Why sustainability?
Improving chronic disease outcomes by addressing the social determinants of health (SDOH) and achieving health equity takes cross-sector collaboration and continuous, ongoing effort. Multisector coalitions working on these issues should think about sustainability early and often. Sustainability planning goes beyond funding models—it requires thoughtful and intentional operations and governance structures that facilitate collaboration across sectors with different systems and cultures and elevate the power and voices of community members. In this blog post, we’ll explore ways to develop and maintain inclusive operational and governance approaches and share tips developed with community coalitions in mind.
Keep partners engaged
It sounds simple, but keeping partners engaged is an important foundation for sustaining your coalition’s work.
Start by collaboratively defining group norms at the beginning of your partnership process and revisit them often. Norms, such as respectful communication and focusing on problems rather than people, can help set an expectation for inclusivity. Your group norms will likely change as the work progresses or more organizations or people become involved. For instance, you might need more formal norms for deciding on external communications if your coalition pursues a politically challenging policy change in your community.
You can build in reminders to update group norms by including a placeholder in meeting agendas at a particular frequency, perhaps semiannually or quarterly, or by establishing a group review process. You can also set aside time reflect on how to ensure group norms are implemented. For example, if one of your group norms is trusting people to move work along between meetings, you might implement that by investing in building trust through one-on-one relationships.
Quick tips: How to run valuable, productive meetings
Purpose and agenda setting are essential to productive meetings with strong engagement. The following strategies can make your meetings more productive:
- Set ground rules and train facilitators in inclusive practices to ensure all voices can be heard.
- Co-create the agenda with partners to facilitate buy-in.
- Make agenda setting, facilitation, and notetaking a rotating responsibility to increase involvement among attendees.
- Nominate someone at the end of each meeting to create the next agenda or put out a call for agenda items ahead of time.
- Before each meeting, name the necessary decision points so organizations can send the appropriate representatives.
- Provide the materials and data necessary to inform discussions and decisions beforehand and in formats and languages accessible to all participants.
- Spend time looking backward and forward to build bridges between previous and future meetings to establish a sense of continuity and momentum.
Creating a shared vision and mission is also key to securing buy-in from partners (see this earlier blog post for strategies). As with group norms, it helps to set a cadence to reassess and update your vision and mission. This allows your coalition a moment to celebrate achievements and embrace the evolution of your work together.
Growing leadership in your coalition
Young coalitions are often works of passion driven by one or a just few visionaries working outside their primary job duties. This can work in the short term, but limit a coalition’s capacity and be a barrier to sustainability. Growing a diverse group of leaders in your coalition—including by supporting professional development of community representatives and people with lived experience—and distributing responsibility supports sustainability and helps avoid burnout.
Use subcommittees to give people room to lead
Setting up subcommittees or a steering committee is a great way to distribute leadership responsibilities and ensure everyone has some area they can contribute to. For example, the Health Equity Collective, a Houston, Texas, area coalition working on food security and other SDOH initiatives, uses a governance structure with seven work groups and a steering committee. The work groups are goal oriented, including one that ensures community members affected by inequities inform the coalition’s actions and another that connects the collective with other SDOH-focused initiatives and coalitions in the region.
“An inherent challenge to building and maintaining a healthy coalition is the demand for committed leadership, effort beyond primary job responsibilities, and time investment.…we found that an evolving and growing coalition of new members at the executive level or within work groups brought a much-needed infusion of support, enthusiasm, expertise, and new ideas that pushed the vision of the collective forward.”
-Jemima John, Health Equity Collective
Think broadly about leadership
As your coalition evolves, keep in mind is that there is no one definition of leadership. Thinking about who exemplifies leadership characteristics like relationship building and emotional maturity might lead you to dynamic leaders in your coalition and community you might not have expected.
While engaging community members, you can intentionally develop leaders through training and by rotating who is responsible for running meetings, representing the coalition in external meetings, and speaking to the public. Avondale Children Thrive melded its approach to authentic community engagement with its leadership transition planning by providing professional development to one of its engaged community members. Current coalition leaders mentor this person by helping her to craft her story and tie it to coalition goals, and they act as a sounding board as she develops her talking points to be a voice of the coalition during public events. In addition to enhancing the coalition’s sustainability, this strategy also helps Avondale Children Thrive better reflect and understand the community the coalition serves, which is one of its guiding principles.
Tools to learn more about coalition sustainability
Sustainability is critical to your coalition’s broader goals of addressing SDOH to advance health equity and prevent chronic disease. For guidance on these and other aspects of sustainability, including community and organizational partnerships, funding, staffing, assessment, continuous quality improvement, and policy, check out the Getting Further Faster Sustainability Planning Guide and asynchronous module. Getting Further Faster and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials also produced resources about funding models and braiding and layering funding. For more on equitably engaging people with lived experience, see this tip sheet.