Engaging Local Partners
Use this guide to identify and engage local community partners to achieve the outcomes you seek from a workforce-bank partnership.
Identify a purpose for engaging partners.
Collaborations can stem from a variety of motivations and aspirations. For example, you may form a partnership to bring about more effective service delivery or to pool resources, build networks, launch inclusive and community-wide initiatives, or create long-term social change. Knowing why you want to work with local organizations can help you build intentional and strategic partnerships that have aligned missions, visions, and goals. You may also need to understand your organization’s strengths and weaknesses: What resources or assets can you offer? Where are the gaps? How could a local partner support your work?
Become familiar with organizations that work alongside your workforce system.
Understanding and identifying the diverse types of stakeholders in your area will enable you to build strategic partnerships. These could be with community-based organizations (e.g., nonprofit groups and advisory boards), public agencies (e.g., schools and educational institutions), faith-based organizations (e.g., local religious institutions and places of worship), and private and for-profit businesses (e.g., banks and other financial institutions).
Also consider the populations that various organizations serve and identify overlaps with your own customers—for example, agencies that support specific communities (e.g., people with disabilities, the Hispanic community, English language learners) or specific issue areas (e.g., bachelor’s degree attainment, civic engagement). If you want to focus on a particular racial or ethnic community, it may be helpful to research organizations that include equity for that specific racial or ethnic group in their mission statements.
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Evaluate potential partners.
Knowing who to engage with is critical to developing a strategic partnership. When considering who to bring on board to further your project or goal, think about the types of organizations that would be beneficial (e.g., a financial institution could be well positioned to support career pathways activities); the audience you are trying to reach (e.g., a Black-led community organization can help provide culturally responsive services to the Black community); mutual goals, aims, and outcomes; and whether resources exist (or could be accessed) to support the work.
You should consider the political and economic context when engaging an organization. For example, in a political environment that is trying to eliminate diversity and inclusion efforts, this approach could be strategically risky. At the same time, it could contribute to countering such elimination efforts.
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Start to build the relationship.
Once you have identified the purpose of a partnership and know which organizational partners to bring to the table, consider developing outreach messaging that clearly articulates the benefits of collaboration. This messaging can include a reminder of the bigger-picture problems the partnership can address. For example, you may make the case that this partnership can help remove barriers that people with disabilities, the underbanked, and communities of color often face in accessing financial services.
Once you have established a partnership, start on small projects to build trust and become more familiar with how each organization operates. In addition to collaborating on project work, you can provide regular updates to partner organizations, join each other’s internal meetings to understand your complementary strengths, involve partner staff in different working groups, and rotate the location of partnership meetings to different partner sites.