Levels of Partnership Worksheet

The Levels of Partnership Worksheet is a visual tool to help you better understand the relative importance of your program’s relationships with different partners. Through sorting your partners by type and extent of NORC program involvement, this seemingly simple tool can help shed light on roles and expectations, and guide how you work with your different partners.

The concentric circles in the diagram are organized by partnership level:

The inner ring is for your core partners (partners that have a direct role in the overall success of the program).

The middle ring is for collaborators (partners focused on a specific activity or task).

The outer ring is for community stakeholders (partners that provide modest, but useful, support or become involved in one-time events).

For more on the different levels of partnership, see Partnering with the Community, Guiding Principle #3.

For this exercise, start by identifying all of your partners. Think about their roles in your program—what you want them to do, what you are asking of them, and what they want and are willing to bring to the table. Once you have identified them all, write them into the appropriate circle on the diagram.

Share your diagram with your community advisory committee, seniors, and/or the larger partnership. Is there agreement about who sits at the table? The resulting conversations will help clarify expectations and commitments. It may also lead to discussion about potential partners within your community with whom you may not have a relationship yet, but would like to. For example, if your local elected officials don’t attend your community advisory committee meetings, but you might like them to, you would write their name in the community stakeholder ring; for visual clarity, you may find it helpful to add potential new partners to your circles in a different color.

Levels of Partnership Worksheet (PDF, 192KB)