How to use this guide
Why Use This Toolkit
If you are reading this document, you probably already have some interest in working more with coalitions. Coalitions are necessary for addressing the complex problems we are faced with these days. Organizations need to bring together different sets of skills, resources, and perspectives to solve problems that have many dimensions. This toolkit was developed in collaboration with and piloted with community-based development and humanitarian aid organizations, local governments, and academics.
This toolkit is also:
- User friendly,
- Community oriented,
- Comprehensive, and
- Designed for organizations to implement without the need for external expert help.
This toolkit is not only for the Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies but also organizations that want to work on city-scale resilience, and organizations working in communities that find community problems need to be addressed beyond the community-level.
What is in this Toolkit
This toolkit presents an approach for building coalitions in cities to build resilience. This approach will allow you to:
- Determine whether effective coalitions exist already to build resilience, and how to strengthen them;
- Identify key organizations that have contributions to make to a coalition
- Identify common goals for different stakeholders on the key issues to be addressed
Building coalitions is an ongoing process – you are never finished. Starting up a coalition, though, probably takes two to four months. At the end, you will have the beginnings of a collaboration that you can build on for years to come.
How to Use this Toolkit
No outside experts are required to implement this toolkit – the tools are designed to be picked up and used by anyone, and assume no prior familiarity with building resilience or running a coalition.
However, facilitation may make the process move more smoothly. The facilitator does not need to be a professional facilitator hired externally; rather, she/he can be someone from your organization or one of the coalition organizations familiar with the concepts presented in this toolkit. You could also assign different members of the coalition to facilitate different parts of the toolkit.
The tools are presented in an order from how to start up through how to keep your coalition going and assess its progress. You may use them in this order, but there is no need to follow them as laid out here – use the ones that seem appropriate for your coalition and the issues it is facing at the moment. Coalitions continually grow and change, rise and fall, and keeping these tools in mind at the right time can help keep them on track.