Hold Team Meetings . Monitor and Evaluate Your Efforts . Sustain Your SART . Know Your Team . Critical Issues
Cooperation: Multidisciplinary agencies informally exchange information, as needs arise. SARTs formed through cooperation are characterized by informal relationships that exist without any commonly defined mission, structure, or planning effort. Cooperation is a good choice when partnering organizations expect only to exchange information.
Coordination: Multidisciplinary agencies work together with an understanding of compatible missions. SARTs formed through coordination include open communication and an understanding of interagency roles and responsibilities without formalized agreements (e.g., memorandums of understanding). Coordination is a good choice when partners share common short-term outcomes or plans and resources to enhance mutual objectives.
Collaboration: Multidisciplinary agencies commit to share resources, refer victims for services, coordinate services or respond to sexual violence as a team, and monitor and evaluate interagency responses through quality assurance mechanisms. SARTs formed through collaboration bring previously separate organizations into a new structure, with a new identity defined by a common mission. Such a relationship requires comprehensive planning, well-defined interagency responses to sexual violence (e.g., SART protocols or guidelines), and open communication channels (e.g., regularly scheduled team meetings). Collaboration is a good choice when agencies want to address issues proactively and systemically.
Community mobilization: An approach to expand community partnerships to provide more inclusive and responsive services and to enhance public awareness of sexual violence. To mobilize a community is to invite more organizations to share their expertise as team members or as advisory members.
Coordinating committee/advisory board: These committees or boards serve as a permanent, multidisciplinary groups established to monitor, evaluate, and address issues that arise once a SART is formed. Members can include law enforcement, prosecution, health care, victim advocacy, and governmental officials and other professionals from the community who respond to sexual assault or work to end sexual violence.
Documents and Materials
Benchmarking 101 for Nonprofits
Provides the basics of benchmarking including what it is, how it can be useful, and how it differs from evaluation.
Building Comprehensive Solutions to Domestic Violence: Skills for Successful Collaborations (Curriculum)
Covers collaborative mindsets, negotiation, strategic thinking, and meeting facilitation.
Building Stronger Sexual Assault Survivor Services Through Collaboration
Describes key roles for community sexual assault coalitions (or task forces). The manual, which can be useful for communities starting SARTs or expanding collaborative partnerships, provides samples and checklists for needs assessments, memorandums of understanding, community resources, mission statements, and self-evaluation instruments.
Capacity Building Defined and Demystified
Defines six components of capacity building and includes links to capacity-building activities and other resources.
Collaboration: A Training Curriculum to Enhance the Effectiveness of Criminal Justice Teams
Assists multidisciplinary criminal justice teams in establishing or enhancing collaborative relationships. All teams can benefit from this curriculum, whether newly formed, long established, or tasked with a specific project or broader purpose (e.g., a multiagency council mandated to oversee all criminal justice activities in a jurisdiction).
Collaboration FrameworkAddressing Community Capacity
Helps SARTs that are either starting collaborations or need help in strengthening existing collaborations. Once a SART has been established, the document may be used as a diagnostic tool for evaluating the team's continued development and expansion.
The Collaboration Primer
Provides useful tips for health care professionals that can be adapted across disciplines. The document reviews foundational as well as more abstract elements of successful partnerships and includes a checklist of questions and issues to consider before embarking on collaborative arrangements and examples of model partnerships.
Community-Based Criminal Crisis Response Initiative: Assessing Community Needs
Provides information on a community-based, multidisciplinary approach that is tailored to the needs and resources of a community and designed to enhance services to victims and reduce their trauma. This report reviews the steps involved in developing a coordinated response and includes information on the planning process that may be helpful to SARTs.
Conflict Management in Community Organizations
Describes the types, dimensions, and effects of conflict and ways to manage it.
Confronting Violence Against Women—A Community Action Approach
Provides criminal justice professionals and community activists with a hands-on, step-by-step guide to forming a coordinating council and describes several innovative councils that are successfully countering violence against women in their communities. Available via e-mail from the National District Attorneys Association.
Developing Effective Coalitions: An Eight Step Guide
Helps partnerships launch and stabilize successfully by reviewing how to determine the appropriateness of a coalition, select members, define key elements, maintain vitality, and conduct ongoing evaluations. Although the examples given are specific to injury prevention coalitions, most can be applied to coalitions working on various health-related issues.
Free Basic Guide to Leadership and Supervision
Describes management skills for new managers and supervisors. Topics include core management skills, staffing, employee training, employee performance management and personnel policies, and sustaining the work.
Gauging Progress: A Guidebook For Community Sexual Assault Programs and Community Development Initiatives
Lays the groundwork for thinking about how to gauge progress, with an emphasis on how to conceptualize evaluation of a community development initiative. The information can be useful for SARTs in developing and expanding team roles and responsibilities that can be monitored and evaluated. The appendix includes several useful organization and evaluation tools that SARTs can customize.
Getting It Right: Collaborative Problem Solving for Criminal Justice
Spells out a practical, team-based approach to assessing current systems and implementing strategies for change. It was developed primarily for local criminal justice policy teams that want to work together to promote safety, prevent and solve crime, and hold offenders accountable.
