Citizen Works - Tools for Organizing

Building a coalition

A coalition is an organization of organizations formed to execute a particular campaign. In nearly every campaign that you undertake, your organization will need to develop informal relationships with sympathetic groups. You will want to form a more formal coalition, however, when undertaking a major campaign that will require resources and volunteer numbers that the members of your organization can not possible produce or manage alone.

The biggest potential drawback to forming a coalition is the time, energy, and dedication that it will demand. Once you form a coalition to run a campaign, your surrender control of that campaign and turn it over to the coalition; the coalition leadership should be made up of leaders from each member organization. Coalition meetings may run much longer than your organization's meetings and will require that you compromise with other coalition members. This can be frustrating, but it can also be a great growing and learning experience for your group.

· Find out what organizations are out there. And don't immediately rule out unlikely allies. A conservative group may want to join a coalition to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas. An organization of law students may want to join a coalition to protect affirmative action on your campus. A Catholic pro-life group may want to join a coalition to halt a scheduled execution.

· Determine which groups you do not know very much about and research them. Find out whether they have specific leaders; if they do, find out who those people are. Also, find out how active an individual group has been on campus. What previous activities has the group been involved with?

· Do not assume that Native American, Chicano, or women's groups are only interested in Native American, Chicano, or women's issues. Most members of progressive issue organizations have a broad progressive platform.

· Get in touch with a group leader or member and ask if your organization can have a representative at their next meeting. Prepare some literature to pass out at the meeting and give a short, enthusiastic pitch about the campaign and the potential coalition. And bring visual aids, and food!

· Do not allow any one organization (including yours) to dominate your coalition. One good way to prevent this is to arrange an executive board compromised of a representative from each of member organization.

· Meet weekly as a coalition, and develop working groups independent of member organizations' working groups. Your chapter should, of course, continue to meet weekly in addition to the coalition meeting.

If, in the end, your group decides not to form a coalition, your campaign can still benefit from endorsements and loose alliances with other clubs. You should ask organization leaders if you can table or speak at their meetings, and work to enlist their memberships.

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