HHD - HHD News - HHD Stories

The monograph reflects the insights shared by six of HHD's project directors in response to the question, “What are the successful strategies to create, manage, and sustain alliances (or coalitions) of partnering organizations to address a major public health or education issue?”

Publication

Developing Alliances to Improve Health and Education: Reflections of Leaders from EDC’s Health and Human Development Programs (http://hhd.org/documents/
ALLIANCE- Final.pdf)

Six Key Strategies for Developing Alliances:

Alliance members need to be “fed”– inspired and nourished – every time they come to the table.
Alliances proceed through developmental stages. Each stage must be cultivated or regression to an earlier phase is inevitable.
Listening to members’ voices when shaping the alliance’s vision and goals is key.
Recognizing and attending to members’ varying styles keeps them involved.
When alliance members share power early in the process, it contributes to sustaining the group and its work.
Planning for sustainability begins early, continues throughout the process, and depends greatly on the success of Strategy 5.

HHD Leaders Recommend Key Strategies for Developing Alliances to Improve Health and Education

Finding solutions to today’s health and education challenges requires ideas and resources from multiple sectors working together to create change. Alliances of stakeholders can frequently address these issues and advance goals with much greater impact than any one person or organization can alone. “Alliances can make new connections possible across levels and sectors, and between research and practice,” says HHD Director, Cheryl Vince Whitman.

Because alliances are central to HHD’s work, we recently published a short monograph highlighting our key strategies for developing and sustaining them. The monograph reflects the insights shared by six of our project directors in response to the question, “What are the successful strategies to create, manage, and sustain alliances (or coalitions) of partnering organizations to address a major public health or education issue?” In a recent two-hour discussion they drew on their experiences building and nurturing alliances on issues such as improving the health of students, protecting teen worker safety, promoting youth mental health, and preventing teen substance abuse.

The project directors suggest these critical elements for creating alliances:

Alliance members need to be inspired and given opportunities to grow and share power early in the process, as well as throughout the life of the alliance.
Groups need to move through seven critical stages of development, from orientation and trust building through implementation and renewal. When these dynamics are operating, participants’ contributions can be brought out and woven together to create important program and policy changes.

The discussion also clarified that the success of an alliance depends on the quality of its members. The strongest members of alliances represent critical organizations and sectors, hold the authority to commit their organizations to action, and commit to carry out and sustain the work of the alliance.

"This valuable roundtable discussion allowed us to share and record our experiences at HHD of creating alliances,” says Carmen Aldinger, an associate project director in HHD. “The resulting monograph will be helpful particularly with new partners who are interested or involved in alliance building and want some practical tips and strategies."

May 17, 2005


	address: 55 Chapel Street, Newton, MA 02458-1060 Need directions? phone: 800.225.4276 fax: 617.527.4096 e-mail: info@hhd.org	Copyright 2008 Education Development Center, Inc.