Working with a few sites recently, I came to realize that “enlightened self-interest” is a beautiful thing. It’s often referred to in the negative because of the perception that people are being selfish if they think about how the partnership work could help an individual partner succeed. But in the end, real and sustainable partnerships do have to meet the unique needs of each partner while serving the common good.
As a practical example, these sites are all having trouble getting one or two sectors to actively engage in the partnership work. When we thought this through with them, we realized we really needed to capture both what would likely bring them to the table AND what could be keeping them away. In the end, this matrix will have to be tailored for the needs of each partner. Doing this by sector can get you a good start, helping you to understand what would be the “enlightened self-interest” of the partner to actively engage in the work. These sites now have plans with concrete talking points for how to get the much needed and critically important partners actively involved.
In the end, each partner will need the work of a cradle to career partnership, and the civic infrastructure that emerges, to meet their own mission and goals. Because, in the end, it is the alignment of all these efforts that will lead to long-term success. And that really is in all of our “enlightened collective interest.”
This post was written by
Jeff Edmondson – who has written 15 posts on Striving for change.
Jeff Edmondson is the managing director of the Strive Network
