====== Coalition Stories ======
Stories show an idea in action. The following stories of real social justice advocates show what becomes possible in working in coalitions.
We have drawn connections between stories and advocacy tools by providing links to our tools where appropriate. In relating tools back to their living sources, advocates can apply, adapt, and improve upon them from within their own contexts.
Read more about the ways coalitions add power to advocacy campaigns.
===== Talk the Talk AND Walk the Walk =====
Ukrainian advocate Raisa Kravchenko and U.S. advocate Victoria Kovari both found that, in each of their successful coalitions, there was a time to talk and a time to act.
* **Raisa Kravchenko**, //**Djerela**//, Kiev, Ukraine
Raisa's 60-organization coalition took the time to articulate their clear common interests, and their clarity held them together through an 18-month lobbying campaign.
* **Victoria Kovari**, //**Metropolitan Organizing Strategy for Enabling Strength (MOSES)**//, Detroit, MI
Victoria's racially and culturally diverse coalition took the time they needed to build relationships and trust together. Their open communication enabled them to form a diverse and credible group that could carry their point with lawmakers.
Both Raisa and Victoria, however, emphasized the need for action as well as talk. Each of their coalitions took care to choose effective objectives for their campaigns: winnable goals that created strategic successes upon which to build.
==== Our Unity is Our Strength ====
//by Raisa Kravchenko, 2004 Ukraine Fellow//
**Related Advocacy Institute resources:**
* [[:advocacy:empower_the_coalition:partnerships|Building a unified platform]]
* [[:advocacy:craft_campaign:whatquestions|Building on your advocacy goals/Move Forward Effectively Towards Strategic Goals]]
* [[:advocacy:craft_campaign:keyquestions|Choosing effective objectives/What objectives -or piece of our vision- will we focus on?]]
Our organization's campaign is aimed at integrating people with mental disabilities into society, by creating opportunities for their rehabilitation and employment. With issues of disability, I think it is obligatory to have a coalition to unite your efforts: this is our strength.
In Ukraine, our country's social policy has been to provide adult professional care only in big institutions. Community-based services are not guaranteed by legislation after the age of 7, and financial support is not guaranteed at all. So to make progress on these issues, we find we have to overcome personal interests and to unite our efforts in lobbying. We must trust one another, consistently so.
We have brought together a coalition of 60 organizations from throughout Ukraine that all work to protect the rights of the physically and mentally disabled. And of course, to some extent, we compete for funds. But in lobbying, we come together and say, if you cross out all the other things, this is our interest and this is the interest of another group, and here we overlap. We are very clear about our joint interests and what efforts we're going to make to lobby for those interests on the national level. We know we will have more success if we are together.
We undertook an 18-month process where we lobbied for a policy decree from the Cabinet of Ministers. They consider some 10-20 regulations like this every day, but ours took us 18 months of lobbying. Three times we had to have joint national actions. Once we wrote about 2000 letters from all the regions of Ukraine to the same set of officials, asking them to write our issue into the schedule of the Commission on Disability at the Cabinet of Ministers - just to write the issue into the schedule. Then we conducted an investigation of priority needs of the families, with a questionnaire filled by more than 1,100 families from all over Ukraine, which we displayed to key persons. Then we had roundtable discussions all on the same week in 20 different regions. So you have to coordinate quite a lot, and to spend your energy doing that.
But all this was possible because we had determined our common interests. We didn't touch on the extra aspects at all - financial aspects, budget support, local support, local solutions, regional policies - we only wanted a declaration from the state about their policies, and we decided to focus on and resolve this one issue.
In August 2004, the Cabinet of Ministers approved this document that, for the first time in Ukrainian history, guarantees the right of mentally disabled people to receive social services in their places of residence. It also speaks of the need to develop individual caretaking plans and to approve a list of free services for physically or mentally disabled individuals.
One Point at a Time
Even there, if you compare the result with the draft of the initial document, it is five times shorter, and there are no special needs descriptions, and no priority services descriptions - quite a lot is crossed out. It still does not reflect the specificity of these people, because it was negotiated with six Ministries and with the Cabinet of Ministers, and with their Legal Service and Literary Editor as well.
