I want you to be able to hear what they're saying, so if that happens, put your headsets on.

This is a hands on workshop, so I want you to know you won't just be sitting around this morning. I'm Carolyn Ropp, this is Judy Dewitts, and we're national board members for the National Association for Family and Community Education. We have about 40,000 members in 39 states and Puerto Rico and we work to strengthen individuals and families through continuing education, leadership, development and community action. This is one of our community action programs that was written and copyrighted by our organization. If you will look at the bottom of your handout, you will see our trademark MCE logo on one side, and on the other side, a triangular logo, which is for family, community leadership. That is our trademark logo for our public policy programs and building coalitions is certainly a public policy program because somewhere along the line with a coalition, you are either going to involve public policy, you're going to be affected by public policy, or your coalition may result in public policy.

I want you to think of a coalition as a disconnected group of people, organizations, and you may think of the gears as representing agriculture related organizations and maybe the nuts and bolts as being non-agricultural related organizations. And we're going to talk about how we can put them together so we can do more. This is a guide to coalition building and we hope when you have your coalition then that you will have all these groups drawn together and have a well functioning machine.

Now, when you came in you were given a 3x5 card. We're going to start off by getting you thinking along the lines of coalitions. At the top of the card, write your name and then write a list just on one side of the card of the organizations that you are in, whether they're business related, church or religion related, civic, community related, maybe it's something you do just for fun.

Beside one of those organizations, you pick out which one, put a star. It doesn't have to be the one your representing here, it could be any one of them. We hope we have a variety that you pick. Then using that organization that you starred, turn your card over and on the back on the top right, the name of that organization that you starred, and then answer these questions about that organization. What is the organization's purpose of objectives? How conjoined, is it a private organization like a sorority Is it public, do you have to be of a certain face? If you don't currently know the number of log members, just put a ballpark figure there. And your organization may be just one of those local, national and international, maybe it's 2, maybe its all 3.

Have you had an interesting week? Gained lots of knowledge? We hope you have a little bit of space left right up here with the knowledge you're going to learn the rest of the day. But it has been interesting and conferences always make you tired, but you really go home exhilarated, I think. Now, after you get that done, turn to the person net to you or behind you, introduce yourself, and tell them about the organization that you wrote on your card.

Those of you that are just coming, on the 3x5 card you have, pick an organization that you're in and answer these questions about it.

Ok, have you finished sharing? No, ok. Yes, you can exchange cards.

Ok, I want you to get up and some of you, to volunteer to share what the person next to you is involved in. And you don't need to tell us anything other than the name of the organization they're in and then Judy will write these on the transparencies so we can all see what groups are represented here.

Ok, who would like to volunteer? Don't everybody volunteer at once. First, come up to the microphones, and bring your cards, so we want to be able to hear you. So just line up behind the microphone, we want several people to do this, so that we will know what organizations are represented in this group. And this is going to help you with an exercise you're going to have to do later on.

The organizations that are represented in this group, where we work, or the organization that we're talking about on the card.

The ones you're talking about on the card.

Ok, the one I'm talking about is our National Mining Artifact Association.

National Mining Artifact? Ok. Thank you. Is that just a national organization?

It's a national, international, we have members all over the world.

Ok, and you're from what country?

I'm from the USA.

Ok, thank you.

Is that it?

Australian Beef Association. National and Australia. Everything to do with the beef industry. Thank you. Ok, someone else, stand up. Let's move along here.

Yes, British Columbia. She's with the Canadian Farm Women's Network. Ok, so her organization is local, national, and international. Ok, that's what I meant by local, state, national. Thank you. She said that they are not a large organization, but they are strong and they stage conferences all over Canada.

Ok, someone else, just holler it out. Women Involved in Farm Economics. Another organization that you are a member of. Wisconsin Women's Sustainable Farming Network. CREDL International Humanitarian Organization. Ok, let's take a couple more.

