A COMMITMENT TO LEARNERS AND THE COMMUNITY

The partnerships all share a strong commitment to adult learners and are determined to find ways to provide better programs to more learners. They build on the strengths of each partner and on established relationships in the community. They recognize the importance of serving the interests of the partners as well as of the partnership, and yet the partners say they are willing to set aside their own agendas, if necessary, to respond to the needs of the learners and the community. They strive to be flexible and entrepreneurial so they can respond quickly to the changing demands of the community and changing priorities of funders.

The overriding objective of the partnerships is to meet community needs for adult literacy services. The partners do this by leveraging resources, mainly by coordinating services and working closely together on funding. Partnerships can also be a vehicle for providing the other services, such as public assistance, healthcare, or employment assistance that many clients need to become successfully self-sufficient.

Establishing partnerships has helped adult education providers meet a number of their programmatic goals, but the partners are still addressing important issues related to collecting data, using it for program improvement, and quantifying program outcomes. These issues are discussed further in the Issues for the Future section of this report. Because of data collection obstacles, it is important to note at the outset that these partnerships have limited hard data to document improved services or better learner outcomes as a result of partnership activities. Individual programs may or may not collect data, but there is presently no mechanism in place to measure the effects of the partnerships per se.