Wellstone Action is all about building power, and the organizations we partner with are equally hungry to build power together. One critical way is by building effective coalitions.
Wellstone Action's labor program has worked with partner unions to help build strong community alliances around education reform, immigration, the Employee Free Choice Act, green jobs and health care. Locally, Wellstone Action has worked with a coalition of non-profit organizations around civic engagement and the Take Action and reNEW Minnesota efforts to build a progressive state.
While coalitions can be an important tool for social change and labor union revitalization, what makes them successful? What causes them to fail?
For the past several years Wellstone Action has been collaborating with Amanda Tattersall, an Australian union and community organizer from Sydney, Australia, around what makes for effective coalitions.
Now Amanda is in the United States having literally written the book on labor-community coalitions -- Power in Coalition.
Wellstone Action, along with an alliance of other progressive organizations, is hosting a launch of Tattersall's book on Thursday, September 2, at Common Good bookstore in St Paul (165 Western Avenue North). Other organizations sponsoring this event include TakeAction Minnesota, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, the Blue Green Alliance, Metro State Social Science Department and the University of Minnesota Labor Education Service.
Jeff Blodgett, Executive Director of Wellston Action, praises the book: ‘Amanda Tattersall's book is the most insightful study of coalitions to date. It is not your typical gauzy view of coalition building, but offers a clear-sighted, practical road map to building more effective labor-community coalitions and in turn an opportunity to transform the labor movement.'
Power in Coalition is the first international study to examine successful coalitions between unions and community organizations in three countries: Chicago's living wage campaign run by the Grassroots Collaborative, the public education coalition in Sydney and Toronto's Ontario Health Coalition fighting to save universal health care. The book explores when and how coalitions can powerful. It considers when and how labor-community alliances can simultaneously move social change, strengthen community-based organizations and renew the power of labor unions.
Power in Coalition identifies important lessons for building strong coalitions that are useful for labor and community organizers. For instance, counter to the popular belief that long lists of organizations produce strong coalitions - Power in Coalition argues that "less is more". A smaller number of powerfully committed organizations will be more successful at sustaining social change and engaging union and community members than a highly broad and diverse coalition where there is little common interest.
The book stakes the claim that coalition success has to be multi-faceted and include not only the social change victories that are achieved, but also the ability for a coalition to sustain relationships between partner organizations and develop the leadership skills and campaigning capacity of rank and file participants in the process of campaigning.
Coalitions also are more successful if they have the versatility to act at multiple scales, and move an agenda and outreach to the general public in local neighborhoods as well as across the city or state. In its Australian and Canadian case studies, the book identifies examples of where this has been done successfully through the establishment of local coalitions that have partnered with city-wide or state wide coalitions. Yet, there is an art form to multi-scaled action, and the Canadian case study cautions on lessons about balancing the need for bottom up and top down input into coalition strategy.
Over the past three years, Amanda Tattersall has been building a coalition using the lessons from her book - called the Sydney Alliance -- a diverse coalition of religious organizations, unions and community organizations set to publicly launch in 2011. The Sydney Alliance is part of the Industrial Areas Foundation.
Power in Coalition was released in August 2010 by Cornell University Press. To find out more about it, and launch locations visit the book's website.