Wellesley believes that building a wide range of partnerships, alliances and ongoing working relationships is essential to winning progressive policy change. Working with sister research, policy and community-based organizations to develop solid research and actionable policy alternatives on common issues can enhance our overall impact.

A number of these alliances are geared to developing and supporting progressive directions and options for health reform. Examples include:

• participating in the GTA Diversity and LHINs Working Group to develop planning and policy tools that will help ensure diversity is incorporated into LHINs planning and priority setting;

• working with the Association of Health Centres to support their 2007 conference , and shape wider public and policy debate , on the second stage of Medicare' or incorporating more upstream preventive, health promotion and determinants of health investment;

• working with the GTA Community Health Centres to elaborate and test an urban health framework as a planning and policy tool. This also involves meeting with GTA LHINs and with Ministry officials to promote this comprehensive planning framework.

Other relationships focus on addressing inadequate access to affordable housing as a crucial determinant of health and health disparities. For example:

• working with the National Coalition on Housing and Homelessness and other national organizations;

• internationally, we collaborate with the Habitat International Coalition, a global network of NGOs;

• locally, we work in Housing Action Now, a Toronto network of about 300 provider and community organizations.

We have also been working with the Canadian Policy Research Network and other national foundations and think tanks on ensuring there is space and resources for progressive policy discourse and debate.

In addition, wehave developed a number of more formal and focussed partnerships with:

• Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH), a major American organization supporting and facilitating community-based research on health and health disparities. The Wellesley board chair is on CCPH's board and we have been local organizing partners for the 2007 conference in Toronto.

• WZB, the most important applied social sciences and policy research institute in Germany, to promote grounded community-based research in health promotion and equity. A critical goal of this alliance is to jointly develop a more sophisticated analytical and theoretical underpinning for CBR, and to elaborate clear and consistent quality criteria and principles. This is a key link between European and North American CBR practitioners.

• The University of Victoria to enhance national collaboration and networking on CBR with policy and programme impact. These two alliances complement our ongoing work with CCPH and international networks of CBR practitioners.

• The University of Toronto's new Public Policy Faculty. We will provide a venue and links for interns interested in non-profit and community-based policy analysis, and will work on other joint projects to enhance our connections to high-level federal, provincial and municipal policy circles.