In order to improve the health of women, children, and families, it’s essential that state agencies partner with other organizations to increase the impact of their Title V MCH Services Block Grant funding. Equally essential is that they partner strategically, selecting the right partners and building collaborations that are mutually beneficial, effective, and sustainable.
In early August, the National Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Workforce Development Center hosted a three-day skills institute in Tempe, Arizona to help Title V professionals strengthen their skills in strategic partnership. The event, titled “Grow Your Title V Impact through Strategic Partnerships,” brought together 86 MCH professionals, representing 21 state and jurisdictional teams.
Over the three days, Center experts presented a series of workshops, introducing tools that each team could use to assess their readiness and capacity for partnership, build strategic and mutually beneficial partnerships, assess and learn from partnership efforts, and build sustainability into their partnerships.
The workshops included presentations from Title V professionals in Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Virginia who reflected on their own efforts to take a strategic approach to partnership.
After each workshop, the teams worked in breakout rooms with Center coaches to apply the workshop’s tools to their own unique contexts.
In their evaluation, a participant shared that the skills institute “struck the right balance between case study speakers, tool introductions, and time for applying those tools with our team. It went beyond getting inspired and into taking action, which helps form the pathways for us to continue our work when we return home.”
Some teams came to the skills institute with only Title V professionals, so they could use the tools presented to think critically about who they should partner with and how to build or strengthen those partnerships for the greatest impact. Other teams included representatives from partner organizations, so Title V staff could work directly with their partners to apply the tools to the work they are tackling together.
For example, a team from Puerto Rico included three Title V professionals and two representatives from different partner organizations. With a March of Dimes representative, they discussed how to improve compliance with a regulation that requires “hard stop” policies at birthing hospitals, which aim to prevent complications for mothers and babies by reducing labor inductions before 39 weeks unless medically necessary. With a leader from the Puerto Rico Institute on Developmental Disabilities, they discussed how to improve developmental screening rates so that children with autism can be identified earlier and receive services and support sooner.
By attending the skills institute together with partners, the team was able to gain clarity about the goals of both change initiatives and what roles would be best for each partner. They also identified other partners who would be important to add to their efforts, discussed their perceptions of how mutually beneficial the partnerships were, and built 30-, 60-, and 90-day action plans for moving their work forward.
“As always, we were grateful for the opportunity to work in person with MCH professionals from across the country,” said Rebecca Greenleaf, MPH, the Director of Learning for the National MCH Workforce Development Center, who led the development of the skills institute’s curriculum. “It’s exciting to create a space where our staff and MCH professionals working in the field can learn from each other. We look forward to integrating what we learned at this event into our Center’s future offerings.”