The Women's World Summit Foundation. Ok, an International Coalition for Women's and Children's Rights. Ok, Associated Membership Coalition for a Rural Women's Day. My all of these organization have such long names. Ok, thank you, that's more than Judy can get on the overhead. The Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture. Ah, Henry A. Wallace Institute of Alternative Agriculture, that's interesting. It is essentially a research organization. It was formed for the purpose of given academic researchers an alternative and sustainable agriculture. A pier review journal into which to published their findings. Well, we certainly have a lot of interesting organizations represented here and thank you for sharing that, that gives you an opportunity to share with your neighbor and, as I say, you're going to need this information later on.  What is a coalition. It's a combination, human, it could be called an alliance, it could be called a collaboration, it could be called a partnership. It might not have any of these words in the title, but it's a group of organizations coming together to solve one issues or several issues, and it has a life, meaning, it has a beginning and an end. And a coalition's purpose is to fill the gaps between what is now and what you want it to be. Now, some samples of coalition, you've certainly given some, we have some others, local, state, national and international and in the total __________, a coalition can be loosely structured and informal, which is usually what occurs at a local level, or, when you get larger, then it has to become, more structured and very formal. I think you can see there are some really unique ones here, is anyone a member of Parlet, International. Well, this is one of our organizations, our grassroots members in Louisiana and they have a luncheon after church and they have projects to raise money to support participants in special Olympics, which is urbanized, athletic activities for the mentally and physically handicapped. The Ho_____________- Project doesn't have a lot of answer, corroboration, or coalition in the name, but that's what it is. It's a flood management and community development alliance but the youth violence prevention coalition is interesting, it and the last international one, because these were both founded by students, who just recently received national recognition for the coalitions that they formed. The Citizen's Task Force and Television Violence is a national organization that our organization NASI is a member of, along with 29 other organizations and we work to improve television programming for children in various ways. So we consider a variety of different types of organizations along with the ones that you mentioned.

Now, when you start to build a coalition, there are certain questions that you need to ask. First of all, you have to have an issue. Is there a need for a flood control in your area? Do you have a need for a building or finding migrant worker housing and facilities? Do you have a need for a senior citizen or a youth recreation facility? After you determine what the issue is, then you have to think, is there another way to solve the problem? In Ohio, where I'm from, there are north of us, there is a coalition, although they call themselves a citizen's action group, there's a large german, egg-producing farm up there, and there's a group of citizens that don't particularly like the farm because of some negative aspects they think that it has. So they've formed a coalition which they invited me to join and I declined to try to, well, initially, they wanted to get rid of the egg farm, but now they're trying to work to solve some of the problems that arise from it. And last year in the paper there was an article that they had discovered that this farm was using underage children for labor and there was this big outcry about how this needed to be another one of their issues that they handle. The children were 11 and 12 years old. Well, the next night in the paper, it was evident that somebody had actually thought a little bit more about this situation, because they _____________ to cover children in labor. So all they had to do was contact the right authorities to get that law enforced. Who should be involved in the coalition? should it just be agricultures organizations, if it's an agricultural issue? No, you've got to have community round organization. But it's got to be people from the commodity that are interest in the coalition, that can be committed to it, that can see the vision of it. And I remember, sometimes I forget this, and I'm just trying to think what speaker said something like this, and I can't remember, but a coalition should be as diverse as the community members it represents, because strength comes through that diversity. Yes, ma'm? Well, a club is just a singular organization, whereas a coalition, you going to have a lot of different organizations. A club is one organization. A coalition is lots of organizations that come together. The coalition that was on this school adequacy and equity in education in their house started out with 5 school boards and I was on the school board at the time. Now, 500 of the 700 school boards in Ohio are members of that coalition, as well as other individuals and organizations that are concerned about school financing. But, like the lunch after church, it's primarily FCE clubs and Pollen, International. It's just 2 organizations, but the group that was concerned about senior citizens, there's a lot of different organizations. So a club is just an organization, while a coalition is lots of organizations and groups. Yes, ma'm?

A coalition doesn't necessarily have political purpose. Yes, a coalition has an agenda. That's correct, whereas a club might not. Yes, ma'm?

