Conflicting concepts of collaboration
Not only do partners need to communicate, they have to also be speaking the same language. Does Susan from agency X understand a partnership to mean the same thing as Mark from agency Y? Do they both see the roles and responsibilities in the same way? Do they both have the same understanding of what kind of a commitment is required? If there isn't a common understanding of what it means to work in partnership, difficulties may develop and conflict may result.

Stakeholder non-participation
A serious barrier to building community partnerships is when key stakeholders cannot or will not participate. This can be related to a number of these other barriers, such as turf issues, lack of time and resources, differences in socialization -- problems that can not only cause developing partnerships to founder, but can prevent partnerships from being built between agencies.

Sometimes a lack of stakeholder participation is due to not enough public awareness about family literacy. It is still a relatively new approach to literacy development, and not a lot of people are familiar with the concept. This can perhaps explain in part the perceived "lack of support from the community" that was described as a barrier by one community agency worker in our 1995 interviews.

A specific and very significant type of stakeholder non-participation is when parents from your proposed target/client group are not members of your partnership. Parents are an obvious stakeholder, and yet research shows that they are among the most difficult partners to recruit. As Unger and Jones (in Translating Research into Practice 1993) point out, the "ideology of encouraging parental involvement… does not easily translate into the reality of more parents participating and parents and professionals having more positive and collaborative relationships…. This is particularly true of urban, low-income, single-parent families with biologically vulnerable and 'at-risk' children (242). "

Often parental non-involvement is because there are no avenues in place for including parents in the partnership and program planning processes (Friedman and Glass in Translating Research into Practice 1993). There are also chronic stressors that prevent many parents who would benefit from family literacy programs from participating in a partnership building process (Unger and Jones). Even if parents can be recruited into the partnership process, there are frequently feelings of inadequacy and withdrawal from meaningful participation (Atmore 1993).