Five Steps to Powerful Coalitions
As we join with our allies in One Nation, we know we can be most powerful when entire communities work together. But not all coalitions between labor unions and community organizations are made equal. Their power and success varies greatly depending on the strategic choices of those involved.
The most successful coalitions are those that seek to achieve social change goals at the same time as they strengthen the organizations that participate in them. Yet these goals can be somewhat illusive.
Power in Coalition documents the trials and successes of three long term coalitions from the United States, Canada and Australia. In it I identify five principles that help coalitions to straddle this challenge.
1. Less is more
Coalitions are more successful when organizational membership is restricted and there are fewer groups making decisions and sharing resources. Bigger is not always better. A narrower agenda made it easier to more deeply engage the commitment of members and leaders.
A “less is more” approach helped avoid lowest common denominator positions where coalitions end up a “mile wide and an inch deep” and tend to only be able to agree on what they are against rather than what they are for.
This strategy runs counter to typical coalition practice where letterhead coalitions are popular. But in the Toronto and Chicago coalitions, it was only when the coalitions restricted membership that they built sufficient trust to keep organizations working together.
Similarly in Sydney, a coalition of only two organizations (the teachers union and parents federation) built an unprecedented independent public education inquiry, staging hearings across the state, mobilizing parents and teachers in dozens of local communities and ultimately winning $250 million in reforms to public education through a reduction in class sizes for young children.
Less is more requires coalition organizers to be strategic with “the less.” There is a need to identify partners that have the right mix of power, diversity, interest and potentially, unpredictability.
With fewer people around the table, there is an incentive to do “more” together—like building strong public relationships that understand personal and organizational interests. In Chicago, this took the form of informal breakfast meetings where people got to know each other over several years before they started campaigning together.
2. Individuals matter
Despite coalitions being defined as an alignment of organizations, alliances live or die based on effective leadership from organizational leaders, champions inside of organizations and coalition coordinators and staff.
Their most important qualities are the ability to build bridges across different types of organizations and act as campaign strategists.
Coalitions are more effective when leaders directly participate in coalition decision-making. In Sydney, the public education coalition had strong commitment and effective decision making because it was a table of leaders. In Toronto, the table of staff struggled at times to engage the unions. Strong leaders were supported by champions in their ranks who helped develop and implement coalition strategy.
Coalition coordinators hold together organizational relationships. Coordinators smooth over differences between organizations, and seek to mitigate union dominance when it arose.
3. To Wield Self-Interest with a Sword of Justice
Coalitions are most successful when they work on issues that feed the direct strategic needs of their organizational partners and simultaneously connect to the public interest or common good.
Organizational self-interest is necessary but not sufficient to build a strong coalition. In Canada, the health coalition struggled to connect with union self-interest.
At the same time, self-interest alone has a limited political impact. In Sydney the media and politicians dismissed the teachers' contract campaign, portraying it as union self-interest.
Self-interest opens up to public interest when a coalition can negotiate a shared interest between diverse organizations. The public education alliance found a mutual self-interest in the issue of reduced class sizes. Teachers wanted smaller classes because it made their workload more manageable, and parents cared about smaller class sizes because they improved educational outcomes for their children.
Mutual self-interest can be creative. For instance, in Chicago, an anti-Wal-Mart site fight was translated into a campaign for a living wage ordinance for retail workers that covered union and non-union workers, helping the union and the coalition win massive public support.
Coalitions are also most able to shift the political climate when their issues are positively framed demands (like a new demand for new class sizes or living wages), rather than negatively framed “no campaigns” (like to no hospital privatization).
4. Timely exercise of power through conscious planning
Sustained coalitions have long-term plans defining how they will build and use their strength. The Sydney public education coalition created a two-year plan that included an independent inquiry, with reports released periodically in the lead up to a state election. Similarly, the Chicago living wage campaign was timed to move its ordinance six months out from aldermanic elections. Disciplined planning ensured the coalitions could deliver political pressure rather than just reacting to the media cycle.
5. Multi-level coalitions
Most issues cannot be solved at a single level. Political and economic power is multi-scaled—traversing the local, regional, state, national and international—and to be most effective, coalitions frequently need to act at multiple levels.
Coalitions are most effective at acting at multiple scales when they support the establishment of local city or neighborhood coalitions. These local coalitions help enhance their organizational strength and their political influence.
The Ontario Health Coalition established 40 coalitions around the province so it could run a campaign that collected hundreds of thousands of petitions and then move issues in a coordinated way across the province. Town-based coalitions were led by union members, retired teachers and community activists, providing a space for organizational members to build their skills and capacity to campaign.
But multi-level coalitions need to be well managed. There is a need for a feedback loop between the different levels. It is not just about setting people up locally to run a state or national agenda, there needs to be local control. Second, there is a need for local coalitions to have some relative autonomy—to pursue local demands in conjunction with national/state demands.
This is a brief overview of some of the findings about what it takes to build strong coalitions. These ideas are elaborated in much more detail in Power in Coalition, particularly in Chapter Five.
Amanda Tattersall is an Australian union and community organizer and author of Power in Coalition and Honorary Associate Work and Organizational Studies, University of Sydney, this is part of a presentation made to the AFL-CIO for the book’s August/September 2010 launch.
Sept. 13, 2010