She says their usually issue based and we'll talk about that issue base later on. That's true. Also, I want to think about all these coalitions, remember that all members of the coalition don't contribute the same thing. You may have individuals that contribute volunteer effort. You may have a member of the coalition that can contribute a meeting place for the coalition and provide material supplies. You may have a member of the coalition, maybe an individual who feels really strongly, there was a man who felt very strongly about an immunization coalition, he didn't want to actually work in it, but he donated $10,000 towards the purpose of the coalition, which was to get young children immunized. It's very important before you join a coalition that you consider the advantages and the disadvantages. The benefits have got to outweigh you, as an individual, or your group joining, or there's really no purpose in joining. Some of the advantages listed here, _________ of effectiveness, because you have greater credibility as your group grows, someone said this morning, you know, the factor of one increases. It improves your efficiency because you have pooled resources. It improves the communication, I think, importantly, it provides the communication between the coalition and the public because you have a lot of different groups that support the issue. It minimizes duplication, everybody doesn't have to have an office for this because there's usually one office for it and you pool your resources to do things like your publicity. And, of course, it usually improves the public image because you don't have wide spread support, you can cost share, which we've talked about and you have consistent information. And we'll talk a little bit about this later on too, because consistent information is available and it's important, not only to the public, but it's important to the groups and that's one of the responsibilities of the leader of the coalition, and then you have better needs assessment.

But there are disadvantages and you need to consider these before you join. One of the biggest disadvantages are truth issues, jealousy and mistrust can come up and someone said this morning about agree to disagree and that's what you have to do at the very beginning, you have to really disagree and realize that everybody's not going to think the same on it. But, remember that you're all focused on one issue. And we have different ways to approach that issue, but the common issue is the common thread. It based on the decision making, because if the group I'm representing in the coalition says, "Now, Carolyn, you're our representative, but what I want to ___________ until you come back and discuss it with us". In Judy's organization, they say, "Judy, you know how our organization feels, we trust you to make the decisions that need to be made". Well, our organization can slow the whole thing down because we may not meet for 3 months, but that's going to happen, probably. Of course, since you've got of all the organizations involved, you're organization is not going to have as much control as if it was just your project. You're going to have a division or resources. Maybe my organization is so involved with the interization campaign that we just don't feel like we can get involved in the flood management project at this time. But if you contact us next January, our organization campaign ends in December, then we'll consider joining the flood management coalition. And, there may be some, a statement that's opposite to your group's policies and philosophies. If they are so far off from what your group believes, then, you probably don't want to join or may want to consider dropping out. But if it's something that you can work together on, well then, of course, consider staying in the coalition.

Now, Judy, after we've gone through all of this, how do we get potential members for our coalition? Harriet and Margaret are going to hand you each 2 sheets of papers, a yellow and a green sheet of paper, and you will need these to work on and you will need to get in groups of about 5 or 6.

Ok, this next part, we're going to talk about how we form our resources, to form who some of these coalition people may be. I'll let Margaret and Harriet hand these out. This green sheet is actually the questions that Carolyn asked at the beginning on your get acquainted exercise. And it's a very useful form that you can use and have on reference when you want to build a coalition. Another example of a coalition to be really common to this particular conference, is the Ag Women's Leadership Network that spoke this morning in the opening session on the panel. Our organization is a member of that coalition. But our organization are primarily consumers of agricultural products and people that live in rural areas, many of them are active farming, farmers, some are first generation off the farm, have a lot of sympathy and understanding of agricultural situations and farming situations. And so, it's a natural coalition because we can work together for the common good, as many of them talked about this morning. We have many common interests. And we've had to come to as you're going to see, as you work through these, you have to come to what works for you. What works for your particular coalition as far as if you disagree, how you're going to handle that. And, that's some of the things the will be addressed as we work through this. Ok, I think you all have that green sheet. The green sheet on the front and the back is a form that you can fill out on many different organizations that you know about, that you may find in the yellow pages, you may do research in your library, you may know one member of the organization, and have that as a reference when you're addressing some particular issue. The question was asked, what's the difference between a club and a coalition. A coalition may be short term or may be long term. You may be a coalition on one particular issue or you may be a long term on a subject, like the Egg Women, which is a long term coalition working on agricultural interests. So, it's a good idea, if you have this ready reference and know some of these backgrounds of the different associations, and you, some political, some particular issue affects you, you have already done your research on who you might work together with to address that issue. And this form as, was a get acquainted exercise, is the name of your organization, the President, the leader, what is the organization's purpose and objective, who may join, how many members are enrolled, what type of organization it is and then on the back, it goes into more details as far as what communities are served, how does the organization acquire funds, has the organization in the past taken a stand on local issues, lobbied for elected officials. And one of the things I want to caution us, I think we always have to remember we don't want to burn bridges. We may have people that we feel very strongly aligned with on a particular issue and we may have some that we feel they were on the complete opposite sides. But in the future, we may be aligned with them on another issue. I think what Carolyn said, we have to agree to disagree, so, I think we need to take an honest look at issues rather than people. So this is a good research tool that you might have some members of your organization put together and have on file. This is a great copy to use here to make notes and so forth, but in your packet, in the orange packet that was given to you, there is a white copy so that you can make copies for your own use.

