Facilitators of and Challenges to Interagency Collaboration: An Early Childhood Perspective

ABSTRACT

Low-income communities face a host of problems that threaten the health and well-being of their children and families, who generally experience more than one problem simultaneously (Brown, Amwake, Speth, & Scott-Little, 2002). Regrettably, the delivery of services to low-income families is typically fragmented and scattered. Recent policy initiatives have encouraged human services agencies, particularly those for vulnerable children and families, to engage in interagency partnerships as a way to ameliorate this fragmentation. This study shares process evaluation findings from an interagency collaboration between an Early Head Start program and a residential drug treatment agency serving low-income families in a large northeastern city. Responses to close-ended and open-ended survey questions were collected from 15 staff members in order to identify the salient facilitators and inhibitors of effective partnership in the initial stages of this interagency collaboration. Strengths and common challenges to interagency collaboration that emerged from qualitative analyses are discussed as well as implications of the findings for research, practice, and policy.

Notes

^a The n reflects the number of responses coded for a particular theme. Because a participant could identify a theme more than once in response to a particular question, this number is higher in some cases than the total N of participants.