Building Community
In our three-part blog series, we are sharing our approach on how to scale your mission through literacy. After sharing best practices for assessing literacy gaps within your organization, we are excited to dive into the second element of our approach: building community.
There are a multitude of adult literacy organizations serving populations with many overlapping and diverse needs. While these programs may serve in different places among unique populations, we believe programs are strongest when working together. Building community among programs creates opportunities for sharing assets, creating networks of support, and collaborating toward a shared mission.
Sharing Assets
Once you’ve begun assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your own organization, you can leverage the work of other organizations to complement or improve your own. Through mapping and sharing assets.
What does sharing assets look like? One great local example is the Welcome to Illinois coalition, which provides direct services to immigrants and asylum seekers entering the state. By banding together organizations that specialize in different services and locations, Welcome to Illinois is able to provide services from housing to health to legal aid. And rather than competing for support, they are able to gain broad support together and distribute aid in ways that best align with their mission.
Sharing assets in other contexts also makes us more aware of the resources that are available and how we can best use those to aid the people we serve. Take this example from this 2012 U.S. Department of Education publication that highlighted work we’ve done in the past to help secure funding for organizations by sharing assets and resources:
“One goal of Chicago Citywide Literacy Coalition and its partners was to broaden collaboration by strengthening relationships with local funders . . . they made joint presentations to local funders in the Literacy Funders Network, an affinity group of the Council on Foundations, and shared the needs identified in the AEGC Summit planning process.”
By working together, we’ve been able to identify recurring needs among organizations and secure funding and resources to fill those needs. The more that organizations are able to network and share our successes, the more holistic support we can provide to the people we serve.
Creating Networks of Support
As an organization with “Coalition” in our former name and integral to our mission, we may be biased–but we believe and have seen firsthand that formal coalition building is vital to building community among organizations. While sharing assets and working together on specific projects is vital, these can be challenging without structures that ensure more successful collaboration. One of the main benefits of creating networks of support through formal coalitions is that collaboration can be sustained and managed collectively.
By creating formal coalitions, organizations with similar goals can:
Better avoid oversaturation of services
Understand more about the populations they serve
Identify who is still excluded or left on the margins when all a coalitions’ services and resources are accounted for
Collectively work to fill gaps among organizations
Create opportunities together that may be out of scope for one organization to do on their own
To begin building coalitions, organizations can:
Reach out to leadership at organizations serving similar missions
Explore examples of successful coalitions—what do they do that you may want to emulate?
Host interest meetings to engage potential coalition members
Once there are several invested members, collectively draft goals and overall leadership structures for the coalition
Get organized and get going—draft a calendar and start working toward your shared mission
Collaborating toward a Shared Mission
Another opportunity that building community creates is collaborating toward a shared mission. When organizations can identify goals they have in common, they can more effectively accomplish their unique missions. The idea of articulating shared goals is not that all organizations need to serve the same organizations in the same way. Rather, these shared missions allow organizations to put aside smaller differences to prioritize specific outcomes and goals in their collaborations. Working toward a shared mission allows organizations to be on the same page about what matters most, which leads to more effective advocacy and sustainable collaborations.
A fantastic example of collaborating toward a shared mission is National Adult Education and Family Literacy Week (AEFL Week), which was created to raise awareness and advocate for the importance of adult and family literacy by organizations across the country. At scaleLIT, we’ve hosted Rally for Adult Education for several years as part of AEFL Week, engaging dozens of organizations in advocacy for adult learners. Throughout these programs, religious organizations, higher education institutions, public nonprofits, and other groups have come together to advocate for adult education and its place as a critical public policy issue.
With the important place literacy has in empowering individuals and communities, this work can’t be relegated to separate silos. Organizations are strongest when working together, and as a result the individuals they serve can attain better resources and services for their success. Sharing assets, creating networks of support, and collaborating toward a shared mission are three key ways organizations can build community and become stronger together.
In our next blog post, we’ll be diving into practices for effectively deploying resources—the third part of our series on how to scale your mission through literacy.
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