All right, then what you need to do is put this all together. You gather this information on the different organizations and how can you make that work for you. All right, the first thing you want to do is you have an issue or you have some errand that you want to work together on. What is the purpose of that coalition and on the yellow sheet that she handed out, this is what would follow. If you take an issue, you would fill in the blanks on the yellow sheet, similar to this. This is one example. What's the purpose of the coalition and an example might be. The coalition is to harness the river, so the purpose might be to develop a plan to control the season flooding along a river to improve agriculture production, reduce loss of human life, livestock and property, loss of property dollars. This could affect a lot of different people. Who is the target area, who's the consumer group for this? It might be the local farmers, the land owners, business owners. You're talking about a rumor, you may, in effect, be talking about a coalition you want to build across county lines, state lines, country lines. This possible coalition members, might be agri-related organizations. Could be grain, elevators and egg businesses. Soil moisture conservation, health department extension service, insurance company, churches and religious organizations, government officials, property developers. In other words, it can cross many different organizational, subject matter lines. Sometimes we tend to think we're agriculture and so we talk to other people that think like us in just agriculture background. But there may be people, we need to look at the broad picture. We also need to look at who some of the opposition might be. Maybe, environmental groups, maybe religious groups, maybe not. Maybe those are the people that are working with us that have similar concerns as ours, similar positions. Like I said, on some areas we may work together and some we may not. And then, you need to look at, we have the different groups, what can the different groups contribute? Whether its human resources, finance expertise, the volunteers that we need, there's a lot of different ways people could contribute to a coalition. It may be the leadership. People that are willing to spend some time to work in the coalition. This is just an overview and an example.

What I'd like for you to do is to get in groups of 5 or 6, take that yellow sheet and take one of the organizations if you'd like that you started earlier, or you can take another one. And come across an example that you could work through. Think of a coalition that you might form with the organization in your 5 or 6 people and describe what the coalition would be, and think what the purposes would be, the targeted group, the potential members, the acquisition and who could make contributions. Ok? This is your time to get together.

Try to get at least 5 people in each group because then you'll have a wide variety of input about different organizations.

Some question has come up about the target audience. The target audience is who do you want to benefit from your efforts? Does that clarify? Is there another way to phrase that, Carolyn? Who's going to be affected by it, who will if affect? Another way to put it would be those who are going to be affected by the solution, not those who you are aiming at to get the solution. We're only going to take a couple more minutes with this and then we're going to ask you to share what you've come up with and if you haven't finished, then maybe some of the other groups can make some suggestions. This is, as you find out, this is a harder task than what you think it might be.

I'm going to call on each group to share one thing, one or two things that you've come up with from your group. Could I have everybody's attention? 'Cause when you get in this, you could just talk and talk and talk and really get involved and that's what we want you to do, but we'll have time to share everybody's so, let's start off here with this front group.

What was the purpose of your coalition? What coalition was it and what was your purpose? And the microphone is working. That way, everyone can hear and it can also be taped. Talk right into the mike, I think if you talk right into it, it will work. What's the name of your coalition? To Protect Property Rights and Responsibilities. And so what is the purpose? That was your purpose. What is your target group? A target group of property owners. And who are some of your potential members? Ok. Ok, thank you. Let's have the second group, and why don't you come up here and let's use this mike, so we can all hear, because it's hard to repeat when we're... Just share a skeleton of what you have.

Our coalition has been formed to oppose the restructuring of a dairy company or cooperative as we would call them in this country, and we are really fortunate because we have wonderful, early coalition members. We have the Farm Bureau, which is going to do our lobbying for us. We have the Wallace Institute, which I represent, and we're just going to do the economic research to show what a terrible idea this is. We have two dairying groups that are going to be the contact with the dairy farmers affected. We have Land Key, which is going to talk about how this would affect land use in the area, and we have an organization called Farm Smart, which is going to deal directly with dairy farmers on the economic, social and management impacts on this. Our potential coalition members, we think we'll go after some environmental groups, because we think we can work together on this one. Certainly, after the business end of things, the local chambers of commerce, possibly the Soil and Water Conservation District and school grounds other dairying groups, although we may have some that we could list on the possible opposition, some other farmers organizations, same thing, they may be a little bit on the opposition too. Depends. We're going to target legislators, because this is going to be a big election issue and we're going to go after the public and we're going to talk to other dairy farmers and other farm groups, the shareholders of the cooperative. And as soon as we get an office, a fax machine and a telephone, we're ready to go.

