Partnership for Results

 

Goal: Foster positive youth development through the implementation of a continuum of evidence-based 

programs. 

About Partnership for Results: Partnership for Results (The Partnership) is a model of local governance 

designed to make system-wide improvements in Cayuga County, New York as a step toward improving 

outcomes for vulnerable youth. The Partnership was formed in 2000, after a wide-ranging community

assessment conducted with the support of a federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant from the helped 

public agency leaders recognize that they were often serving the same children. 

Collaboration Model: The partnership is a quasi-governmental, 501©3 organization, with its own 

professional staff and a board comprised of the directors of the County’s youth-serving systems, including 

social services, health, education, law enforcement, and juvenile justice. This leadership structure and team 

allows the partnership to:

• Use a data-driven decision-making process, including regular evaluation — The Partnership, guided 

by data and regular evaluation, selects evidence-based programs to implement in the community. 

• Implement protocols for collecting data across agency lines — Agencies use a common consent form 

and new operational principals and legal structures to aggregate data for the purposes of 

assessment, treatment planning, and service coordination.

• Establish joint fiduciary responsibility to braid funding — Shared fiscal responsibility in a sustainable 

structure has allowed the Partnership to braid many sources of funding in new ways to support 

programs that address multiple adverse circumstances affecting children.

Promising Practices used in the collaboration:

• Fostering cross-agency awareness and providing cross training — The Partnership forms a single 

point of integration through its database and interagency expertise and conducts cross-system 

training and provides technical assistance to agencies on an ongoing basis. 

• Focusing on sustainability from the start — Multi-agency involvement in the selection, 

implementation, and monitoring of evidence-based programs ensures that programs continue to be 

supported and maintain efficacy over time, even in 

the face of leadership turnover. 

 

Lessons Learned by the collaboration:

• Develop instruments and databases designed to 

meet your need — The Partnership developed and 

validated new screening tools and assessments 

because available tools were not sufficiently 

interdisciplinary to meet the comprehensive needs 

of their multi-systemic model. 

• Engage stakeholders to manage relationships and 

conflicts — A consortium of community stakeholders meets regularly and provides advice to the 

Board, which has helped community-based organizations to continue to communicate easily with the 

public agencies that were essential to their ongoing activities. 

• Actively manage the change process — To reduce negative reactions from stakeholders when 

replacing long-standing programs with evidence-based versions, the Partnership and their committed 

staff maintain responsibility and re-direct blame away from public leaders. 

Be sure to check out the Research to 

Results Brief by Child Trends on the 

Partnership for Results: Evidence-based 

Programs in Action: Policy and Practice 

Insights from a Success Story 

 

Learn more at youth.gov/collaborationprofiles/partnership-results