If I were to say the one thing I've learned from looking at collaborations over the years is that it's about developing relationships from the beginning between the individual people, not just between researchers with their researcher's hat on and community agencies with their service hat, but everybody who's committed to the same population.

To do good collaboration, it requires, as in any relationship, a lot of face time, and it means getting people from community agencies into the academic setting, and people from the academic setting out from behind the desks and into the clinical setting, into interface with clients, to meet with as many people at an agency as possible and to develop capacity with both sides about what the work is.

So how you'd go about developing a relationship with somebody from the other side who you haven't, a lot of it just starts with some informal phone calls or informal meetings to talk about your shared commitment, talk about your experience with the clients. It's usually not best to start when you have a grant deadline.

It's usually best to start when you have some time to develop a relationship to talk about a shared vision and then to develop a project even before there's funding on the table and that way when there's a proposal out, you already know what you want to put out together.

I think there are some fairly common challenges for all collaborators and that is that you're working cross-culturally, and I'm talking about the culture of academia and the culture of direct service. So it really does take being very patient, learning the language and the timeframes and the resources and the authority figures and all of that of the folks in the other world, to be successful in collaborating.