Thank you. Ok, how about the group in the back?

Ok, my name is Sue Grumby. Our group decided that we would go to primary schools to teach them the value of agriculture. We chose our target and consumer group as student, teachers, schools and farmers. Our potential coalition members as parents and friends or PTA groups, industry commodity groups, Department of Agricultures, Department of Education, the school administration, local media, teachers, members of Parliaments, and environmental groups, and we thought it would be really good to involve them so that they could come in and do ___________ or something similar. The possible opposition that we saw was teachers, environmentalists, extreme fundamentalists. Efforts hard with curriculum, that we needed to make sure that we got the proper curriculum. Organize that we needed meeting facilities and cooperation from lots of other people, finances, particularly for producers that were putting there time in so that they could be reimbursed because Australia particularly is a big country and has a lot of traveling involved. That we need a proper documentation, we need a correct statistical backup to reinforce the fact that students needed this sort of information and that we wanted to have a pilot area, and that the pilot area would, in fact, be global and that we'd have 3 or 4 regions globally testing this and that we'd come back at the next conference and have a look at them and make international benchmarks.

Very good. Ok, last group?

All right, our group has designated the coalition to be called International Network for Developing and Guaranteeing Sustainable Farming. The purpose is to think globally and act locally and to disseminate education for coherent lifestyles. The target or consumer groups would be constituencies of affiliated coalition members and the potential coalition members include everything from international farmers, unions to development organizations. It's practically unlimited. The possible opposition would be the status quo, corporate, even governments. And the needed contributions would be, of course, money for dissemination and examples of simpler lifestyles of less stressful behaviors of internet connections of learning from alternative farmers' strategies and success stories. We will need research and education on the exhaustible resources of the planet. We have, in fact, the planet that can feed they say up to 8 billion people. On which we do not really know how to feed the rest of the world and that if everyone would want to live on the planet like you and me today, we would need 6 planets with the same resources, which, of course, is impossible. So how are we going to live ourselves so others may simply live as well. Because we are using 80% of the world's resources in the north, representing about 15% of the world's population, and the other 80% of the world's population have less than 15% of the world's resources. So we are completely out of integrity and coherence and that is for me the biggest question on the planet.

Ok, one of the things I think you probably realize as you work through this, one of the purposes of a coalition is to broaden your base. And so, if you have many different organizations and other networks, other people coming together, you've broadened just the number of people that are hearing what the message is. And that, in effect, just that effect alone will make a big difference in accomplishing what you want to accomplish, because you've broadened your audience automatically. Ok, Carolyn, take us to the next step.

