Reframing cooperation: Challenges in overcoming tensions between professional services and volunteer organizations providing parenting support in immigrant communities

Volunteer organizations can potentially partner with mainstream professional services to provide better parenting support to immigrant parents. This qualitative study of cooperation between professional agencies and volunteer organizations known as migrant volunteer and community organizations (MVCOs) aims to understand the extent to which professionals and volunteers can transform frame divergence from an obstacle into an advantage. Using frame analysis, this article explores the difficulties these groups encountered when they attempted to work together in two immigrant neighborhoods in Amsterdam. The divergence of the frames each group employed to define cooperation and its aims fueled mistrust and prevented attempts to work more closely together. The possibility of positively employing frame divergence to develop innovative solutions through frame reflection and reframing was hampered by the frame divergence itself, which was rooted in a long-standing controversy concerning roles, power relations, and patterns of inequality between the people involved Reframing Cooperation| 69