The Spirit of Coalition: Lessons from the Field

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From The Spirit of Coalition, by Bill Berkowitz and Tom Wolff © 2000 American Public Health Association. Dr. Berkowitz has been involved in creating, directing, and writing about community programs for over 35 years. His previous books, Community Impact, Community Dreams, and Local Heroes deal with the skills, ideas, and personal qualities involved in successful community development. Dr. Wolff is an internationally recognized expert in coalition building and community development, who consults to and trains coalition practitioners in diverse settings across the world. He is the author most recently of The Power of Collaborative Solutions.

Challenges to coalition building, and tested strategies to meet them

1. Engaging citizens

  • Learn about citizens groups and associations
  • Develop contacts and relationships with these groups
  • Keep on the lookout for potential new recruits
  • Make personal contacts with prospective citizen members
  • Suggest giving the coalition a try (a small commitment)
  • Provide an incentive (e.g., status, a small stipend, a name on a letterhead)
  • Offer a range of ways people can help

2. Building citizen participation

  • Hold meetings at convenient times and locations
  • Provide time for informal interaction
  • Let people share their goals, expectations, and feelings
  • Make sure citizens have an equal voice
  • Hire agency staff from within the community
  • Allow time for trust to develop

3. Giving up control

  • Solicit and encourage ideas and issues from everyone
  • Listen to and validate those ideas and issues
  • Provide specific procedures and clear ground rules
  • Believe in your own members’ abilities
  • Accept that mistakes may occur
  • Consider that disagreements may be healthy
  • Don’t feel you have to do everything

4. Giving up territory

  • Be aware of past history and past territorial issues
  • Openly acknowledge that territorial concerns may exist
  • Understand current territorial definitions
  • Respect members’ self-interests and their need to hold on to some “territory” of their own
  • Find ways to cooperate that don’t involve territory
  • Be gentle, persistent, and patient around these issues
  • Keep coalition members focused on the greater good

5. Taking meaningful action

  • Discuss and clarify the overall goals of the coalition
  • Create a coalition plan based on those goals
  • In the plan, include clear objectives with actions and timelines
  • Agree upon small, feasible, easily realized actions
  • Give members advance notice of decisions that need to be made (e.g., on coalition agendas)
  • Follow up on decisions made and actions needing to be taken
  • If needed, discuss in a meeting why decision making and action seem to be difficult

6. Exerting your leadership

  • Make sure your leadership represents the full coalition
  • Clarify work expectations together with coalition members
  • Make sure that taking some responsibility is part of the membership expectation
  • Find those members most willing to accept responsibility
  • Delegate responsibility, with agreed-upon limits
  • Follow up on responsibility delegated
  • Offer leadership training for prospective new leaders

7. Balancing your life

  • Find a balance that works for you personally
  • Review that balance from time to time
  • Set aside personal time and personal days for yourself
  • Lead a healthy lifestyle, making time for rest and vacations
  • Find some interests beyond the coalition
  • Find supportive people you can talk to when needed

8. Keeping the flame alive

  • Plan future directions together with coalition members
  • Move at a pace consistent with members needs
  • Groom a new leadership
  • Take on winnable activities, and develop a track record of success
  • Reward members for accomplishments
  • Build in some celebration and fun times for the coalition

9. Keeping the faith

Faith is found in many places. We can’t tell you how or where to find it. It is a personal matter. But we do know that faith in the coalition and in its success is essential – and we hope that you can find a way of maintaining and sustaining it for yourself.

An open letter from Bill Berkowitz of Community Tool Box Re: “Taking Action in Your Neighborhood”

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I got this note from UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz earlier this week, and with his permission have posted it here so you can share your own thoughts and suggestions. Dr. Berkowitz is a writer, editor, and core team member of the Community Tool Box, the most extensive web site on community health and development on the planet (which we featured here). His books deal with skills, ideas, personal qualities, and stories relating to community organization and improvement. Bill is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a recipient of its award for Distinguished Contributions to Practice in Community Psychology.

I’d forwarded this email to some of my contacts in the neighborhoods movement, and with their permission will be posting excerpts from their responses here as well.

Hi, Leo – Thanks very much for your April 12 note. It’s so easy to be impressed by it – both by your statement of purpose and by the people you’ve been gathering around your ideas. I surely hope your work gains momentum, takes off, and soars.

In this note, I’m sending along a concept of our own, titled “Taking Action in Your Neighborhood,” which perhaps you might reflect and comment upon.

In some ways, it’s a variation and extension of Our Blocks. Some differences are that it’s more explicitly action-oriented, and more explicitly participatory. It also structures the content by topic, rather than have the user do it via tagging. And it centralizes and gives a specific focus for much of the needed neighborhood work.