Ok, if you refer to your handout, you will see step 5 in there are the steps to implement the coalition. Now you've got all the information you need to start your coalition. You may need to gather more information as it goes along, but you've got a really good start. The first thing is who's going to lead it. But before we talk about that, let's talk about who's going to represent your organization on the coalition. Obviously, if you're a member of a 30,000 member organization, they're not all going to go, I need to send someone. And, it may be someone who would represent you by virtue of their audience. Here, Harriet Stinson, our lady back there in the red jacket, is our vice president for public policy. She represents our organization and the Citizen's Task Force for Television Violence by virtue of her office. It may be the organizations' president who would go by virtue of the office. Or you may pick someone in your group who is really committed, who is really interested, who will do a good job of being a go between. They're going to take information from your group to the coalition meeting and they're going to accurately bring back what the coalition members have decided, so that everybody is well informed. So the first job is to pick the good representative from your group, and maybe you'll have 2 or 3. Then when the group meets, you have to find a leader. Sometimes that's the person that had the idea, the original idea for the coalition. Or you may select someone else. Now, that person needs to have several characteristics. They need to be a good organizer. They need to be a good facilitator, so that you can have well run meetings that stay on task. You have to have someone else knowledgeable in people skills, someone who can help with this conflict because conflicts are going to occur but if you agree to disagree, and this person is good in managing conflict, that won't destroy the coalition. You've got to have someone who's a good speaker because they may go out and present your coalition purpose to the public. You've got to have someone who is willing to recruit new members because you constantly need to recruit new members in a coalition in order to keep growing and to broaden your base of support. You've got to have somebody that's really committed to the vision, the issue of your coalition. And you['ve got to have someone that has the time. They may be here for a volunteer task or it may be a paid position, or maybe in their job, they're employer may feel so strongly about the purpose of the coalition, that he will allow them to take, or she, will allow them to take some of their working time to help towards the coalition. So, that's the first thing, pick a leader. And this can make the difference between your success or failure. Expand your knowledge of the issue. Use an individual group member and lasting member of the coalition. Read all that you can about the issue, pros and cons, documented report, talk to people, talk to your target audience. The group that had the target audience about the school educating the children about agriculture, talk to the kids, see how they feel about it. Don't leave them out. Talk to the parents. Because, when you talk to these individual people, then you may get an idea about how the coalition may go and a potential member that you hadn't' though of before, or maybe, you'll realize that you need to change something. Get together a brainstorm and talk, so that you share ideas back and forth, which also have spread your base, helps you form a general consensus of how you want to go, and it helps you clarify issues and commitment to the purpose of the coalition. Set your goals and strategies. Now the group needs to agree on these as a whole and it works well if you set up a time line. Now the group back there that had the educated children's school, did you have a time line? Did you get that far? Did you sway we want to do it by next year, or? 2005. So, here's where we are today and here's where we want to be by 2005. So it's a long term coalition because they want to educate quite a few... sure, you start them young and then maybe it will just keep rolling like a ball and the coalition then might not be such a big factor in it. But remember that the group has to agree on these. Your goals need to be realistic. Now what I like to set goals up here, but if you set them so high that they're not reachable, you're going to turn people off. And you need to set a series of goals. You want one big goal, then you want a series of goals that you can reach so that you can see that you are making progress towards the big goal. So they need to be attainable and they need to be measurable so that you know that you're actually moving step by step. And again, in this way, you're going to have a lot of brainstorms. This is the very time consuming part, to set your goals and strategies. But you need to involve all members. Everybody needs to have equal status in setting the goals. This also helps eliminate the turf issues that we talked about, the jealousy. It's very important to remember that merely supporting the cause does not resolve in change. What resolves in change is making somebody take action. Action results in change, not just saying, "oh, that's a good idea". You've got to want to get out and work for that good idea.

After having your cause and strategies, then you need to develop your plan. How are we going to reach those goals. Let's say your coalition want to find a facility of you can have housing and feed the homeless. So what's your first goal? Find a facility. So how are you going to do that? Are you going to hire a real estate agent to go out and find you one or are you going to appoint a committee to do that or are you going to advertise in the paper and say, would anybody like to donate a building to us? There are different ways you can go about each of these things. Once you have got your facility, you step up on your goals. How are we going to educate the public? One of the purposes of your coalition is so that you can gather support. There are some ways you can educate the public. Newspaper, radio stations, flyers, letters, education campaigns, all different kinds of ways. What type of publicity that you use and again, that kind of ties in with your education campaign, but are you going to have meetings to discuss these? Are you going to just depend on the tv and the radio, they tie in together. Then divide the responsibilities up among your coalition members and set them to work, but if you want to know whether you're successful or not, but you have to have a reporting system. And you might have one person that they report to; you might use verbal reports, you might have an evaluation sheet, you might have written reports, all different ways that you can do that. Usually it's best to have something in writing, because you know how word of mouth gets things messed up sometimes.

I read this quote in the paper the other day and I thought it was applicable here. You can change the way people think, but the message is, you feed them. Now, if somebody isn't too excited about a facility for the homeless, maybe it's because they don't know it's a problem. The don't know there are homeless people out there. I live in a very small rural area and in a town next to me, several years ago, I found out there were people living in cardboard boxes behind a church. I was flabbergasted because I never though we had that kind of a problem. So you need to feed people the messages so that you can change the way they think.

The next step is to keep on track. Now, of course, this is after you've got your coalition going. You need to keep good records. And who's going to do that? Are you going to appoint a secretary or a record keeper. Or if you're on track, you yourself, when you're supposed to be, and are changes needed? Keeping records helps you know if changes are needed. You need to make regular assessments and again, this could be when you have your coalition meetings, you could have group discussions to see how you're going. You could have a written evaluation form, or you could just have people do the reports in writing. But it's very important to have that assessment. Then, that tells you what works and what doesn't. And it provides you with documentation which can prove to people that you have a successful coalition. That it's really needed.

