Other stories on the Partnership Imperative are:

• Riding the New Wave in Public-Private Partnerships
• A Badgeless Workforce: GCSS-Army’s team approach defines a partnership—and defies the odds
• Profusion of Partnerships: A dizzying spectrum of alliances helps USAID foster global growth

With 74,500 acres, 59 miles of bay and ocean shoreline, and about 1,250 historic structures, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, or GGNRA, is perhaps the most complex of all our national park areas. More than 16 million visitors take in sites such as Alcatraz, the Presidio of San Francisco, Fort Mason and Muir Woods National Monument, as well as participate in educational programs and just enjoy nature.

So how does it get by on an annual operating budget allocated by Congress of about $19 million? The short answer is, it doesn’t—and hasn’t for 20 years.

GGNRA and its superintendent, Brian O’Neill, have become known as a pioneer of successful public-private partnerships. Today, they leverage that $19 million allocation almost dollar for dollar through a variety of other sources and have transformed GGNRA into an organization that facilitates a creative network of alliances.

“The key concept in partnerships is that there aren’t any surprises.” —Brian O’Neill

“When I first arrived as assistant superintendent, it was clear that the mandate we had to maintain buildings and transform them into inspirational places wasn’t going to happen if we did it ourselves,” O’Neill said. “Because of the magnitude of what had to be done, we had to work outside the box and tap into the genius and expertise of the community. Partnership became a fundamental philosophy we had to pursue.”

But at the time, O’Neill didn’t understand the best approaches to sustaining partnerships. It took some hard knocks, he said, to learn how to combine the talent and resources of a public agency with the talent and resources of the community.

GGNRA became an innovation lab of sorts for alternative funding and financing concepts. O’Neill and his colleagues had to understand how to connect effectively with the community. Over the years, that has developed into an incremental, ever-engaging process.

“People give to people,” he said. “You have to tap into individuals, corporations and foundations that have an emotional engagement with the park. Emotional ownership gives us the kind of support we need to tap into.”

Finding the right partners is crucial, of course. It requires a lot of homework to identify just who should take on a specific body of work, he said. Sometimes, the organization is already in place. Sometimes, however, you have to build the entity.

One of GGNRA’s chief partners is Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. It was established more than 20 years ago to assist GGNRA in research, interpretation and conservation programs. Since 1982, it has invested nearly $78 million in GGNRA.

Greg Moore, the conservancy’s executive director, works closely with O’Neill. He credits strong communication and a common vision to their success as a team. “We have systems throughout our organization to keep communication flowing,” he said. “Brian and I meet every week and our management meets every two weeks.”

O’Neill has instituted relationship managers for all of GGNRA’s partners. A relationship manager’s job is to keep in regular contact with the partner, know what the partner is doing, identify problems and determine if O’Neill needs to be brought in.

Not only does this approach keep good relationships flourishing, it prevents potential problems from getting out of hand, and makes handling exit strategies easier should the partnership ultimately not work out.

“The key concept in partnerships is that there aren’t any surprises,” O’Neill said. “If communication is good, we should be picking up on issues fairly early.” O’Neill also serves on a lot of nonprofit boards in the community to help create a culture of partnerships, learn the fiduciary responsibilities of his partners, and learn their perspective on what it’s like to deal with government agencies from the other side.

Equally crucial to attracting and sustaining partnerships is the internal buy-in.

First and always is the challenge of operating within a deeply conservative National Park system. Born out of the military, it has had a command-and-control philosophy, O’Neill said. Even today, with a top-level advocacy of partnerships, the conservative, cautious approach remains, requiring O’Neill always to bring in the very best talent in the broader community to develop strategies around new ideas that foresee all possible roadblocks by those higher up.

“We anticipate organizational resistance and prepare ourselves with arguments and perspectives to help them get over those roadblocks,” O’Neill explained.

Recasting the organization was also required to make a partnership approach work. GGNRA has only 347 National Park Service employees, a small fraction of the total workforce, which includes partners, concessionaires, contractors, cooperative associations and volunteers. Leveraging that core group into a legion of workers who do everything from restore and maintain historic buildings, serve snacks to visitors and protect endangered species has required a wholesale change in how employees understand their jobs.

Said O’Neill: “Our folks have chosen public service because they have passion and commitment to the park service. What we found, however, is that no matter how effective they are in doing their work, they as an individual could only get one [full-time equivalent] of output from their best effort.”

As a result, he said, “We had to make them see that their role isn’t so much the doer of the work themselves but the leader who facilitates the convening and brokering of community talent to create a sense of citizen stewardship of their national park. It means we’re looking for a different set of competencies in our employees than before.”

That kind of change is always resisted, but O’Neill has taken the approach to a personal level to convince his team that the work they view as so important can be enhanced and expanded with community help. “It almost always occurs one person at a time,” he said. “People need to see the light turned on. They need to see that it’s important.”

That strategy has worked. In the 20 years since O’Neill first began this journey, GGNRA has become a partnership model and his “21 Partnership Success Factors” a virtual bible for those who want to adopt that model (see sidebar). But it’s not an approach limited to the National Park Service.

“I’ve found through interagency work that so many of our issues are the same in government, no matter what the agency,” O’Neill said. “The point is by necessity, we’re building a changing environment, and working with others is where government is heading.”

Other stories on the Partnership Imperative are:

• Riding the New Wave in Public-Private Partnerships
• A Badgeless Workforce: GCSS-Army’s team approach defines a partnership—and defies the odds
• Profusion of Partnerships: A dizzying spectrum of alliances helps USAID foster global growth

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