Boundaries

One of the most rewarding things about coalition work is developing, growing and sustaining relationships. If we are honest, relationships can also be challenging (some more than others!) 🙂 When we work with diverse relationships and engage with people who may think differently than we do, it’s only a matter of time before we will […]

We have all kinds of encouragement to build relationships from our boards, funders and coalition supporters. Occasionally, we will hear that we should “sustain” or “maintain” relationships. While both of these are important, we also need to talk about what happens in the “messy middle” of relationships that is critically important to maintain them. In

Coalition work is all about relationships. Although we may have the name of an “organization” listed as our member or partner, we do not work with an organization. In coalition relationships, just like any other relationship, we need to spend time together in order to understand, support and learn from one another. We will also

We are all on a journey. Whether you have been leading coalitions, teams or partnerships for a few weeks or 20+ years, you have developed practices, routines and rituals that set expectations for participation and engagement. If you have been doing this work for a while, your partners have expectations about how you will show

Whenever we develop a workplan or a coalition strategic plan, focusing on action and implementation is easy but finding time for reflection is difficult. Although we may include evaluation, many times it becomes a “check the box” type of activity. When our calendars get so busy that we are moving from one meeting to another

As coalition leaders, we can easily spend all of our time on meetings, projects, reports, plans, budgets and addressing other people’s needs that we rarely find any time to pause, reflect or rest. And we definitely do not have time to invest in ourselves. When we do invest in ourselves, we often focus on improving

In our coalition work and the rest of our lives, our culture supports constant productivity but doesn’t praise or support rest (or play). When we are constantly focused on checking one more thing off of our to-do list and not taking time to rest and pause, we will continue to live in a place of

You may have facilitated a fantastic online meeting where you engaged participants, made important decisions and made progress on your most important projects; however, the real test of a “good” meeting happens after the meeting is over. Once you have had a good meeting, it is critically important to follow-up as quickly as possible to

If we schedule every meeting for an hour and we fill up that time with conversation, we may never have a meaningful break and can easily experience meeting fatigue. In my experience, most of my colleagues and coalition members want to schedule one-hour meetings. While many meetings need to be an hour – or longer

As we continue to host online meetings, we have new opportunities to engage our participants utilizing both “old” and new “tools.” Not every tool is a good fit for every meeting. Considering the purpose and the participants, use these tools to maximize engagement and encourage participation. As someone who is a strong extrovert who is