Recruit new members as you go. You can't just say, well, we've got this little core group and we don't need anybody else. You constantly need to bring in new life because they might have more ideas. Get feedback to your members and this is where we talked about the importance of having a good representative to your meeting, because needs to know what's going to be going on if you want them to have ownership in it. Publish your successes and thank you's. If you want the public to know that your coalition for the homeless is successful, then you've got to publish in the paper that you've got a building and it was donated by so and so and we thank them very much. That let's them know one, that you're reaching a goal, that somebody else is supportive of your coalition and helps you gain support. And thank the people. We can't say this enough. Thank everybody that's involved. You'll go thought lots of thank you notes and don't leave anyone out. If you've got a group that comes in and maybe provides a luncheon so you can have a fund raiser, I know this happened once. There were six women there from a group and they did not, one of them get thanked. Do you think they helped with the next fund raiser. No, they did not. They really felt left out. Everybody else was thanked but them. Building a coalition is networking with other organizations and some of them might seem very unlikely to be supportive or your coalition, could become a great supporter. I have an example of that. Several years ago I was at an immunization, coalition meeting in Chicago, and there was a woman there from a midwestern state who was the head of an immunization coalition. She has been out supporting, publicizing the coalition to a group meeting. Afterwards, a lady cam up to her, she was using a walker, she was 75 years old, she was hard of hearing, but she told the coalition leader that she just felt very strongly, that it was so important to get children immunized that she wanted to help. She said, "what can I do to help?" Well, the initial reaction might have been, well, you can't walk, you can't see very well, and the woman had told her she didn't have a car, you can't drive. She might have said, I'm sorry, but I just can't think of anything you could do. Instead, she said, let me have you name and phone number, I can't think of anything right now, but I'll get in touch with you. She got back to the office and she realized they were having this letter writing campaign and they had hundreds of letters to fold, stuff into envelopes and put labels on. So she called the lady and asked her it she'd be willing to come in and do that and said she'd provide a car. She said, oh, I'd love to, and she said, I've been talking to a couple of my friends, they feel strongly about immunizing children and they'd like to come to. So they sent a car, they brought all 3 ladies in, I think it was for 3 days, fed them lunch, they had a good time sitting there talking while they were performing the task, they were all great grandmothers, they called their grandchildren to make sure that their great grandchildren were adequately immunized and some of them weren't, you how things kind of slip through the cracks, so they were responsible for getting their great grandchildren's immunizations caught up, and they called all the young families in their neighborhoods to make sure that they had their children immunized. So that seemed like a very unlikely supportive member of a coalition turned out to become a very important thing and did a lot of good for them in the community. I'm going to tie this up together.

Ok, we have some short summary here, we want to do some reminders of what we've shares with you today.

These are the traits of a well structured coalition. All the players and the members have to be involved. Everyone has to know that they're a vital part. The group has to have a realistic strategy. As Carol talked about, you have to set your goals, they have to be reachable goals that can be achieved. If the established vision shared by all members, are all the coalition members thinking the same way, are you going the same track, or are there several tracks? You need to come together in one vision. Members have to agree to disagree in the process. You have to realize you may not agree on every issue but how can you address the issues the you disagree on and still work together. The groups makes promises that can be kept. The worse thing we can do, I think, is say we're going to do something, and not follow through. The trust level breaks down and it's very difficult to regain that trust level. Ownership is there at all levels of involvement in the coalition. changes are made when necessary to keep the coalition current and vibrant. Our world is changing so fast today that if we have a long term coalition, even if we have a six month coalition, we may have to take a look at what our goals are and our strategy and we may have to adapt it to what's really happening. And if we have a long term coalition over several years, I can't imagine not having to adapt it and change it to still reach that same goal, but we may have to make some changes along the way in the strategy and some of the contributions may be of the different organizations. Again, publicize your successes. Everyone feels good when you know you've achieved what you're going after. And that's really important to remember the people that have donated their personal time and their financial time to work for the coalition for the good of all. So, in summary, we need to determine what the issue is, find the coalition members, identify our target audience, and initiate that first planning meeting. And after you do that, you go through the steps that Carol just went over with you, and we wish you a very successful coalition. Thank you. Carol?