Valuable Partnerships

Valuable Partnerships: Cooperation, Innovation, and the Future of Municipal Texas bridges rich scholarship and practical application to produce an important reference for local government scholars and practitioners alike by covering the dynamic approaches altering how Texas municipalities operate. Valuable Partnerships investigates the efficacy of the American fragmented municipal model comprised of 89,000 jurisdictions. Critics consistently criticize this decentralized model while arguing for a regional structure yielding greater efficiencies and scalability that also solves the twin problems of equity and service delivery inequalities. Conversely, Valuable Partnerships presents evidence that Texas local governments leverage regional cooperation and innovation to achieve these results without the political and structural upheaval. The author utilizes historic analysis, benchmark results, socioeconomic measures, and budgetary data to demonstrate how Texas governments increase service performance and reduce the burden to taxpayers. Such results support a counter thesis to the structural regionalism hypothesis by presenting findings that Texas local jurisdictions embracing regional cooperation and data analytics will experience the same benefits.

Social Value Investing presents a new way to approach some of society’s most difficult and intractable challenges. Although many of our world’s problems may seem too great and too complex to solve — inequality, climate change, affordable housing, corruption, healthcare, food insecurity — solutions to these challenges do exist, and will be found through new partnerships bringing together leaders from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors. In their new book, Howard W. Buffett and William B. Eimicke present a five-point management framework for developing and measuring the success of such partnerships. Inspired by value investing — one of history’s most successful investment paradigms — this framework provides tools to maximize collaborative efficiency and positive social impact, so that major public programs can deliver innovative, inclusive, and long-lasting solutions. It also offers practical insights for any private sector CEO, public sector administrator, or nonprofit manager hoping to build successful cross-sector collaborations. Social Value Investing tells the compelling stories of cross-sector partnerships from around the world — Central Park and the High Line in New York City, community-led economic development in Afghanistan, and improved public services in cities across Brazil. Drawing on lessons and observations from a broad selections of collaborations, this book combines real life stories with detailed analysis, resulting in a blueprint for effective, sustainable partnerships that serve the public interest. Readers also gain access to original, academic case material and professionally produced video documentaries for every major partnerships profiled — bringing to life the people and stories in a way that few other business or management books have done.

Providing a treasury of community partnership opportunities and resources for innovative learning experiences, this title helps Future Ready Librarians to create authentic, student-centered experiences that address American Association of School Librarians (AASL) standards. As school librarians strive to become Future Ready and meet the new AASL standards, community partnerships can help them to build innovative programs within their districts to realize their school's mission and goals. Placing value on the importance of preparing students for the future, this book encourages librarians to "learn, leap, and grow" and form community partnerships to create learning experiences both in and outside of school. Innovative learning experiences can have a positive impact on student engagement, empathy, knowledge, skills, and local and global awareness. This book introduces ideas, materials, resources, and a step-by-step action plan while highlighting how learning experiences meet AASL standards. A user-friendly and invaluable resource for librarians who desire to be Future Ready, it will catapult librarians to the forefront of their practice and support them as they create innovative learning experiences for their students.

This book analyzes the everyday emotions of international peacebuilding practitioners as practices that hinder – and potentially help – them to listen more receptively to their local partners. It develops ‘‘emotional practices’’ as an analytical concept by integrating critical feminist perspectives insights into practice approaches. Effective peacebuilding requires international actors to listen to local partners. This sounds simple enough but often fails in practice. Examining how everyday emotions help or hinder internationals’ receptivity to local perspectives, the book challenges the conventional wisdom that emotions do not matter – at least not those of internationals who are the privileged party in peacebuilding partnerships. The book is based on interviews with peacebuilding practitioners, donors and researchers working in the Balkans and East Africa, as well as in the UK, the US and Sweden, and gives a detailed and no-nonsense description of daily dilemmas regarding listening and partnerships. Johansson provides concrete recommendations of how internationals can practice personally, organizationally, and geopolitically to build emotional capacity that will help them listen better to local actors. Drawing on the author’s expertise in political science and peace and conflict research, this volume speaks to scholars in international relations, political theory, sociology, cultural studies, development studies, critical theory, and anthropology.

