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Question:
Good morning,

I am working to organize a statewide community peer-to-peer mental health advocacy and education organization here in New Mexico. There is interest and passion in the success of our group. We are thinking about using an association/collaborative of local chapters model. Can you please offer web resources that we can review to see how such a model is working for others?
Answer:

Good Morning Larry,
 
Thanks for visiting the Community Tool Box (CTB) and Ask an Advisor, I hope we can provide you with timely, useful, and directly applicable information! What an exciting undertaking, glad we can be at least a tangential part of the process.
 
Well, first let me call your attention to what we have here in the CTB that you might find useful. To begin, go to our home page and click on the "Learn A Skill" button, then the "Table of Contents" button and scroll down to the section entitled "Communications to Promote Interest and Participation - Communications that promote interest and encourage involvement." There you'll find two chapters, Chapter 6 - Communications to Promote Interest and Chapter 7 - Encouraging Involvement in Community Work, and two toolkits, 1 - Creating and Maintaining Partnerships and 8 - Increasing Participation and Membership. Each of these resources contains a veritable treasure-trove of information related to forming partnerships and fostering collaboration, particularly Chapter 7 and Toolkit 1. Chapters are divided into sections and within sections there usually are examples regarding the topic of that section - very useful indeed. Toolkits also provide great examples, and in many cases a "how to" approach.
 
Second, go back to our home page and click on the "Help Taking Action" button and then click on the "Databases of Best Practices" where you might find better examples than in the section I just mentioned. You'll have to root around a bit, but I think you'll be rewarded for your efforts; unfortunately, I can't tell you which specific database will best suit your needs because I'm just not that familiar with all of them so I'll leave you to it. If you again click on the "Help Taking Action" button you'll notice that we offer online courses, 8 modules to be exact. In my estimation, Module 1: "Assuring Engagement in Community Health Improvement Efforts" which includes information on how to assure ongoing involvement of community members (you are after all a community of peers) and how to assure shared ownership among stakeholders will be of greatest use.
 
You also might be interested in checking out the inspiring stories in our "Community Stories" resource. Click on the "Connect" button on our home page and then click on "Community Stories." You'll notice a map on the right side of the page, click on the "Full Size Map." On the left side of the map there is a list of approximately 50 different types of programs and projects; scroll through them to see if any pique your interest and whether they might better inform your thinking about forming the collaborative.
 
Last, there is a CTB resource I'd like you to also consider once you're moving toward a state-wide collaboration. Again, go to our home page and click on the "Learn A Skill" button, then the "Table of Contents" button and scroll down to the section entitled "Organizing for Effective Advocacy - Information on advocacy principles, advocacy research, providing education, direct action campaigns, media advocacy, and responding to opposition" you'll notice we have six chapters and one toolkit: Chapter 30 - Principles of Advocacy, Chapter 31 - Conducting Advocacy Research, Chapter 32 - Providing Encouragement and Education, Chapter 33 - Conducting a Direct Action Campaign, Chapter 34 - Media Advocacy, and Chapter 35 - Responding to Counterattacks, and toolkit 10 - Advocating for Change. Again, these will prove useful as you are moving forward with your collaboration.
 
Okay Larry, I think that about wraps it up. I hope that we've provided you with a lot of food for thought and great information that you'll be able to use. If you're not satisfied with this reply, please come back and visit us again and we'll work together to come up with a more appropriate response. With that, again, thank you for your great question and for the important work you are undertaking, really great stuff. Be well, take care.
 
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Question Date: ven, 05/13/2016