Leveraging local resources to maintain effective leadership teams

Background: In a time of shrinking budgets and growing economic concerns, it is crucial to leverage existing resources to maximize community capacity. As advocacy efforts are underway across our nation to improve community health, they are faced with the increase challenge of maintaining effective leadership teams. Funding, time and effective structures become the greatest barriers to achieving jurisdiction-wide policy, systems and/or environmental change. In order to sustain local community efforts, partnerships need to learn to navigate through these challenges by strategically leveraging existing partnerships, their resources, staff and institutional capacity. This can only be achieved through strong leadership teams that are well organized, defined, have clear roles and expectations and are given the opportunity to be actively engaged in the process. Methods: Our community worked across funding streams to join forces to strategically define the leadership team functions and infrastructure. The creation of “Articles of Collaboration”, well-defined priorities and the support of anchor organizations lead to a dynamic dialogue that empowered participants to benefit from the Leadership Team. Investing time up front and then stepping back at every juncture to re-assess strategies and challenges proved to be essential to leverage community assets and maintain an effective leadership team. Conclusions: Our community learned that an effective leadership team serves more than “Robber Stamping”. It is actively engaged, committed, provides solutions to challenges, and drives the community action agenda. Cross collaboration among partners through a strong leadership team strategically leverages resources and opens communication to achieve real outcomes and improve community health.