Finally, your information package should clearly explain why community partnerships are essential to early intervention initiatives of any kind. A brief rationale for partnerships can be summarized from Chapter III, highlighting the following points:

• to meet the interrelated needs of family members with integrated services and approaches
• to be aware of the services and support offered by other agencies
• to avoid duplication of services
• to pool resources and expertise
• to improve access to families and potential clients
• to meet funding agency criteria

See Appendix A for a sample information sheet for potential community partners.

In order to prepare information for your community partners, it's useful to consider what their needs might be. We asked community agency staff what they needed in the way of information to decide whether to join in partnership with the local family literacy program. Their responses are summarized in Table 5.

In some cases, it was not the information presented to the community agencies, but rather personal experience of agency staff that led to the decision to join the partnership. For example, agency staff were familiar with literacy program or coordinator, or they had worked together in a previous partnership. Some agency staff had previous experience in literacy, most often having volunteered as a tutor. Knowing someone who needed the support that could be provided by a family literacy program was also cited as motivation to join the partnership.

Contacting potential partners
When we spoke to family literacy coordinators about how they approached potential partners, we found a number of similarities as well as differences in their experiences. In small towns and rural areas, coordinators stressed the importance of informal conversations (such as in grocery stores, libraries, or at other meetings) as opportunities to introduce the idea of partnering for family literacy.