How to "Nimble-ize" a Collaboration
Includes 10 principles for creating a resilient collaboration structure and why they are critical to success.
Implementing Evidence-Based Principles in Community Corrections: Collaboration for Systemic Change in the Criminal Justice System
Assists multidisciplinary criminal justice teams in establishing or enhancing collaborative relationships. The appendixes include essential elements of collaboration and collaborative models for implementing change.
Implementing Evidence-Based Principles in Community Corrections: Leading Organizational Change and Development
Describes concepts and strategies that foster organizational change and reform. Sections include changing the way business is done, organizational case management, the leadership challenge, the influence of infrastructure, the integrated organizations change process model, managing transitions, and structural supports for change.
Leadership in Victim Services
Focuses on the differences between management and leadership and explores the principles of leadership and the qualities of exceptional leaders. Specifically, the material includes information on ethics, resiliency, ownership, problem solving, team building, and facilitation.
Learning About Victims of Crime: A Training Model for Victim Service Providers and Allied Professionals
Summarizes the training and education efforts of the Victim Services 2000 initiative in Denver and how the Denver site approached cross-training victim service providers and allied professionals in faith communities, law enforcement settings, and judicial and other legal settings.
Looking Back, Moving Forward: A Program for Communities Responding to Sexual Assault (Workbook)
Assists interagency councils in organizing and carrying out the steps for developing and implementing a multidisciplinary, multiagency, victim-centered protocol. The workbook has easily customizable letters, media releases, meeting agendas, and other tools.
Making Collaboration Work: The Experiences of Denver Victim Services 2000
Documents the Victim Services 2000 collaborative model in Denver, discussing leadership, use of technology for case management, community advocacy, and lessons learned.
Office of Justice Programs Financial Guide
Assists OJP award recipients in fulfilling their responsibilities to safeguard grant funds and ensure that funds are used for the purposes for which they were awarded.
Reshape Newsletter: Dual Coalitions
Provides a series of articles on how dual coalitions that deal with domestic violence and sexual assault issues simultaneously can address multiple service needs equitably.
Revisiting the Critical Elements of Comprehensive Community Initiatives
Describes effective outreach and how to sustain levels of involvement, address cultural issues, and address the challenges of collaboration.
Sexual Assault Response Teams: Partnering for Success (DVD)
Provides a history of and context for the multidisciplinary response to sexual assault, describes the benefits of a collaborative response to victims, highlights the progress the field has made in serving victims, and addresses emerging issues facing first responders and ways in which those challenges continue to shape the response of SARTs.
Six Best Practices for Complex Collaborations
Describes collaborative practices that improve success.
The Tension of Turf: Making It Work for the Coalition
Discusses common types of turf struggles and reasons why they occur and offers recommendations for limiting negative turf issues. Companion piece to Developing Effective Coalitions: An Eight Step Guide, which focuses on coalition startup.
Three Keys to Being an Effective Community Leader
Describes core competencies for leadership.
Tips for Getting Technology Funding
Discusses six ways to improve the prospects of getting technology funding.
Using Technology To Enable Collaboration
Examines Denver's automated information system, which is a critical component of its interagency collaborative effort. It also suggests how other sites can develop and maintain technology-based solutions to serve victims of crime.
Asset-Based Community Development Institute
Provides publications, tools, and resources for asset-based community outreach. The institute also has a listserv for community builders around the country to share experiences and exchange ideas.
Collaboration Assessment Tool
Allows multidisciplinary coalitions to identify strengths and areas of growth and enables them to gauge progress over time.
Allows multidisciplinary coalitions to evaluate each partner's skills.
Community Tool Box
Provides practical guidance to promote community development. Sections discuss issues such as leadership, strategic planning, community assessment, grant writing, and evaluation, among others. Each section includes a description of the task, its advantages, step-by-step guidelines, examples, checklists, and training materials.
Community Organizational Assessment Tool
Helps guide group discussions about how teams are functioning. Although the questions are structured for nonprofit board members, the form can be used as a gauge for SART members to use to assess their perceptions of team dynamics.
Collaboration Toolkit: How to Build, Fix, and Sustain Productive Partnerships
Provides practical guidance to law enforcement agencies as they develop and sustain partnerships that support community policing.
Links to information on community organizing and coalition building.
OVC Strategic Planning Toolkit
Serves as a guide to use throughout the strategic planning process.
OVC Training and Technical Assistance Center
Focuses on strengthening the capacity of victim assistance organizations throughout the country. The center's training and technical assistance activities are coordinated through three core functions: needs assessment, capacity building, and evaluation.
Part E. Leadership, Management, and Group Facilitation (Community Tool Box)
Includes information about the core functions in leadership, becoming an effective manager, and group facilitation and problem solving.
Supports the work of SARTs nationally and promotes peer-to-peer technical assistance among community and professional organizations and agencies that respond to sexual violence.
Toolkit to End Violence Against Women
Provides concrete guidance to communities, policy leaders, and individuals engaged in activities to end violence against women. Each chapter focuses on a particular audience or environment and includes recommendations for strengthening prevention efforts and improving services and advocacy for victims.
Wilder Collaboration Factors Inventory
Helps users assess how their collaborations are doing on 20 research-tested success factors.