Creating Strategic Partnerships: A Guide for Educational Institutions and Their Partners

What are the characteristics and conditions that lead to successful educational partnerships?

What can we learn from partnerships that fail, cannot be sustained over time, or cease to benefit their partners?

This book serves as a guide to the successful implementation of partnerships. It provides the context and tools for readers who are responding to the increasing demands of policy makers, funders and institutional leaders to use partnerships to address local, state and federal issues, achieve external mandates, meet public or internal agendas, or pursue international collaborations.

This guide provides an evidence-based framework for institutional and organizational leaders to develop the vision, shared values and norms to achieve the “partnership capital” that will sustain an enduring relationship. It offers a three-phase model of the development process of collaboration, together with a tool box for those charged with partnering and leading organizational change, and includes a template for both creating new partnerships and sustaining existing ones.

The authors start by differentiating between “traditional,” often ad-hoc, partnerships and “strategic partnerships” that align organizational strategy with partnership actions; and by identifying the importance of moving beyond incremental or surface “first order” change to develop deep “second order change” through which underlying structures and operations are questioned and new processes emerge due to the partnership. They offer analyses and understandings of seven key components for success: exploring motivations; developing partner relationships; communicating and framing purpose; creating collaborative structures and resources; leading various partnership stages; generating partnership capital; and implementing strategies for sustaining partnerships.

Each chapter concludes with a case study to provide more understanding of the ideas presented, and for use in training or classes.

This guide is addressed to policy makers and educational leaders, college administrators, and their non-profit and business partners, to enable them to lead and create strategic partnerships and facilitate organizational change.

Marilyn J. Amey is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Administration who teaches courses in the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education programs. Her primary research area is leadership, and the postsecondary governance, administration, organizational change and faculty issues that fall within that larger rubric. She has particular interest in community colleges and the cultivation of new postsecondary leaders. Her current research involves serving as principle investigator of a project looking at K-14 partnerships, which builds on earlier work on interdisciplinary collaboration. She is co-leader of the evaluation team for a five university, NSF-funded consortium, looking at the evolution of interdisciplinary partnerships and academic work. She is co-author of Breaking Out of the Box: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Faculty Work, with Dennis Brown, guest editor of an issue of the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, entitled: “Leadership as Learning: Rethinking Community College Leadership”, co-author with Linda Kuk and James Banning of Designing Organizations for Sustainable Change, and editor of Collaborations Across Educational Borders. Dr. Amey is immediate past editor of the NASPA Journal About Women in Higher Education, the 2005 Senior Scholar recipient of the Council for the Study of Community Colleges and its past President, the inaugural recipient of the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Mentor Award and the chair of its Publications Committee. She teaches courses on administration and governance, leadership, community colleges and faculty.

Pamela L. Eddy is a Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership at the College of William and Mary. Her area of research concerns community colleges, organizational change, gender equity, and faculty work. Eddy is recognized as a key scholar on community college leadership and received recognition as the 2006 Emerging Scholar and the 2013 Senior Scholar from the Council for the Study of Community Colleges. Additionally, her scholarship was acknowledged by Central Michigan University when she received the 2007 Provost Award for her research and by the College of William and Mary when she received the 2011 Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence. She received a 2009 Fulbright Scholarship to conduct research on college partnerships in Ireland. Eddy is the author of Community College Leadership: A Multidimensional Model for Change, and Partnerships and Collaborations in Higher Education. She served as editor of New Directions for Higher Education―International Collaborations: Opportunities, Strategies, Challenges, and of New Directions for Community Colleges―Leading for the Future. Eddy was recognized for her teaching and received the 2008 Central Michigan University Teaching Excellence Award.