Coalition

Building Consensus Among Diverse Stakeholders

1. Focus on the vision of the IDEAL ENVIRONMENT
2. Use DATA to separate fact from opinion
3. Help stakeholders share their experiences, not their positions
4. Work from a list of emerging needs across partners: what solutions best meet all these needs?
5. Research how other communities met a similar set of needs through a specific solution, asking, "Could this work here?"
6. Be ready to mediate between disagreements, but recognize debate as healthy.
7. Role-model productive debate and disagreement

Community Forums

Community forums allow a open group of stakeholders from specific arenas or smaller groups to come together around a specific issue.

Forums:

• Create an information discussion, enables multiple perspectives to be shared in a single setting
• Provide community knowledge of issues, tensions, trade-offs, and next steps
• Allow for the presentation of relevant data and perspectives of experiences
• Create the opportunity to experience issue directly
• Result in next steps

Effective outcomes of a community forum are expanded awareness of the tensions, trade-offs, and perspectives that must be considered in order to fin a lasting solution to the problem. The outcome is "collective insight."

Common Results of Coalitions:

• Enhanced understanding among stakeholders
• Enactment of new policies
• Increased support for common needs across the community
• Reduction of binge drinking rates and related problems
• Clarity in media coverage and public discussion

Common characteristics of a successful coalition:

• A comprehensive vision that addresses all segments of the community and community life
• A wide sharing of vision and movement to a shared vision
• A strong core of committed partners from the start
• An inclusive and broad-based membership
• Consensus on the partnerships basic purpose
• Decentralized units encouraging participation and action at a variety of levels
• Shared leadership
• Extensive prevention activities and support for local prevention policies

Common characteristics of an unsuccessful coalition:

• Considering the partnership to be a “special project,” not a long-lived entity
• Misunderstanding of the basic ground rules of partnership
• Permitting staff to exert too much control
• Allowing partnership identity to be confused with other organizations
• Competitive
• Hidden agendas
• Top-Down leadership
• Failure to keep all members informed appropriately
• Lack of interim rewards
• Delay or change in conditions