Vision for partnership

How the Community Life Competence can shape a vision/mission

Here is an (edited) e-mail sent by Ruben del Prado on 16 February 2012

I was invited by the Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP) to facilitate a two day workshop in Port of Spain (Trinidad & Tobago) last month, working with the Caribbean Network of People Living with HIV (CRN+); coming from the English, French, Dutch and Spanish speaking Caribbean.

After one day of introducing the practice of CLC, we reviewed the existing Vision of CRN+, and proposed a revision, and a revision of their Mission statement, as well.

The Powerpoint slides are attached below.

But here is the contrast in the old and the new vision:

and here is the contrast between the old and the new mission:

I think that this is very beautiful in itself. But I want to suggest 2 more uses for the approach.

How this approach might change our partnerships and their negotiation

In talking to Ricardo after a recent workshop in Uganda, he suggested that we needed to establish a deeper relationship with our partners in order to avoid becoming an organisation with trainers that delivered workshops. You can find more detail at

https://sites.google.com/a/communitylifecompetence.org/learning-from-constellation-events/home/ricardo-and-caring-communities

and the discussion is the final item in the content entitled, 'Our engagement with potential partners. How do we sell our dream'.

As an idea, perhaps during the early phase of the discussion about a partnership, we should be seeking to create a vision and a mission for the partnership that is similar to the updated versions that were produced with Ruben's help.

Almost as an aside, perhaps this approach might have been helpful in Olivia's recent discussions with the Red Cross in French Guiana.

How this approach might be used in our work with commercial organisations

At the moment, we are working on developing relationships with commercial organisations and I wonder if this might be a nice way of bringing out a statement of the dream for such an organisation. So as part of building the dream for the organisation, we would seek to integrate the Constellation approach into the more usual vision and mission of the organisation.

I think that Ruben's work might be a nice example of how this might be done.