Who's This For
You have an early developing sense of your (and/or your team’s) impact possibilities from the intro of issue 1 of StoryStacks. This will help to define the intersections of capacity and purpose across multiple dimensions of the changes and impacts you want to make. Now you need to think about who else is in this story.
This issue is for anyone designing partnership possibilities based on impact goals (long-term and short-term). Anyone who tends to center themselves in broader impacts without seeing the full cast, and anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to think deeply about what partners actually need, want, and can contribute as part of a collaboration.
The key insight: partners are protagonists in their own stories. When you truly get that, your partnership design changes.
The Partnership Moment
For everyone actively writing or daydreaming drafts of a broader impacts section and you write something like: "The PI will partner with local organizations to expand the reach of xyz research findings." Raise the flag!
It sounds reasonable. But who are these organizations? What do they get from this? What’s their story? Are they in danger of not surviving without knowing the ‘z’ of your xyz findings?
Too often, partners appear in proposals as interchangeable extras, background characters who exist to receive what the researcher provides. They fill a role, but they don’t have depth.