What’s here could be a rather big idea, probably calling for both synthesis of existing content and creation of some new content as well. The potential payoff, though, could be very large.

So take a look if you can, and see what you think; we’ll be very grateful to learn of your own reactions, others’ as well, whatever they may be.

We’re also very comfortable with your sharing any or all of this with your other neighborhood contacts – actually we’d encourage this, since more feedback may both help strengthen this concept, as well as Our Blocks itself, and potentially lead to mutually-beneficial collaborations.

Thanks very much again, Leo, and be talking to you.

~~ Bill

* * * * *

In response to your note and request for feedback, I’m writing to sketch out some neighborhood thoughts, and more specifically around developing a centralized “Taking Action in Your Neighborhood” resource that I’d mentioned before.

We’d certainly be interested in any of your own thoughts you might have on this, especially (if the idea has merit) for moving this idea forward. I’m also copying Jay here, since this relates pretty closely to some work he has done.

Here’s the rationale: There’s a lot of neighborhood-related stuff in print and in cyberspace, which may not be very surprising. Much of what exists is both good and useful. A lot of it can be found on Our Blocks. Some of it is on the Community Tool Box, and I’m sure also on many other sites as well.

But a real downside is that it’s scattered all over the map – so if someone is interested in a particular neighborhood topic or issue, they might find themselves looking in a lot of places, and having to patch together what they need from a bunch of different sources. This is both time-consuming and often not all that effective.

(more…)

Neighborhood-based community building handbooks recommended by Jim Diers

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“Few people in this country know as much about community building as Jim Diers,” said  Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces (PPS). From 1988 to 2002, Jim led Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods which is “widely known as the most innovative effort in the U.S. to empower local residents” (John P. Kretzmann, Co-director or the Asset-Based Community Development Institute).

Jim’s been dragged all over the world by people and orgs keen to learn from his real-world experience as a community builder. He’s currently on a tour through Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, and the US. (It’s not really a book tour, but a lot of the discussions revolve around the ideas and practices detailed in his must-read book Neighbor Power.) Yet he somehow found time to answer my request.

In my own experience as a community organizer, I’ve found that it’s so much easier to get things moving when people don’t have to first invent the wheel. So I like workbooks. Our Blocks recently featured one workbook,which I thought was the best I’d seen so far. I asked Jim if others came to mind. He said he’d give it more thought when he had more time, but off the top of his head:

  1. The Organizer’s Workbook, published by the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center -  a roadmap to discovering, organizing and engaging your neighborhood. (This is the workbook we’d previously featured, as noted above. Incidentally, I corresponded this week with INRC Executive Director Anne-Marie Taylor, who said she’d “love to hear how folks outside of Indianapolis are utilizing this Workbook”.)
  2. The Great Neighborhood Book, by Jay Walljasper, published by PPS. (In the Great Minds Think Alike category, this book was also recommended to us by UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz, Development Partner at the Community Tool Box.)

Not a workbook, but something Jim brought up in relation to my plans to do community-building work in the Philippines: From Clients to Citizens – Deepening the Practice of Asset-Based and Citizen-Led Development (pdf) – Conversations from the ABCD Forum, July 8 – 10, 2009. Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Edited by Alison Mathie and Deborah Puntenney. December 2009. The Coady International Institute published this under a CC-ANSA license, very nice of them.

Thanks for your recommendations Jim.

Other recent articles on Jim Diers by friends of Our Blocks: Jim Diers on citizen action by Kevin Harris at Neighborhoods; Getting back to Government Is Us at Socialreporter (which includes a beer-powered interview by David Wilcox). You can also find Jim’s talks on The Youtubes, three of which (so far) we’ve added to our Videos collection. Not recent but still fresh, this hour-long conversation on KUOW (note: turns out there’s a difference between mating calls and meeting calls).

Neighborhood resources from Bill Berkowitz

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UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz sent us these recommended resources:

  • The Community Tool Box, a service of the Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas – the world’s largest resource for free information on essential skills for building healthy communities. It offers more than 7,000 pages of practical guidance in creating change and improvement, and is growing as a global resource for this work.
  • Neighborhood Resources at the Society for Community Research and Action – “circa 2006, though at this point that could probably use some updating”.

Dr. Berkowitz adds: “As for books, two useful ones I’ve come across fairly recently are The Great Neighborhood Book, by Jay Walljasper, which focuses on creating public spaces, and Superbia!: 31 ways to create sustainable neighborhoods, by Dan Chiras and Dave Wann, which deals with ideas for improving and sustaining neighborhood life in the suburbs (the suburbs tend to get underplayed in the neighborhood literature, though that’s where roughly half the American population lives). Both are published by New Society Publishers.”

Thank you Bill!

ctb