The Partnership Forum – Connecting and supporting partnership practitioners for sustainable development

This is a cutting-edge web 2.0 platform developed to support partnership practitioners from all sectors (business, governments, NGOs) and all parts of the world in their professional development. It is designed to fill a gap and to provide a sense of ‘family’ for those individuals – wherever they are – who lead their organizations, sectors or communities in developing cross-sector partnerships.

The Partnership Forum will provide access to:

• A bank of partnership resources
• Peer-to-peer exchange and practical learning opportunities and
• Interactive networking.

Promoting cross-sectoral and cross-cultural collaboration around topics of interest, the platform works at multiple levels, allowing more focused connections - whether geographic, (eg The Partnership Forum South Africa) or thematic (eg Partnerships for the Environment) or communities of practice (eg Building Tools for Partnership Evaluation).

In May 2008 the site will be open to associates to begin to further populate the Resource Bank leading to a full launch in June.

Go to: PartnershipForum.org

The Partnership Brokers Accreditation Scheme (PBAS) is managed by the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) in association with the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Established in 2004, by Ros Tennyson (IBLF) and Michael Warner (ODI), PBAS remains the only partnership brokers professional training programme in the world and has now trained more than 250 people from all sectors and many different countries. It is currently enrolling for its 18th and 19th cohorts for which Part 1 (a residential skills training course) will take place in a rural setting in the UK (June and October 2008).

Go to: http://www.odi.org.uk/pbas

New Tool Book for Partnership Practitioners Under Development

The next in the series of Toolbooks (see PUBLICATIONS) is entitled FIT FOR PURPOSE: Building Institutional Capacity for Partnership. It is being written with my colleague Rafal Serafin and a number of other practitioners with whom we have worked over many years in different parts of the world.

Partnership practitioners regularly report that one of the most challenging aspects of cross-sector partnering (perhaps, surprisingly) is that of engaging their own organisations as genuine and enthusiastic partners. But this is not the only ‘institutional’ challenge of partnership as a sustainable development paradigm – sometimes it becomes necessary to create a new ‘institution’ to implement programmes medium to long term. This tookbook will address both these issues and more in a practical, user-friendly way.

The book will be published by the International Business Leaders Forum in December 2008… and we welcome ideas or possible collaboration. Please contact: emily.wood@iblf.org if you would like to know more.