Building Inter-Organizational Collaboration to Promote Community Systems Change

We are a community-agency-university collaboration that has evolved over a three-year period to plan and implement community strategies to reduce the burden of diabetes in a northern New Mexico community. Partners include the San Miguel Community Health Council, two programs of the New Mexico Department of Health/Public Health Division: the Office of Health Promotion and Community Health Improvement (OHPCHI), and the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program (DPCP), and two university-faculty research partners. We grounded our initial collaborative efforts in the application of a community health improvement planning framework designed to guide the community health council toward identifying systems (program or policy) changes. Over the last year and a half, the partners have been meeting on a monthly basis to plan, implement, and assess collaborative activities and to engage in structured self-reflection. That reflection has included examining intra- and inter-organizational and environmental challenges, creation of an equitable division of labor, and seeking to identify factors that facilitate and impede trust among partners. The inter-organizational collaboration has as a key goal the development of processes and outcomes that can be replicated with other groups, including: the importance of collective discovery, creativity, and the development of a learning community through structured reflection, learning to navigate the challenges involved in participatory decision-making, and applying core themes to identify outcomes for inter-organizational partnerships. We will present and discuss results of our collaborative efforts and how what we have learned has shaped our work in community health improvement.