Critical Themes of Intersystem Collaboration: Moving from a "Can We" to a "How Can We" Approach to Service Delivery with Children and Families

Human service agencies are increasingly encouraged to collaborate to support a more comprehensive, integrated, and responsive service delivery model for vulnerable children and their families. This paper describes specific facilitators and barriers emerging from the thematic analysis of interviews conducted over a two-year period with staff in counties that implemented a statewide inter-system collaboration project. The following facilitators were observed: accessible and available resources, flexible funding structures, organizational structures that encouraged partnerships and teams, participants open and committed to working together, and management supportive of front line efforts. Factors that hindered the collaboration effort included unavailable or inaccessible resources, unclear administrative guidelines and corresponding difficulty in defining the target population, philosophical differences between participants, and competing demands on time and funds.