Building partnerships and coalitions

Seminar title: "Putting Information Together: Building Integrated Data Repositories"

Date and place: Wednesday, February 9, 2000, University at Albany

Speaker: Robert Dawes, Director, Bureau of Shelter Services, NYS Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance

Transcript of video and audio clip

It’s easy to say "okay everybody we are going to be partners."

It’s much more difficult than that. In order to proceed with any type of project in this area, especially when you have a population with service needs as diverse as ours, you really do have to become partners.

In order to do that I’ve found that it’s a learning experience and it’s a lot of fun and it’s really an interactive process.

There must be open communication with your partners. There is no "Hi. I’m from the State. I’m going to keep this back."

It doesn’t work that way. You have to share everything you know and everything you are planning on doing and be ready to change, to modify based on the needs of your partners.

You’ve gotta bring these partners in from the beginning.

The first thing we did with CTG was to figure out our service objects, some of our initial points. The next step was to bring in the partners who had that data. That information they could share with us, and that we could share with them.