How to collaborate regionally with no money?

Regional collaboration activities have come and gone, mostly grant funded and rarely institutionalized. About two years ago, a few people from the CTE leadership in Orange County spun a group off the Regional Tech Prep Initiative to kick off regional advisory meetings. It was composed of a couple of CTE deans from the community college side, several CTE leaders from K12 school districts, and a number of people from the local ROPs.

We all knew that most of our independent advisory meetings were not very effective, with memberships that were generally composed of previous students, part-time faculty, and very few people from the industry.  We also knew that all of us, the CCs, the high school districts, and the ROPs, were tapping into the same pool of industry do-gooders for our advisory members. So, the idea was that if we could pull our resources together, we could have advisory meetings that were of higher quality and with more unbiased input to guide our programs. We invited a non-profit entity, Vital Link, to the table that had worked with our Tech Prep groups for many years and had organized industry-specific field trips, occupational awareness workshops, curriculum development work, etc.  We had a lot of questions and concerns as to how this partnership was going to work. At times it seemed that our interests and needs were too disconnected to pull off such a regional effort.  But the relationships between the members were strong enough that no one wanted to walk away from the table.   Read More.