Characteristics of WynBay LLEN Partnerships

The central mechanism by which the WynBay LLEN carries out its role in the community is through building strategic partnerships with:

• Education and training providers;
• Business and industry;
• Parents and families; and
• Community groups.

These partnerships demonstrate the following characteristics:

• Partners work collaboratively to build community capacity that supports young people‘s learning and improves transition outcomes;
• Partners communicate effectively and are involved in joint planning to achieve agreed outcomes;
• All partners have a voice and are able to influence strategic directions;
• Partners establish monitoring and review mechanisms to assess the effectiveness of the partnership;
• Partners are committed to a sustainable relationship;
• Partnerships are relevant to the needs of young people in the region.

Benefits

The challenges we face as a community in terms of meeting the needs of our young people can only be addressed through partnerships. No single sector or organization has the capacity to meet the multi-dimensional issues on their own. Working in partnership with the LLEN can help you as a business, school, parent or community organization to:

• Effectiveness: Creating more appropriate products and services for your clients;
• Access to knowledge: Mitigating risk and reducing potential mistakes by greater understanding of the operational context;
• Access to people: Drawing on a wider pool of technical expertise, experience, skills, labour and networks;
• Reputation and credibility: Achieving genuinely earned organizational reputation and greater credibility in the community;
• Efficiency: Reducing (by sharing) costs and avoiding duplication;
• Human resource development: Enhancing professional skills and competencies in the work force;
• Long-term stability and impact: Achieving greater ‘reach’ by being efficient and effective means an expanded sustainable development impact. This is a direct objective of government and civil society, but also critical to the sustainability of business;
• Innovation: Developing unexpected / new ways of addressing old issues and complex challenges.

Multi-Sector Partnerships

Multi-sector partnerships are formed when organisations from one or more of the business, government, community or education sectors decide to work together to achieve specific outcomes. It enables strong relationships to be developed based on mutual trust and respect, which form a foundation for sustainable development outcomes to be achieved.

Multi-sector partnerships can take many forms and be utilised for many objectives, such as:

• Resolving complex issues involving resources;
• Implementing multi-sector stakeholder initiatives;
• Developing economic and social capital;
• Building capacity within communities;
• Developing regional economies;
• Implementing corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Partnerships are a means to an end - not an end in themselves. They are a way of engaging more than one group, organisation or sector in a program, project or initiative which enables greater innovation, increased resources and greater capacity to be accessed than would otherwise have been the case.