October 7, 2020
5 things we've learned about being a good partner
Local Welcome couldn’t exist without partnerships with other charities and community organisations.
Being a good partner is fundamental to our model because our partners provide us with our venues and refer refugee guests to our meals.
We’re also a national organisation so working with local partners gives us a good grounding in communities to help ensure we complement, not compete with work that’s already being done.
We’ve found that transactional partnerships - ones in which partners are held accountable by some kind of measure, service level agreement or contract - don’t work for us. Instead we’ve made the most progress when we’ve developed relational partnerships - ones that are based on human-to-human contact and shared values.
Here are some lessons we’ve learned about how to be a good partner:
1. Good partners align their self-interest
It might seem counter-intuitive but charities and community organisations - including Local Welcome - act within their own self-interest most of the time.
This self-interest is almost always tied up with the best interests of the community of people they serve so it’s no bad thing, but learning to align our self-interest with that of potential partners has been an important lesson for us.
It’s in Local Welcome’s interest to find venues where we can host our meals, and for those venues to come at little or low cost to us. These goals are often in direct conflict with the self-interest of the community groups responsible for venues which are reliant on rental income. How do we overcome this? Through alignment.
For example, Father Gerry at St Alban’s Church in Birmingham generously hosts us in the church hall most Sundays. Our goal is to establish a thriving Local Welcome group in the city at low cost. Father Gerry’s goals are for a wider group of people to visit the church and for his congregation to have the opportunity to live out their Christian values by becoming leaders or members of Local Welcome. Our respective goals are not the same, but they align.
What’s more, St Alban’s was recently awarded a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for much needed repairs. When they heard the news, they got in touch to celebrate with us because being able to demonstrate that the church was serving the wider community - in part by hosting our meals - helped them to make a convincing case to the funders.
The partnership has benefitted Local Welcome and St Alban’s Church as well as the local community because we worked together to find the place where our self-interests aligned.
2. Good partners focus on humans, not organisations
Our venue partner in Derby is Derby Homes, the housing association that runs Churchside House where we host our meals. In reality, our partners are Charlotte and Leon - the humans we communicate with about Churchside House.
They’re the humans who trust us with the key to the venue, the humans who we go to for help if something goes wrong and the humans who understand and support what we’re trying to achieve in the community.
Organisations can’t trust, listen, understand or empathise. Humans can.
Where transactional partnerships exist on paper between organisations, our relational partnerships exist in person, on the phone or over emails with other humans. A piece of paper is no substitute for trust and communication.
No written agreement can ever anticipate all the potential points of tension in any relationship or how to resolve them. When Donegall Road Primary School told us we’d blocked their sink with leftover tabbouleh we didn’t need to refer to a contract to know how to put it right.
The one time an organisation we worked with did ask for a written agreement, the partnership ended up breaking down. It wasn’t the agreement itself that was the problem, it was because it was used to bypass developing human-to-human relationships and we all ended up on a much more difficult path because of it.
3. Good partners make the effort to build trust
Developing relational partnerships with humans takes a lot more effort than signing a piece of paper but in our experience it pays dividends.
Take the brilliant Lee from Liverpool, the incredibly busy manager at John Archer Hall. We know she’s busy and brilliant because we’ve met her, spent time with her, shared a cup of tea (and stories) with her.
We value Lee, we value what she does for her community and we value being part of the life of John Archer Hall. We demonstrate how much we value and respect Lee by communicating with her in the way she prefers (email), by checking in after each meal to make sure everything was ok, by paying our invoices on time, and by impressing upon our leaders the importance of respecting the hall and its facilities.
All these things helped to build Lee’s trust in Local Welcome to the point that when we asked if we could install a key box onto the outside wall of the hall for our leaders to use, she said yes straightaway, helping us to solve what had been a tough problem (getting keys to different leaders each weekend).
When the Covid pandemic hit, we made an early decision to keep paying the hire fees at John Archer Hall and at the other venues where we pay to use the space. There was no contract dictating that we did this, we just felt it was the right thing to do. Our loyalty wasn’t to the building, it was to Lee (and by the way, Lee used that money to pay for emergency food parcels for people in her community impacted by the pandemic).
4. It’s hard to be a good partner when there’s a clash of values
There’s no getting away from the fact that sometimes things don’t work out with a partner.
This has happened to us and it’s challenging on a number of different levels.
It was frustrating for people in our team who were trying to make the partnership work and left them feeling drained of time and energy. There were practical implications, like not being able to use a venue at short notice, and there were the knock-on effects, like leaders and members having a difficult experience at a meal because the venue partner’s support had started to ebb away.
Once this particular partnership was over we spent time reflecting on what had gone wrong. There were numerous bumps along the way but the fundamental difficulty was a clash of values and culture. There’s a small event that happened which sums this up well - one Sunday a partner mistakenly left the door between the kitchen and the hall locked which left us unable to run our meal. Our solution was to hop over the kitchen counter to unlock it from the inside. We saw this as pragmatic and harmless, whereas they viewed it as disrespectful and rude. There’s no right or wrong in this situation, just two organisations who value different things.
When partners continue to butt up against each other like this, it’s very hard to come back from. We had a written agreement with this partner but in the end culture trumped all because it’s the invisible dominating force in any organisation.
We’re proud of our values and culture but we don’t expect others to share them. Our experience has taught us that when alarm bells start ringing in our head about a potential new partner we should listen to them. They’re telling us it’s time to pull back, and that’s ok.
5. Good partners don’t impose broken systems on each other
Our meals used to rely heavily on referral partners to promote our meals to refugees, sign people up and distribute tickets.
These partners, all from refugee support organisations, had one thing in common - they were all over stretched and under-resourced - and yet we still designed a system that added significantly to their workload.
Unsurprisingly the system didn’t work very well and many weeks we saw low numbers of guests at our meals, despite the fact we knew demand was there.
We realised we were asking too much of too few people so we learned and we iterated. Our next approach was to invite partners to choose the level of support they felt able to offer us, from putting up a promo poster to referring people to meals through a simple new webpage. At the same time we started actively seeking out more partners in each area to grow the pool of people referring refugees to our meals.
The changes we made led to more predictable turnout from refugee guests, but they also made us a better partner. We were wrong to rely on one or two partners in each area because this put too much pressure on them to refer people to us. There’s only so much demand you can pile upon a partner before they shake you off (and rightly so).
If you want good partners, be a good partner
Learning how to build a good partnership is actually learning how to be a good partner.
Good partners recognise the importance of mutual self-interest. Good partners know that their counterparts are humans, not organisations, and that these humans deserve to be valued, respected and supported. Good partners don’t outsource their responsibilities to others. Wise partners know when it’s time to walk away.
There’s still more for us to learn. As we grow from 8 to 100 groups we’re going to have to work out how to be a good partner when the number of organisations we’re working with keeps increasing.
We’re also unsure about what the landscape will look like post-Covid. Some of our partner organisations might be struggling financially, or with unprecedented demand or with a change to their service, or all of the above.
But we’re confident that no matter what the challenges ahead, the learning we’ve done about how to be a good partner will help us to face them.