The Benefits of Nonprofit Coalition Building
By: Shaheer Sandhu
It is a common theme for nonprofits to have a goal or mission of impacting public policy or changing trends in their industries. For example, nonprofits in the immigration field could aim to attain a sanctuary city designation or lobby against a policy as large as the border wall. Whether at the local or federal level, nonprofits often face difficulty gaining enough traction to actually generate industry-wide change. The problems faced by these nonprofits are similar regardless of the space in which the nonprofit operates. Issues can range from a lack of resources, time, and having a large enough reach to be able to influence politicians.
Creating a coalition of nonprofits has a wide array of benefits for each individual nonprofit and also the collective coalitions. This article aims to highlight the benefits of a coalition and provide action items for nonprofits hoping to create or join a coalition.
What is a Nonprofit Coalition?
A nonprofit coalition is a group of nonprofit stakeholders coming together with a certain goal in mind. That can be something very broad like trying to overall reform the juvenile justice system or a more specific goal like trying to influence a certain local bill. Coalitions are typically more informal but some choose to create a separate legal entity. Larger coalitions often file to become 501(c)(3)’s so that they can hire their own staff and have the same tools to operate as a normal non profit. This is usually only done if the coalition is meant to be around long term and has a large/broad agenda.
When entering a coalition of this kind, communication is essential. As the needs and wants of the nonprofits and the industry change, coalitions will need to adapt as well. The only way to ensure this happens is by having open and frequent communication between all members of the coalition. A common strategy includes biweekly or monthly meetings/check-ins and some form of group chat for updates on platforms like Slack or Facebook Messenger. Logistically, the larger the coalition, the better communication and coordination will have to be.
What is just as key as communication for coalitions is setting strategies. Every coalition should have someone or multiple people taking the initiative to create the coalition’s strategies for policy change– typically the founders of the coalition have this role. By understanding every nonprofits’ core competencies, the leaders set specific tasks that are unique to each nonprofit as well as collective tasks for all the nonprofits to do. More on this later.
Regardless of the size of the coalition, creating bylaws and setting specific tasks for every nonprofit to complete enhances communication and keeps everything accountable and equitable. These bylaws will serve as the model for governing the coalition. One model often used to set up coalitions is the Collective Impact Model. This model outlines 5 steps and aims to streamline the process of measuring results, communication, and collective support for coalitions.
What are the benefits to being a part of a Nonprofit Coalition?
Influence Over Policy
One key benefit to a nonprofit coalition is having more power to influence policy. This can take many forms including but not limited to: drafting legislation, lobbying legislators to introduce legislation, circulating lobbying materials to assist in the passage or defeat of a bill, and engaging the general public by letter, phone, or the mass media to encourage their legislators to support or oppose legislation. All nonprofits have existing networks and tools that they use to do these things, but pooling those networks and resources together maximizes chances of success in attempting to create policy change.
An example of a time in which this was done can be seen in Berkeley, California in 2018 when a homeless shelter was set to close. The shelter had been set to remain open only for the winter time and was dubbed The Winter Shelter. However, if it did not stay open year round, all the residents of the shelter would have been forced onto the streets. This led nonprofits like Dorothy Day House, Friends of Adeline, The Grey Panthers, and others to form an informal coalition to try and get the Berkeley City Council to allocate $400,000 in the next year’s budget for the shelter to remain open. These nonprofits started petitions, got residents of the homeless shelter to come and speak at city council meetings, mobilized students at UC Berkeley to advocate for the shelter, and attracted media coverage in order to accomplish this goal. They ended up successful and got the funding that they lobbied for. This makes this case an excellent example of nonprofits coming together to influence and change local policies.
Larger Systemic Impact
One more common goal of nonprofits is to create larger systemic change through their work. Another key benefit to a nonprofit coalition is being able to do just that. Nonprofit coalitions can create this change by streamlining data collection. If all nonprofits working in a certain area or sector share their data and collect it in the same way, they can better assess whether their work is creating an impact on a larger scale rather than just looking at their own data or services.
For example, in the criminal justice sector this could look like all nonprofits operating support programs in a certain jail working together. This would be in order to give their program participants the same post program assessment to see whether they are creating systemic change in the jail overall rather than just whether their own program is creating change.
Another real world example of this happening is when a coalition worked to redesign the New York State Medicaid services in the early 2010’s. This coalition saw a lack of support for linguistic services when it came to supporting Asian Americans. This coalition was able to lobby together towards getting a seat on the Redesign Task Force and, once they were all able to pool resources into being able to do that, they successfully advocated for their recommendations within the team.
Increased Data Sources
Finally, once a nonprofit coalition has successfully advocated for policy change and combined data to assess impact they can leverage this work to gain funding. This is a direct benefit to each individual nonprofit as they can either individually or collectively apply for funding grants and in order to attain these grants nonprofits need to show Project Data. Project Data is any data or evidence that illustrates the community impact and change the nonprofit is creating. When it comes time for nonprofits to apply for these grants they can show the data they were able to collect because of the data standards set by their coalition. This data can highlight the success of their own programs but also because they were a part of the coalition they can showcase the policy change they created at a higher level as well as larger changes in the community.
Because COVID-19 has changed the nonprofit landscape and made it much more difficult for them to operate. Joining a coalition could alleviate some of that difficulty as nonprofits can unite in these times to work towards a common goal and support each other.
