What you need to prepare
The following are suggestions for what you need to prepare ahead of time for the inter-agency meeting.

Be sure you are fully versed in what you want to achieve from the inter-agency meeting, and that you can satisfactorily answer questions about the proposed program.

Will you want to use overheads or hand-outs on literacy that will add to, not duplicate the information sheet you gave to potential partners when you made your agency visits? You might want to prepare a brief presentation based on the recent International Adult Literacy Survey from Statistics Canada and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1995). You might also present information from the Statistics Canada Survey of Literacy Skills Used in Daily Activities that relate to the relationship between parental education and children's school success. See the Practical Guide to Family Literacy (Skage 1995: 16).

Prepare information (overheads or hand-outs) on the proposed family literacy program model(s), including examples of programs in other communities.

Prepare overheads or hand-outs on partnerships, how they are defined and what their benefits are.

Have a worksheet or exercise on identifying previous experiences with partnerships and how they could have been improved, as well as what participants' expectations are for the partnership, what they feel they can contribute as an individual, and what they feel their agency can contribute (Quezada and Nickse 1992).

Be sure to consider who will be responsible for recording the meeting. If you will be facilitating, perhaps someone else from your organization would volunteer to take notes.

Hosting the meeting
If your organization does not have a room available for the meeting, see if you can have it in another suitable location, such as the library or local school. If you already have a commitment to the partnership by another agency, perhaps they could provide space for the meeting.

The meeting should be long enough to thoroughly discuss the items we've identified, but be reasonable in terms of the time commitment required. Be sure to provide coffee and juice, and to ask the group to determine the need for breaks.

You may want to consider an agenda combining large group discussion, presentation to the large group, and small group discussion with lots of opportunity for interaction (Quezada and Nickse 1992).