Collaboration and partnership are well-known characteristics of the nonprofit sector, as well as important tools of public policy and for creating public value. But how do nonprofits form successful partnerships? From the perspective of nonprofit practice, the conditions leading to collaboration and partnership are seldom ideal. Nonprofit executives contemplating interorganizational cooperation, collaboration, networks, partnership, and merger face a bewildering array of challenges. In Partnerships the Nonprofit Way: What Matters, What Doesn't, the authors share the success and failures of 52 nonprofit leaders. By depicting and contextualizing nonprofit organization characteristics and practices that make collaboration successful, the authors propose new theory and partnership principles that challenge conventional concepts centered on contractual fulfillment and accountability, and provide practical advice that can assist nonprofit leaders and others in creating and sustaining strategic, mutually beneficial partnerships of their own.

Are you identifying the right deals and making them profitable? Or are you haggling over who gets the biggest piece of the pie, rather than working out how to make the pie bigger? This book will help you identify, develop and safeguard added value, which means that both businesses in the partnership can develop and grow with reduced risk. Not just any partner and not just any deal will do. An international study based on over 20,000 negotiations revealed that a huge amount of time is wasted on producing deals that are often of only marginal merit. This book will help you identify the deals which are worth doing and set you on the right track to make them profitable. "Negotiating Partnerships" will take you through dozens of areas where additional value can be found, to make win-win partnership deals that really work for you. You will learn how to identify opportunities and conclude better deals at the same time as making the other party feel good. This book sets out key steps to co-operative negotiation so that you have the know-how to achieve profitable partnerships. The partnering process is one that makes sense in any line of business from online retail to manufacturing via everything in between. As the business environment becomes tougher, and margins are continually shaved this book will help you maintain and grow your existing profit. In all cases, a partnership should provide better solutions than those currently available to each party separately. With this book you can achieve partnerships, which reduce costs and risks, improve earnings and at the same time reap the benefit of each other's experience, creativity and contacts. Yes, it is important for theother party in a partnership to be satisfied. But it is your job as a negotiator to try to ensure that you can keep to yourself most of the added value created. This book will help you through this process so that you find and retain good and valuable partnerships.

The disruptive potential of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and biotechnology catalysts redefine traditional business models and serve as instrumental forces in attracting venture capital investments. The lower barriers to entry, facilitated by these disruptive technologies, empower entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to market, creating a more accessible landscape for funding and innovation. Fostering Innovation in Venture Capital and Startup Ecosystems explores this transformative intersection, where emerging technologies catalyze change, fuel innovation, and redefine the dynamics of financial investments and entrepreneurial endeavors. Moreover, the book delves into how embracing AI, IoT, blockchain, and augmented reality/virtual reality can expedite innovation, enhance efficiency, and scale businesses. Through a multidisciplinary lens, readers understand how these technologies influence established markets, drive economic growth, and create job opportunities. This book is ideal for venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, startup founders, and policymakers.

Family-school partnerships are increasingly touted as a means of improving both student and school improvement. This recognition has led to an increase in policies and initiatives that offer the following benefits: improved communication between parents and educators; home and school goals that are mutually supportive and shared; better understanding of the complexities impinging on children’s development; and pooling of family and school resources to find and implement solutions to shared goals. This is the first comprehensive review of what is known about the effects of home-school partnerships on student and school achievement. It provides a brief history of home-school partnerships, presents evidence-based practices for working with families across developmental stages, and provides an agenda for future research and policy. Key features include: provides comprehensive, cross-disciplinary coverage of theoretical issues and research concerning family-school partnerships. describes those aspects of school-family partnerships that have been adequately researched and promotes their implementation as evidence-based interventions. charts cutting-edge research agendas & methods for exploring school-family partnerships. charts the implications such research has for training, policy and practice especially regarding educational disparities. This book is appropriate for researchers, instructors, and graduate students in the following areas: school counseling, school psychology, educational psychology, school leadership, special education, and school social work. It is also appropriate for the academic libraries serving these audiences.