But still, the government declared their attitudes. That will be the baseline to which we will refer, to say, "In order to enact this solution, we need this and this, and first we will need something" - so, we will build on this one point at a time. And it will take a couple of years, but I hope that we will win.
==== We Decided to Declare That a Victory ====
**Related Advocacy Institute resources:**
*[[:advocacy:empower_the_coalition:partnerships|Open communication in coalitions]]
//by Victoria Kovari, Metro Equity Project Director, Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), 2002 Leadership for a Changing World award recipient//
MOSES was born out of a merger between three church-based community organizations in Detroit, all affiliated with the Gamaliel Foundation. I have chaired two task forces for MOSES, one on housing and economic development and most recently one on transportation. This work involves a broad group of people - clergy and lay people, from the city and the suburbs, Black, White and Latino.
**Take Time to Build Relationships**
The start of our collaboration was an honest dialogue about what our various groups' particular interests were in this issue. We came to it from very different places. Several weeks and months of dialogue about what we wanted to get out of the collaboration was a very important element of its success.
The same is true whether you're dealing with collaborations between larger groups or whether you're doing it between different leaders in your organization. Relationship building is an important part of any potential success.
**Carry out a Winnable Action**
The other element is that you actually do an action; you participate in carrying out some concrete action on that particular issue. And your ability to declare victory is an important part of building solidarity among those groups. There's nothing like a win to build team spirit. Tackling something winnable is important and being able to recognize victory is important.
One specific example is a hearing we held in Lansing, our state capital, in April of 2000. We brought over 200 people to Lansing to conduct a citizens' hearing on the priorities of the state transportation budget. The rest of the statewide coalition, which included environmentalists and several unions, brought a more limited number of people from across the state.
**Demonstrate Your Credibility**
When they saw our ability to bring out that many people from the Detroit area, the other members of the coalition became much more trusting of our abilities and our claims of being able to follow through on the things we said we could do. We became much more of a force in their eyes. And we gave them a lot more credibility because of our numbers and the diversity of our numbers. Just a dialogue about this would never have achieved the kind of solidarity and trust that the action was able to achieve.
We didn't win what we wanted to win originally, but because we were able to increase state funding by $50 million we decided to declare that a victory.
===== When the Pain is Worth the Gain =====
Social justice advocacy has inherited a long legacy of success stories; here are two that carry vivid lessons about reaching across differences for important strategic gains.
The Canadian-based legislative campaign for a ban on all cigarette advertising and promotion brought together groups with divergent organizational styles and cultures, but with a shared policy agenda. The U.S.-based campaign to defeat the Bork nomination brought together groups with widely divergent policy agendas, who learned to work together for one common goal.
Though the latter story illustrates balancing the tension in coalitions and the former shows some effective alternatives to working in coalition, each demonstrates the strategic power that comes from choosing the right kind of diversity for your coalition.
Learn coalition lessons from the Canadian campaign:
==== Find Common Policy Goals Across Perceived Differences ====
**Related Advocacy Institute resources:**
*[[:advocacy:empower_the_coalition:evaluation|Alternatives to working in coalition]]
*[[:advocacy:empower_the_coalition:diversity|Choosing the right kind of diversity for your coalition]]
For years, Canada's tobacco control efforts lagged behind those of the U.S. One reason was the institutional distrust and discomfort felt by Canada's leading health voluntary organizations, especially the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS), toward the leading advocacy group advocating smoking control: The Non-Smokers' Rights Association of Canada (NSRA). NSRA was aggressive, media-wise, and impatient with the perceived conservatism of the CCS. CCS had been reluctant to make an institutional commitment to political advocacy as a cancer-related strategy.
The relationship of the two groups changed radically when, in 1986, CCS acquired a new CEO, who decided that instead of attacking NSRA, he would give an award to its leader, recognizing that NSRA, as well as CCS, had an important and legitimate role to play in smoking control advocacy.
