Once a core group of stakeholders has made a commitment to improve the criminal justice and mental health systems' response to individuals with mental illness, they need to identify and focus their shared objectives. Leaders of successful partnerships state time and again that, long after launching their joint venture, reminding each other of the mission that originally focused the initiative has enabled them to overcome disagreements or missteps that subsequently threatened the collaboration.

In defining the problem, stakeholders may agree on a limited number of discrete goals, and the problem-solving approach may require a partnership between just two organizations. For example, in Connecticut, the court and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) focused their attention on the inability of judges to obtain a mental health assessment of a defendant or to gain access to mental health treatment for the defendant in a timely manner. (In attempting to address the problem independently, judges were ordering an examination for competency to stand trial, which resulted in the hospitalization of the defendant for a minimum of three weeks.) The partnership between the judiciary and the DMHAS led to the deployment of mental health clinicians to each court to conduct on-site assessments shortly after arrest and to arrange for treatment in the community as a condition of pretrial release.

In some cases, agents of change may determine that the circumstances call for a coalition comprising a diverse group of stakeholders spanning much of the criminal justice and mental health systems. Such a coalition may be necessary when the core group of stakeholders establishes that the problem is large in scope and requires multiple responses. In other cases, leaders in the community may have succeeded in narrowly defining the problem, but they recognize that potential responses (or the issue itself) are controversial and certain to draw the attention of the media. In this event, a broad coalition ensures diverse support for an initiative that could attract criticism.

The success of such groups depends, in part, on the number of stakeholders involved and on the diversity of perspectives - including representatives of criminal justice and mental health entities from state and local government, private mental health professionals, victims, advocates, and consumers and their families - committed to the coalition's success.