, partnership members anonymously fill out a short on-line questionnaire; the system then analyzes the data provided and generates a comprehensive report about the partnership.  This report provides the partnership with its own road map for taking corrective action.  It shows what the partnership can do to become more responsive to its members and the broader community.  In addition, it describes how the partnership can achieve the breakthroughs in thinking and action that are needed to understand and solve the problems it is addressing.   As people who participated in the pilot have said:

· “It’s an exciting tool for all partnerships.  There is so much to learn about how partners can work together at the highest level.”
· “It’s easy to use – I’m not the most computer literate person, and I was able to get through it with no problem.”
· “The report was extremely helpful and wonderfully laid out so that our strengths and weaknesses were clear.”
· “I’m going to use the results for my own development as a partnership leader and manager; the Tool helped me see areas in which I need to improve.”
· “I would recommend the Tool to partnerships that want to be effective and want to be a ‘real’ partnership.”

To learn more about the Tool, check out www.PartnershipTool.net.

The Tool was developed at the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health at The New York Academy of Medicine (www.CACSH.org), in partnership with Instructional and Information Systems at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (www.sph.unc.edu/iis/).  This project was made possible through generous support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.