Trust funding was coming to an end and the organisation had 12 months to wind down its own research and action research, and identify and hand-over its role leading the consortium to a new organisation or organisations that could sustain and develop the partnership it had established. The partnership would deliver the practical change that the organisation had argued for over the past decade. Issues that needed to be addressed included how much of the activity was to be transferred, how the partnership could be sustained and who would co-ordinate it, who could host the technology, and how to provide new opportunities for the original staff. The task was large, complicated, and had many interconnecting, and sometimes personal and '‘political' issues. The Director of the organisation commissioned Jacqueline Hill of J Hill Associates to act as a mentor to help develop an effective plan for sustainability and identify future career choices.

Jacqueline first helped the Director identify his goals for the mentoring process:

• Ensure the continuation of the partnership, its development programmes and its internet gateway by ensuring a smooth transition of the roles currently held by the organisation to a new organisation/group of organisations. The Director characterised success as "a planned, staged exit that I am in control of" and "the last 6 months to create a legacy".
• Create a legacy for the original organisation and celebrate its achievements.
• Develop leadership skills to create a more effective working environment.
• Identify personal goals and the things that give job satisfaction to inform career choices.
• Develop skills in managing workload to reduce pressure and create time to achieve the above.

Over a series of 2-3 hour meetings, Jacqueline helped the Director to: identify the issues; break these down into manageable areas to address; establish a planning process, starting with a vision of what the organisation would be handing over; and identify the goals, milestones, assumptions and anticipated issues so that the Director could draw up realistic plans and get the appropriate people involved.  The next stage focused on the Director's personal goals.  In addition to practical activities designed to help the Director identify what he wanted from his next role, Jacqueline identified a set of diagnostic tools to elicit feedback from staff, peers and managers on the Director's management and working styles and their impact on others.  This helped the Director to identify the key strengths he could bring and areas he might want to develop in a new role.   

• The partnership has been successfully handed over to its members, and was able to bid successfully for long term funding
• The partnership began a process of practical support to organisations in the Third Sector which the organisations first identified as critical and argued for, but could not deliver on its own
• The handover of the coordination of the partnership took place in a controlled and timely fashion, allowing the Director to wind up the programme, oversee the move of staff to partner organisations, and complete a final research report

The Director commented "…I realised that I needed help after a year of working closely with five other organisations to help deliver a radical new vision for how we work together  to improve support for young people and the organisation wishing to involve them in their work. I was clear about where we should be heading, but at times felt worn down by dragging others along and continually explaining and re-explaining what we needed to do and why. I needed to spread the load a bit and make sure that I could extricate myself from my leadership role, but there had to be something in place that would ensure momentum and quality continued. Jacqueline helped me step away from the fray and put in place some practical steps to get some control back. I was a lot clearer about the process to follow, and felt less bogged down in all the personal politics that surrounded the partnership...I gained some profound insights into how I work, and some of those were uncomfortable. The help I got from Jacqueline was a real catalyst for me and led me into a longer term Leadership Programme elsewhere"