Newemploy Wales: Building a partnership
| 'You
need to have patience with your partners, and building
the rapport and trust to talk openly can take time.
The thing to remember is that collectively we can have
a greater impact.' |
Newemploy Wales have a staff of 22 and an annual income of
£400,000. They provide training, capacity building,
business advice and community support in south Glamorgan.
Newemploy recently instigated a partnership project to bid
for £1.5 million of capital funding to develop a local
area. The partnership, which took six months to set up, included
the local authority, the Training and Enterprise College and
local businesses.
Setting up the partnership took a lot of time, Paul Morrissey
explains. 'It was not an easy process. But accepting that
others have different priorities is really important in making
a partnership work. You need to have patience with your partners,
and building the rapport and trust to talk openly can take
time. The thing to remember is that collectively we can have
a greater impact.
'I've found working in a formal partnership valuable because
different people in the partnership have been able to deal
with different dimensions of challenges that have arisen.
For example, if some lobbying is needed, the local authority
representatives are not in a position to do it but the voluntary
organisation can. Each representative has an insight into
their organisation and how to best steer the project.
'One of the difficult things to deal with is a change of
key personnel in partner organisations, which nearly always
happens at some point. This can really alter the dynamic of
the relationships. Sometimes it feels like you are starting
all over again.
Sustaining a large partnership project can be very time-consuming,
as Paul found out. 'We had help from experienced external
planners but ideally we should have had a full-time person
working in Newemploy who could have taken responsibility for
the project overall.'
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