April 14, 2011
Partnerships OMBIL data base
I am asking your help to create a strong and accurate data base in OMBIL for partnerships. A major focus of the national Recreation Strategy will be the expansion of partnerships at our projects to leverage financial and human resources as we move into years of more budgetary constraints. We are working hard to be able to demonstrate the extent of partnerships at work in the Corps now. There are several reasons for the need to do this: 1. Partnerships will help get work done that you may not otherwise have the capabilities to do, 2. Partnerships build community support for the Corps and our programs, which can be leveraged in many other ways. 3. Partnerships will help to support our requests for the recreation budget--they demonstrate that we have strong and robust recreation and environmental stewardship programs that should be financially supported in our budgets. 4. They help to build internal support for our programs all the way up the line. So the business case is that partnerships will support your needs at the project level.

In order to put forward our budget defense and our efforts to build internal and external support, we need to have the best data we can to show the breadth and depth of our partnerships programs.

There has been significant work on building new OMBIL partnership pages. Many projects have not entered their data, or the data appear incomplete or inaccurate. Heather Burke, the national Partnership Program Manager will be notifying you and your folks that there will be an open window until July 1 to enter your partnership data.

I can't request strongly enough that you support this effort and get this done. The FY 13 budget is upon us, and we need this data to build the case for our programs to Hq, ASA(CW) and OMB. Thanks for helping us to help you.

Respectfully, Mary J. Coulombe

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