Building Coalition

Rep. Ayanna Pressley visited the Cambridge Community Center in October 13, 2022. The Center’s team is working on making a Resilience Hub, a concept developed by USDN (Image from CCC volunteer photographer)

Please note this page is a work in progress, we will be adding to it as resources become available.

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Tools to help you build coalition

Why coalition is important: build trust, work at the pace of trust, seeing faces, committing to periodic meetings.

Guiding Principles: Guiding principles can be considered the "rules of engagement". They define the values and behaviors that will guide the work done by the group, regardles of their goals, works structure or strategies. Guiding principles are important because they set the ground rules that everyone agrees to. They clearly define what the team will and will not allow. They can be realistic and aspirational. These are the guiding principles we have agreed for our projects in Chelsea and Chinatown.

Memorandum of Understanding: Also known as MoU, this is a document written by all parties that expresses clearly what the agreements, goals, roles, and responsibilities will be of each party in order to achieve a common goal. You can find an example of an MoU we used here. To develop your own MoU, this template can help you get started.

Resource Sharing: While all parties in a project or collaboration might be equally enthusiastic and committed to reaching the goal or completing the project, that doesn't mean each party will require the same amount of hours to complete their parts, or that the role they play might mean they have a bigger responsibility. In order to avoid issues down the line, it's important to have clear and honest conversations of how much effort each party will have to make, and how to best remunerate each one. We found this spreadsheet helped us split resources in the most just and equitable manner.

Financial Resources:
Project Resources: common repository everyone has access to

Choosing Contractors:

RFPS

Keeping the momentum going:

Project Champion: A project champion is a person who helps make sure the project progresses even through the project's biggest challenges. They help keep the project's momentum. Project champions cannot be chosen, they get identified as the team works on the project. Here are a few articles that delve into this topic:

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