Building Partnerships & Coalitions: Lessons Learned from DELTA FOCUS

Creating new or deepening existing relationships with community partners is an important strategy for preventing intimate partner violence! Building meaningful relationships is both a pathway to impactful change and an important prevention goal and outcome in and of itself.

In the DELTA FOCUS project, coalition-building approaches were designed to increase two or more organizations’ abilities to work collaboratively on statewide or community intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention programs, policies, or resources. Partners are vital to embedding prevention approaches into routine practices of public health, education, and violence prevention agencies and systems. Multiple partners working together can build on each agency or organization’s strength, whether it is leadership, planning, resources, delivery, or evaluation.

This story features lessons learned from coalitions in California, Delaware, and Michigan whose approaches focused on building a network of partners working collaboratively to support IPV and TDV prevention. 

Each coalition learned that to create new, and deepen existing, partner networks they needed to attend closely and responsively to how they built relationships. They did this by approaching relationship building as a long-term process, balancing communication with an openness to input, and fostering trust by being authentic and present for partners.