An examination of a community partnership, the Triple S Industrial Training Group

Abstract

An integral part of Canada's social safety net throughout most of the earlier post-war period was the provision of labour market training services delivered by government. In order to improve the efficiency of the delivery of labour market training, the federal government examined alternate means of delivery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Recent academic research suggests that the use of such intermediaries may be more effective than the government was in the delivery of publicly funded labour market training. Because of the evolutionary nature of community partnerships, there is little prescriptive literature on how to achieve this strength in numbers. The case study examined in this thesis and a review of existing literature provides some insight into the pre-requisites of an effective community partnership. As the Conference Board definition of a community partnership, which is referred to throughout this thesis, suggests, the partners must have a co-operative relationship based on a sense of sharingand supported by an anticipated or actual sense of achievement. The real benefit to government from using community partnerships does not come from cost savings but from using a community partnership to harness the energy of and tap into the strength of a strength of a local community network. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)