==== Collaborate Outside of Formal Coalitions ====
The relationship was transformed, but it did not lead to a tight, formal coalition. Informally, a strategic planning group in which CCS and NSRA played key roles was formed and met continuously throughout the legislative campaign for a ban on all cigarette advertising and promotion.
==== Bring Together Strategic Resources ====
Critical to both the strategic planning and the campaign was the recognition that each group brought different resources to the campaign, and that those resources were often best deployed with public independence.
In a rough sense, CCS played the lead role in the "inside" campaign, while NSRA led the "outside" campaign. In its own name, but with the full knowledge and public support of CCS, NSRA took out newspaper advertisements calling public attention to the close political ties between the government and the tobacco industry's principal lobbyists, applying the aggressive and powerful weapon of public shaming. But as one sympathetic government official remarked to an NSRA leader, "You may be right, but where are your troops." NSRA had devoted volunteers, but it was not a massive membership organization. CCS was. Its staff and volunteer lobbyists could open doors closed to NSRA, and they did.
"A key factor," noted one of the participants, "was that the CCS was able to give credibility and stature to the campaign which the NSRA could not provide. The CCS entered the fray ardently, something it had never done before. The media and politicians took notice. It is one thing for the tobacco industry to go up against a group perceived by some as militant anti-smokers, but it is quite another for it to fight a reputable, conservative, gigantic grass-roots charitable organization."
Learn coalition lessons from the Bork campaign:
**Reach Across Policy Differences for a High-Stakes Goal**
**Related Advocacy Institute resources:**
* {{advocacy:wiki:balancing_the_tensions_in_coalition.doc|Balancing the tensions in coalitions }}
The campaign to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court brought together groups with widely divergent policy agendas, who learned to work together for one common goal.
Women's groups had different priorities from Black civil rights groups. More significantly, groups such as the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) were focused single-mindedly on reproductive rights, while the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the historic pro-civil rights lobby, included many Catholic and other church groups deeply opposed to abortion. Nonetheless, these groups were able to forge a close alliance for the duration of the Bork campaign. This was made possible, in part, by their single, limited, shared goal: the defeat of the Bork nomination. It was greatly facilitated by the willingness of each group to subordinate differences in the strategic support of that shared goal.
**Create Broad Power with Unlikely Allies**
By focusing on core, shared values, such as the right to privacy, rather than specific issues, such as abortion rights, or gay rights, the coalition was able to forge a broad, powerful coalition of otherwise unthinkable allies. In doing so, the coalition also succeeded in avoiding dismissal by the media and the Senate as either a narrow, "left-wing" coalition, or as advocates for "special interests."
**Balancing Coalition Tensions**
During the campaign in Texas, some labor unions were uneasy about co-existing in a coalition with abortion rights groups, though these groups were sensitive to this highly charged emotional issue, even to the extent of absenting themselves from meetings where their presence might prove politically awkward. The two organizers hired by the Leadership Conference had the diplomatic skills necessary to prevent fracturing of the Texas coalition, letting certain labor leaders work independently of the coalition where they were more comfortable doing so.
In Arizona, the state NARAL affiliate chose not to participate in meetings with Senator DeConcini, mindful of his unwavering opposition to abortion.
Bill Robinson, Executive Director of the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, observed, "You get massive coalition efforts when the stakes are truly high and there is an ultimate goal that everybody can subscribe to, and understand why they must submerge their individual and organizational interests." This was a time for leaders to emerge and coalitions to prosper. Both things happened.
**Half a Loaf?**
Often coalitions are faced with the painful question of whether to make strategic compromises for the sake of possible victory. It takes a courageous examination of the circumstances to determine whether such compromises are truly imposed by circumstances, or whether they may in fact be self-imposed. It also takes a cool head to identify a strategic point at which to take a stand.
Kevin Berrill, the Anti-Violence Project Director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, faced just this decision when he joined a national hate crimes coalition and became part of a landmark effort to collect statistics at the federal level. His actions at a critical moment provide lessons for those on both sides of the compromise question.
Learn Kevin's coalition lessons:
[[:advocacy:empower_the_coalition:managingcoalitions|Coalitions and the Give/Get Ratio]]