New Tool: Partnership Self-Assessment Tool

Posted by on June 21, 2002

[CCPH]

Those of you who were able to attend the pre-conference workshop on “maximizing the power of partnerships” at this year’s CCPH conference learned of a new web-based partnership assessment tool developed by CCPH board member Roz Lasker and her colleagues at the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health at The New York Academy of Medicine (see workshop handouts on the CCPH website at http://futurehealth.ucsf.edu/ccph/guide.html#Publications)

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. A number of CCPH members involved in community-campus partnerships participated in the research and pilot-testing, in part to ensure that the tool would be relevant to these sorts of partnerships.

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.

To learn more about the Tool visit http://www.PartnershipTool.net.