Partnership to Proposal Team Guide | Issue 4 of 8
Who's This For
You have partners. Real ones, not just names on a letterhead. You've done the first conversations, mapped assets, aligned expectations. Now you need to design the actual activities that will make the partnership work.
This is where many partnerships stall. Someone has to take the lead on planning. Usually that someone is you. You draft the workshop structure, outline the research protocol, sketch the participant recruitment strategy. Then you send it to partners for feedback. They say it looks good. Maybe they suggest minor tweaks. The partnership feels collaborative, but you're doing the design work alone.
This issue is for anyone who senses that partners signing off on your plans isn't the same as partners shaping those plans. You want genuine co-design, but you're not sure what that looks like in practice.
The Partnership Moment
You're planning a summer research experience with a community college partner. You've worked hard on this relationship. Multiple meetings. Asset inventories. Expectation alignment conversations. Everything from the previous three issues of this guide.
Now it's time to design the actual program. You spend a weekend drafting a detailed plan: ten-week structure, research mentoring model, professional development seminars, culminating poster session. You're proud of this plan. It incorporates best practices from the literature. It fits your institution's resources. It addresses the funding agency's priorities.
You send the plan to your community college partner. "Take a look when you have a chance. Let me know what you think."
They respond: "Looks great! Happy to help however we can."
Three months later, implementation begins. And everything breaks.
The ten-week timeline conflicts with their academic calendar. The mentoring model assumes research infrastructure they don't have. The professional development seminars are scheduled at times their students can't attend. The poster session format makes their students feel like visitors rather than participants.
Your partner's feedback? "We thought you had this worked out. We didn't want to overstep."
Under the Surface
The problem isn't your partner's engagement. The problem is your process.
Sending a finished plan for feedback isn't co-design. It's review. And review creates a power dynamic where one party owns the design and the other party approves or modifies it. Even well-intentioned partners hesitate to fundamentally reshape something you've clearly worked hard on. They don't want to overstep. They don't want to seem difficult. So they approve plans that won't actually work in their context.
Research-practice partnerships have been wrestling with this for years. The RPP literature talks about "genuine co-design" and "mutual benefit," but manifesting those principles requires something most researchers aren't trained for: sharing design authority before you know what the design will be.
Co-design can't happen unless you've done the discovery work from the previous issues. You need to understand partner constraints, priorities, and organizational rhythms before you can design together. Without that foundation, co-design sessions become polite fiction, with partners deferring to your expertise because they don't have enough context to push back.
But even with good discovery, co-design requires deliberate structure. Ideas shared in a meeting aren't the same as ideas considered by the right people at multiple organizational levels. Program coordinators see different things than directors. Directors see different things than board members. Genuine co-design moves through these levels, gathering input that shapes the final design.
