The Challenge
Solving complex issues like climate change – while also driving “win-win” outcomes that achieve multiple benefits – is a task best done collaboratively. All over the world cities that collaborate with their community members pursue climate solutions more successfully. A study undertaken by C40 and ARUP in 2015 examining the success 66 global cities achieved on climate initiatives, found that cities that collaborate with community partners deliver twice as many actions that those that don’t take a partnership approach. Collaboration and partnership are also key in handling conflicting interests constructively and even leveraging them to create more innovative solution-building. And working with collaborates to ensure climate policy can advance multiple objectives helps strengthen policies and programs and ensure that they benefit more people.
However, building collaborations, especially among diverse stakeholders, is far from easy. Management of diverse partnerships requires expertise, guidance and resources – and the area of climate action is no exception. The brokering and management of outcomes-focused partnerships is not something we can do off the side of our desks, or by simply assigning the work to our best “people person.” There is an emerging consensus that to do this work in ways that support best outcomes we need professional training and support.
The Solution
The Atmospheric Fund (TAF) launched the Brokering Better Partnerships initiative in 2018 and will support it through to the end of 2020. The purpose of the program is to create professional training and networking opportunities in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) that contribute to helping cities achieve their climate goals while also supporting other important public goals. Leveraging world-class training capacity represented by the international Partnership Brokers Association, TAF is offering an opportunity for practitioners to gain partnership brokering training and to connect with a solid regional network of peers working to support multi-sectoral partnerships.
The GTHA Partnership Brokers Community of Practice, launched in December 2017, provides quarterly opportunities annually to bring together partnership and collaboration practitioners to share experience and challenges and hone their own partnership efforts. Participants will co-develop the findings from these meetings into a living set of Partnership Brokering resources informed by local insights and actions.
Partnership Brokering Training: In collaboration with the Partnership Brokering Association, TAF will host in-depth, four-day training intensives twice annually in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The sessions will be taught by two accredited trainers. Upon successful completion of the course, participants will become Partnership Brokering Association alumni and gain access to leading edge online resource materials.
Partnership Brokering Accreditation: Graduates of the Partnership Brokering Training will be eligible to access follow-on sessions to gain professional partnership broker accreditation .TAF will seek out and support candidates to broaden the roster of accredited trainers in the GTHA in order to create more cost-effective training opportunities for climate solutions practitioners.
TAF’s Social Innovation Skills Fund offers partial bursaries to climate-focused organizations interested in partnership brokering and other training opportunities.
Knowledge Sharing
- We support the capturing and sharing of lessons associated with climate-focused partnerships and collaborations, e.g. a report on the lessons learned from the Move the GTHA collective impact initiative.
- TAF and its partners will assess how Partnership Brokering Training augments the work of local practitioners. See this guest blog for some first-hand training insights.
Collaboration Opportunities
We seek collaborators to:
- Co-host and support our quarterly Community of Practice events, providing space and/or supporting the cost of refreshments and supplies;
- Enhance the Social Innovation Skills Fund to help offset the cost of training for climate solutions collaborators who lack the resources to pay the full cost;
- Gather and share good local examples of how partnership and collaboration create improved outcomes;
- Help identify or create useful partnership evaluation metrics, and
- Enable ongoing professional partnership brokering training opportunities in the GTHA.
For more training opportunities in Canada and around the world visit partnershipbrokers.org
To discuss these opportunities or to subscribe for updates, please contact Mary Pickering, VP, Programs & Partnerships.