Understanding the University-Community Alliance: The Waterloo Experience‪.‬

Abstract Partnerships are common in community planning and they take many forms and structures. These partnerships vary in scales and organization with structures ranging from joint ventures to alliances. Alliances were first introduced in the early 1990s with business and strategic planning efforts to help private corporations compete in a global market. They are understood as ambiguous, complex, and dynamic. Based on collaborative efforts of networking and information-sharing, alliances have gradually found their way to the public sector by the late 1990s. This shift was due partly to public funding cutbacks and the increasing complexity of community issues.