Collaboration Handbook: Creating, Sustaining, and Enjoying the Journey

How to start, run, and maintain an effective collaboration

The Collaboration Handbook is your complete guide to putting together a collaboration that gets results! You’ll see how to get a collaboration going, define the results you’re after, determine everyone’s roles, create an action plan, and evaluate the results. Plus, you’ll find out:

• How to know if collaboration is the best way to accomplish your goals
• If your collaboration has the ingredients to succeed
• How to select the best structure for your collaboration
• How to manage the four stages of collaboration
• When it makes sense to test the waters with a pilot project

Because working together can be complex, this valuable guide gives you practical steps, tips, and worksheets to guide you all the way. You’ll find out what to expect and how to:

• Find and attract the right people
• Build trust among diverse groups
• Avoid common pitfalls
• Turn conflict into cooperation
• Create accountability standards
• Keep people involved, enthusiastic, and motivated

This practical handbook includes: a case study following one collaboration from start to finish; sixteen worksheets to help you solve problems, plan successful strategies, and track your progress; and special sidebars with helpful tips such as what to do at your first meeting and how mandated collaborations can succeed.

With the Collaboration Handbook, you’ll save valuable time and energy figuring out how to collaborate—and move ahead to creating a collaboration that works!

Also helpful: the research report, Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 3rd Edition, available from Fieldstone Alliance.

For more than 25 years, Michael Winer has been successful at bringing together diverse talents and perspectives to achieve common results through decisive actions. As the founder of 4Results Together, Michael is dedicated to growing individual, organizational and community resources into powerful results - hardy individuals, vital families, productive agencies, profitable businesses and healthy communities. 4Results Together offers training, consulting, coaching, facilitating and motivational speaking on how to grow the resources you have into the results you want.

Michael has worked with community members and leaders have been from all parts of the country and all sectors: arts, business, community development, community services, education, family services, government, health care, hunger reduction, law enforcement, literacy & early education, long-term care, media, philanthropy, religion, rural development and violence reduction.

Karen Ray is president of Karen Ray Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in training and organization development for government, community, and nonprofit agencies. Karen has twenty years of experience with new and existing collaborations. Previously, she was executive director of a literacy-focused agency mandated to collaborate by state and federal funders. As president of Karen Ray Associates, a consulting firm which specializes in training and organization development for government, community, and nonprofit agencies, collaboration is the theme of her work.