The Essential Skills for Partnership Series

Cross-sector partnerships are essential in addressing and improving the vital conditions of a community. Navigating these partnerships requires a specific set of skills not often taught in traditional public health settings.

Building on a series of previous efforts to support IVP practitioners in strengthening partnerships to advance community injury and violence prevention efforts, Safe States identified a set of “essential skills” necessary for establishing and sustaining these partnerships.

This three-part self-paced training series covers the skills needed to be intentional in your preparation to partner, build and maintain trust with partners, and manage tension and conflict. While each module can be taken independently, the lessons in the series are intended to build on one another. Throughout each lesson, there are skill-building exercises included to help you apply what was covered in the session.

Training Modules

MODULE 1: INTENTIONAL PREPARATION FOR PARTNERSHIPS

Module one of the Essential Skills for Partnership series begins with intentional preparation for successfully establishing partnerships critical for public health efforts. This module will help you think through how you can be intentional in your efforts, providing resources and self-paced exercises for skill building.

Expanded View				Module One Activities Click the links below to access the worksheet that corresponds to the activity and instructions referenced in the training. Module 1. Activity 1: Strategic Planning for Partnerships Module 1. Activity 2: Values Clarification Module 1. Activity 3: Moral Foundations Theory Module 1. Activity 4: Reducing Jargon Module 1. Activity 5: Working your Network Module One Slides

MODULE 2: HOW TO BUILD TRUST

Module two of the Essential Skills for Partnership series discusses the importance of and necessary skills for building trust with partners. This module will help you develop strategies for building and maintaining trust among partners, providing resources and self-paced exercises for skill building.

Expanded View				Module Two Activities Click the links below to access the worksheet that corresponds to the activity and instructions referenced in the training. Module 2. Activity 1: Reflection on Building Trust Module 2. Activity 2: Transparency about Organizational Culture Module 2. Activity 3: Red Yellow Green Flags in Partnerships Module 2. Activity 4: Power Analysis in Partnership    Module Two Slides

MODULE 3: MANAGING TENSION AND CONFLICT

Module Three of the Essential Skills for Partnership series helps you learn to proactively prepare for tension or conflict with partnerships. This module will provide tools and build skills for managing tension and conflict in ways that minimize harm and create opportunities for improved relationships and progress toward outcomes.

Expanded View				Module Three Activities Click the links below to access the worksheet that corresponds to the activity and instructions referenced in the training. Module 3. Activity 1: Approaches to Tension and Conflict Module 3. Activity 2: Addressing Historical Harm   Module Three Slides

Resources

Each training module includes a number of resources to support applying the lessons and further learning. Below you can download the full list of resources referenced across all three modules, as well as other key Safe States resources.

• Full list of resources referenced in the training modules
• Strengthening Partnerships between Business and Public Health: A Roadmap to Advancing Community Injury and Violence Prevention
• Preparing to Partner – A Prequel to Strengthening Partnerships between Business and Public Health: A Roadmap to Advancing Injury and Violence Prevention
• Partnerships in Action – Case Studies
  
• Connections Lab – Exploring Elements of Shared Risk & Protective Factors
  
• Research to Practice Toolkit
  

Background

Despite strong interest in fostering meaningful collaborations to advance IVP efforts and address systemic issues at the local, state, and national levels, resources to support this work continue to be scarce. In response to this, Safe States Alliance has developed a number of resources on applying SRPF approaches and strengthening cross-sector partnerships. In November 2020, Safe States released “Strengthening Partnerships Between Business and Public Health: A Roadmap to Advancing Community Injury and Violence Prevention” (Roadmap) to provide concrete guidance and tools to support public-private partnerships. The Roadmap is a culmination of work that began in 2017 with the National Safety Council and extended through an expert convening supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and, in partnership with, the United States Surgeon General in August of 2020.

As the literature calling for business and public health partnerships grew, the question of how sectors start building relationships to determine if a partnership is feasible arose. To begin to answer this question and build upon the guidance of the Roadmap, Safe States developed “Preparing to Partner – A Prequel to Strengthening Partnerships between Business and Public Health: A Roadmap to Advancing Injury and Violence Prevention” in October 2022.

The Roadmap compendium builds on previous and ongoing work to support public health leaders with engaging non-traditional partners to address shared risk and protective factors (SRPF). Through a series of assessments, environmental scans, literature reviews, and key informant interviews across projects, Safe States discovered a need for expanding “soft” or “essential” skills, such as message framing and language, relationship development, conflict resolution, shared agenda development, etc., not often taught in traditional public health curriculum.

With financial support through Cooperative Agreement #5 NU17CE924917-05 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Safe States built on earlier activities designed to create meaningful collaboration between public-private partnerships by conducting training activities to equip public health practitioners with the necessary or “essential” skills to engage with non-traditional partners to improve community health.