Pearls of Wisdom

The second section of the guide is a collection of “Pearls of Wisdom” that let you benefit from the experience of community organizers who have come before you. Someone else has already made all the mistakes!

The path of community action has been well trod by many people before you. You have every reason to expect to find others who can help in many different ways. The advice below will give you a start on what others have learned when working together effectively. We have organized these recommendations for effective community collaboration under seven topical areas.

Vision, Mission & Objectives

• Be clear and specific about your mission and goals. You will make a bigger difference when you can articulate what you intend to achieve. It will help those who are already involved in your effort and others who might want to join or help later. For example, organizations external to the community partnership might help objectively frame the goals or help identify the best community level indicators. A goal might be increasing childhood immunization rates or decreasing sexually transmitted diseases among youth. You will know it is specific enough if it leads to concrete action.
• Set realistic goals. Community efforts often promise more than they can deliver, especially when they seek grant money. Leaders want to make the best possible impression to secure the most funding. If goals don’t challenge the community, then they won’t inspire the effort, funding, and other resources that will drive needed change. But setting unrealistic goals sets up the effort for a sense of failure no matter how far it has come. Goals should be challenging, but they should also be achievable.

Action Planning

• Look for issues that affect people in many different ways. That’s where the needs are and that’s where you gain widespread interest. Some community issues, for example, neighborhood safety or substance abuse, affect the majority of people who share a common place. They also offer a solid basis around which a critical mass of local people can work together. When community organization efforts involve people from diverse backgrounds of income and power –such as educational or public health improvements affecting people across social class –substantive change is a lot more likely to happen.
• Consider using more than one strategy . It’s easy to get stuck tackling complex problems like obesity using one tactic when other tactics, or several tactics simultaneously, may work better. You won’t know unless you try different approaches. A change in strategy by itself can also be helpful because the disruption may lead everyone involved to take a fresh look at the problem.
• Be creative. There may have already been dozens of projects to solve the problems you want to address, but you have to find the right way to do it where you live. You’ll have to be creative about looking at the problem and finding ways to apply ideas to your community. A particularly creative idea by itself can contribute to success. Consider how much the wristbands helped Lance Armstrong’s foundation fundraising.
• Provide incentives for success. Funders may be more likely to support your effort if you give yourself an incentive to make progress. For example, the annual renewal of multi-year awards or the offering of bonus grants could be based on evidence of progress or accomplishment by the community group.
• Try for quick wins. Quick wins are short-term opportunities that can make a clear-cut difference. They may not complete your goal, but they build confidence that you can get it done. Quick, small successes can also help recruit and retrain members as word of the success spreads.

Leadership

• Leaders help set the right direction. “Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results,” as George Patton once said. Once you can help a group of people see a new direction, they will have little trouble going that way.
• Community organization can't always be separated from politics or controversy. Consider the case of people coming together in a rural community to address issues of toxic waste and environmental pollution. Public debate may focus on both the economic interests of affected businesses and the health concerns of local residents. It's typical that when two parties are on opposite sides of an issue, neither will get everything they want. Inevitably, a resolution is going to involve politics: the art of reconciling or balancing competing interests.
• Opposition to change may be like an onion. According to the Community Tool Box, community efforts dealing with entrenched, controversial problems will encounter many layers of opposition and resistance to change. For example, community efforts to limit indoor air pollution like smoking may face resistance initially from the tobacco industry and then later from bar and restaurant owners. You need to peel off one layer at a time, and expect to find deeper layers of resistance that are created to protect vested interests.
  
  Reports from high-level groups that get a lot of attention create a chance to try something new in the community . The nationwide program Healthy Start, which aims to reduce infant deaths, got its start from a national level task force. A task force gathers a group of leaders together and enables them to set a new direction that none of them might come up with on their own. The task force group may give them “cover” to say things they might not have been able to say on their own. And it may stimulate ideas that would they would not come up with individual. High profile reports can also analyze the causes of societal problems that are often too complex for any single individual to tackle herself. You might work to create a high level commission to address the problem you want to tackle or keep an eye open for opportunities generated by a national task force.
• Be concrete. As community consultant Gillian Kaye says: "Nothing loses steam and involvement faster for a coalition than a lot of talking and no action. Coming up with broad ideas is one thing, but actually developing concrete strategies and getting them implemented is quite another."

Collaboration

• You can't do it by yourself. One person or even a few people cannot solve the complex problems facing society in the areas of health and health care alone. They need a diverse group of local people to tackle the interwoven relationships that under gird any complex problem. Joining people together in a common purpose can strengthen a community more than any other way because it enables community members to take action themselves.
• Collaborate to expand your reach. There’s a good chance that someone in your community is already concerned for one reason or another about the problem you’ve identified. The local hospital may be concerned about highway safety because accidents send uninsured motorists to the emergency room with no ability to pay the bills. Consider “non-traditional” or non-obvious allies in your initiative.
• Involve faith-based and racially/ethnically diverse community organizations. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and many other diverse faiths are often active in communities and help shape our beliefs about what is right and good, such as our responsibility to care for others. Ensuring the poor, the sick, and the disabled in our communities can get the health care they need to live better lives requires us to serve more then just ourselves. Achieving reasonable equity requires us to devote ourselves to a higher purpose than the basic demands of life.

Adequate Resources

• Seek resources to engage community mobilizers. Community mobilizers will focus their energy on getting the community involved in your effort. Paid mobilizers are often necessary because getting people involved is usually a full time job. They can sustain an organization through times when volunteers cannot devote enough time or even when enthusiasm runs short. They can also multiply themselves by recruiting volunteers to get even more done.
• Don’t hesitate to seek technical assistance . Most initiatives rely on volunteers with full time jobs without adequate time and skills to devote to the many details like developing written plans, tracking activities, and designing outcome measurements. Successfully executing on these tasks takes specialized knowledge, a lot of time and self-discipline. Indeed, these obstacles can dampen enthusiasm, even for those truly committed to making a difference. Community initiative organizers should not be afraid to admit they need outside help and seek it as part of their funding needs.
• When fundraising, do not think you are merely asking for money or a grant . You are asking as an advocate on behalf of those who are in need. Your enthusiasm will replenish itself if you see yourself as a direct conduit to the needs in the community you are serving.

Documentation & Feedback

• Keep records and feedback. Key records include a description of what the group has done and how they have done it. This history lets new members of the group get up to speed more quickly. Seeing the progress can inspire old and new members to work even harder. Records are also very important to maintaining an accurate evaluation of what worked and what didn’t.

Making Outcomes Matter

• Focus on outcomes. For those who want to make a difference, it's nice to know that you actually did. Getting results will help your group feel better about itself and attract others to your cause. Set measurable targets so you can teach and show others about your success and communicate results.
• Can you replicate your success? Once you’ve had some success, ask yourself if you can help others. Finding the “DNA” of your success will help sustain your own initiative and allow others to benefits as well.
• Make sure you can demonstrate you are the cause of your own success. When you evaluate your effort, ask yourselves if there could there be another reason for your success. With enough time and money, you can conduct scientific research by comparing the effect on one group of people who receive your assistance with another control group who receives nothing from you. That way you can tell if your intervention is making a real difference. Often such research is not possible, but with some common sense and analysis, you can help make the point that you are indeed the cause of the impact you see.
• Make sure you have a sustainable project. All the success in the world doesn’t guarantee your initiative will be around next year if funding dries up. As your success builds, you will have a better chance to secure funding streams based on the continuing value of the project.

Next: "The ABC's of Working Together"