Training Guides for the Head Start Learning Community:
Community Partnerships
Module 3
| Contents | Preface
| Introduction
| Module 1
| Module 2
| Module 3
| Module 4 | |
Challenges of Collaboration
Handout 2: Managing Conflict Worksheet
Instructions
Select a facilitator and a recorder for your small group. Read the scenario below and then discuss the questions that follow. Your group has 35 minutes to complete its discussion. When the large group
reconvenes, you will be asked to summarize your discussion outcomes.
Collaborative Scenario
The PACT collaborative has been meeting about twice a month for a year. Originally, partners from 10 community agencies joined forces around an alarming fact--the community had the highest rate of infant deaths in the state and the fifth-highest rate in the nation. The collaborative set out to make its community known as "the place where all babies thrive."
At today's meeting, partners are trying to come to grips with the news that more teenage girls are getting pregnant than graduating from the local high school. A vast majority of the babies born to the teens are premature. Several partners, including the high school's counselor, Dedra Wooten, are saying the collaborative's efforts to educate the community about the importance of prenatal care, healthy diets, and no smoking or drinking during pregnancy have failed. They want the collaborative to develop a school-based pregnancy prevention program. Other partners are saying it's too soon to change strategies; they want to continue the thriving babies education campaign for at least another year. With no apparent solution to the dispute, one of the partners urges the group to go on to the next agenda item.
The next item on the agenda is grant-writing. Funds for next year's operating and project expenses are scarce. Last year the collaborative was successful in getting a start-up grant from a local foundation, which was then matched by the agencies participating in the collaborative. Joshua Stokes, who wrote the proposal for last year's grant, has not come to the collaborative's last three meetings; no one at today's meeting knows why. After everyone at the meeting today says they have neither the skills nor the time to write a proposal, the decision is made to table the grant-writing topic until next month. In the meantime, the collaborative's facilitator, Matt Henderson, offers to call Joshua and see if he's willing to write another proposal for the collaborative.
Beverly Abbot, from the community's Early Head Start program, brings up the last item on today's meeting agenda--parent participation in the collaborative. She reminds the group that she has raised the question of getting parents involved in the collaborative before but no decision has been reached. She urges the group to expand its membership to include parents. The question is debated for about an hour. The group is split--three partners are against parent involvement and three are for parent involvement; the remaining two partners voice no opinion. The biggest argument made against inviting parents is the collaborative is not ready for consumers; it needs to focus, instead, on building interagency commitment to the collaborative. The issue of parent involvement gets dropped again, with no resolution in sight.
Most partners agree that interagency commitment seems to be waning and without some dramatic results soon they expect their agencies to pull out of the collaborative. As the meeting ends, several partners announce they can't come to the next meeting. A variety of excuses are given, but it seems clear that today's meeting has left everyone feeling frustrated and ineffective.
Discussion Questions
- What conflicts are evident in the PACT collaborative? How did the partners respond to the
conflict?
- Which conflict do you see as most threatening to the collaborative's survival? Why? What seems
to be the source of that conflict? (Some common sources of conflict to consider include: vagueness
about the collaborative's mission or goals, low trust or power struggles among partners, little or
no concrete signs of progress, lack of partner authority to act, and partners not having enough time
to devote to the collaborative's work.)
- What would you try first to resolve or manage the most threatening conflict? Why? What would you
try next? (Some possibilities to consider include: revisiting the collaborative's mission, getting
everyone's ideas on what the source of the conflict is and ways to resolve it, searching for a
compromise or a win-win solution, asking a few partners to study the conflict in-depth and propose
a solution, or getting a mediator to help the collaborative work through the conflict.)
- What would you suggest to help this collaborative regain its momentum?
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