Building City Coalitions for Community Resilience
Building City Coalitions
for Community Resilience
Introduction
Communities worldwide have greater opportunities for growth and connectedness than ever before; yet the number of people exposed to hazards, shocks, and stresses is rapidly increasing, especially in coastal cities, leading to increased risk and vulnerability. At the same time, people living in cities are themselves agents of change and have significant resources, skills, and capacities to bring to resilience efforts in their own communities and across their cities and districts.
Numerous community organizations do significant humanitarian and development work in vulnerable neighborhoods, and this is helping to build social capital and local capacity. However they cannot address the full range of needs related to resilience and are also frequently unable to relay unaddressed concerns – including many related to disaster risks – to corresponding municipal or national authorities, or to other potential partners.
Strengthening resilience of urban communities requires an enhanced level of civic engagement that draws on the strength and growing diversity of urban communities and that can effectively complement formal governance
structures by engaging a wider set of stakeholders to focus on resilience at the community and household level. Combined with the community-based, neighborhood approaches that community organizations have long invested in,
this type of civic engagement in urban settings provides a bottom-up push to accelerate local risk-sensitive decision-making and influence development, governance and investment for effective community resilience outcomes.
Addressing the increasingly complex issues facing urban areas requires a city-wide civic process to build local coalitions to guide and foster work at the community level and tap the wide range of resources available in cities. This coalition-building process engages a wide set of interested stakeholders from local government, civil society organizations, the private sector, academia, and community volunteers to identify and pursue locally developed solutions for resilience and climate change adaptation. This guide aims to help you build these coalitions.
Why Use This Guide
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 guide was developed in collaboration with and piloted with community-based development and humanitarian aid organizations, local governments, and academics.
This guide is also:
- User friendly,
- Community oriented,
- Comprehensive, and
- Designed for organizations to implement without the need for external expert help.
This guide 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 Guide
This guide 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 Guide
No outside experts are required to implement this guide. 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 guide. You could also assign different members of the coalition to facilitate different parts of the guide.
Coalition Building Tools
Why Coalitions?
1
- Video - Better Together
Institutional and Social Network Analysis
2
- Stakeholder Mapping
- Interest vs. Influence
Learning to See Systems
3
- Tip: Learning to See Systems
Managing Coalitions
4
- Five Questions That All Coalitions Should Answer
- Role-playing Game for Introducing Multi-level Community Resilience Coalitions
- Good Practices for Collaboration
- Commitments and Agreements
- Monitoring Performance of the Coalition
Tips for Facilitators
1
The exercises in this guide are for use by coalition members to put
together effective coalitions. In some cases you may also want to train
people in how to help others run through the exercises. In support of this training, the manual includes “tips for facilitators.” These serve as a guide to helping people understand and do the exercises. However, the introductory workshop should not be confused with the coalition building process as a whole.
2
Some tools in this guide are simply for training purposes, to understand
the principles better. They do not have to be done as part of the coalition building process, but can be helpful if members want to deepen their understanding. Those exercises are also marked “tips for facilitators.”
3
In leading a coalition building process using these tools, please keep in mind that you don’t have to use all the tools. If the group you are leading already has some experience with resilience, build on what you already have.
4
In addition to the introductory workshop, it is necessary to take the time to engage the correct stakeholders for each step, and complete the work with each tool with your stakeholder group. Resilience is as much about process as the information collected through these tools. The process of
working through these tools together is a fundamental aspect of your resilience work, as it helps you build the relationships that are needed to implement a cohesive, integrated resilience strategy and resilience activities, and establishes the value and expertise that different partners bring to the table.
Coalition Building Workshop Agenda
| SESSION / TOPIC | TIME | OBJECTIVE |
|---|---|---|
| DAY ONE | ||
| Introduction to this training | 1 hr |
Participants - Know who everyone in the room is Understand - what this pilot training will deliver Facilitators understand what people expect from the workshop |
| Managing Coalitions | 1 hr | Participants understand the essential agreements that effective coalitions need to make. |
| Stakeholder Mapping | 1.5 hr | Participants have a clear understanding of which organizations and groups need to be involved in a coalition to address the prioritized shocks and stresses at various scales, both vertical and lateral. |
| Interest vs. Influence | 1 hr | Understand which organizations have influence over managing shocks and stresses, and which have interest in engaging as a coalition member. |
| Managing Coalitions: Role Play | 2 hrs | Participants understand the essential agreements that effective coalitions need to make. |
| Good Practices for Collaboration | 1 hr | Participants understand principles and practices of individuals and organizations that make collaborations effective. |
| Road Map | 1 hr | Participants develop a road map for rolling out a coalition building process |
Why Coalitions?
Video: Better Together
This guide presents an approach for building coalitions in cities to build resilience. This short video covers the basic concepts of how and why to use coalition building to build resilience, especially building resilience in response to climate change and urbanization in developing countries.
It is not an instructional video -- it is designed to motivate people to learn more about how working in coalitions can help them reach their goals. The video is probably best used as part of a training workshop or coalition building meeting, rarely standing alone. It is especially useful for people who want to see the connection between unplanned urban growth, climate change, and the need to work with a wide variety of organizations. However, it could also be used as part of an effort to recruit people to a coalition or training.
The video assumes that viewers are already concerned about building resilience in their city. It does not use much technical language, and is suitable for people from all sectors, especially those who are not active on disaster
management.
Better Together
TIME NEEDED
5 minutes to watch the video, 10-30 minutes to discuss it
MATERIALS NEEDED
- Computer or TV capable of playing a short video
- Screen or monitor large enough for everyone to see well
- Sound system strong enough for everyone to hear
STEPS
- Introduce the video and suggest that there will be time for discussion afterwards.
- Watch the video as a group.
- Depending on how you are using the video you may then start the coalition building exercises in this manual.
a. Open up a discussion about how or if the situation described in the video is true for your area.
b. Explore how organizations from various sectors coming together to look for solutions could benefit the interests and goals of the viewers.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
- What were the main messages coming out of the video?
- What are the similarities between the video and your situation?
- What was hard to understand in the video?
- What did you not agree with?
- Are there coalitions already active in your area in building resilience?
- Are there other issues where it would be a good idea to start a coalition?
Who can help you - People who are already working with coalitions or other types of collaboration can help describe their experience and advise you on how to get started, or how to improve your existing efforts.
Tips for Facilitators
1
This video is mostly motivational. It will not show you how to build a coalition -- instead, it shows you why coalitions are necessary to handle problems of unplanned urban growth and climate change.
2
For many people the word “coalition” will be too general. You may suggest that the idea is that any collaboration among multiple organizations can help to tackle tricky problems that are beyond the reach of any individual organization.
3
Others will say “we are already doing this,” which is excellent. In these cases you may want to explore if there seem to be any stakeholders who should be added to make the coalition even more effective, or if there is need to improve the way the coalition is set up or run to improve its effectiveness.
Download All Coalition Building Tools
You can print them, share with your team, or use them offline during workshops.
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