Assessing New Partnerships

As a staff, we spent some time recently talking about partnerships. This is germane because individuals and agencies occasionally approach us with an interest in working collaboratively to reach the local Asian American/Pacific Islander community. Suggested collaborative work includes but is not limited to health fairs, workshops, and outreach efforts. These requests are generally more than welcome, given that the local AAPI community tends to under-utilize a wide variety of health and human services. Having said that, we have limited resources upon which to spend a significant amount of time working outside our current grant and contract obligations.

Given these resource limitations, we thought that developing a list of criteria to assess the relative value of potential partnerships might make sense. Here’s what we came up with (not necessarily in any particular order):

· Resource intensiveness – how much time and effort will be taken in working collaboratively with a new partner?

· Mission/project alignment – are the interests of the partner in line with our existing goals and objectives?

· Scientific validity – is the area of interest an area of health disparity for AAPIs? Is there an evidence-base supporting the proposed efforts?

· Nurturing a future relationship – is the interested partner an entity that we want to work more extensively with in the future? Does this new relationship potentially leverage other resources and relationships?

· Capacity development – does this new partnership/relationship build our agency capacity or the community’s capacity?

· Innovation – does a new partnership – particularly with non-traditional partners – represent an opportunity to test new ways and areas in which to collaborate?


These then are some of our staff thoughts relating to partnership development. We will still review future partnership opportunities on a case-by-case basis, but it helps for us to have a framework for thinking about the value (for all involved) of new partnerships.

-Doug Hirano, MPH, APCA Executive Director