Building Collaborative Capacity in Community Coalitions: A Review and Integrative Framework

Abstract

This article presents the results of a qualitative analysis of 80 articles, chapters, and practitoners' guides focused on collaboration and coalition functioning. The purpose of this review was to develop an integrative framework that captures the core competencies and processes needed within collaborative bodies to facilitate their success. The resulting framework for building collaborative capacity is presented. Four critical levels of collaborative capacity--member capacity, relational capacity, organizational capacity, and programmatic capacity--are described and strategies for building each type are provided. The implications of this model for practitioners and scholars are discussed.

Strategies Employed by Inner-City Activists to Reduce Alcohol-Related Problems and Advance Social Justice

“…Grassroots mobilization was generally described as central to all other strategies, which included creation or enforcement of laws, meeting with elected officials, media advocacy, working with police/law enforcement, education and training, direct action, changing community norms, and negotiating with store owners and community members. The centrality of grassroots mobilization, including creating a shared sense of purpose, fostering collaboration, building relational capacity, and leadership development have been noted in other literature reviewing effective community coalitions (Foster-Fishman, Berkowitz, Lounsbury, Jacobson, & Allen, 2001;Zakocs & Edwards, 2006). At the same time, the specific opportunities for building leadership skills, such as documenting and reporting on local billboard placement and content or training for testimony at a public hearing, were highly linked to local context.…”

Advancing Health Promotion Priorities: Stories of Capacity Building from the Canadian Heart Health Initiative (CHHI)

“…These were the realities. Health promotion and capacity literature has increasingly reflected the critical role of external contextual and policy environment factors in influencing health promotion efforts (Green and Kreuter 2005;Foster-Fishman et al 2001). Each of the provincial projects studied contributed to building capacity through relationships, by tapping into existing structures and organizations and by developing new productive unions that shared joint agendas for primary prevention.…”

Meanings, drivers, and motivations for community-based conservation in Latin America

“…From the perspective of the competence need, motivations to participate in conservation can be related to economic values, such as the need to improve natural resource management by obtaining monetary rewards at the lowest possible cost (Steg and Vlek 2009), and to noneconomic values, such as the need to be successful in ensuring the maintenance of resources for future generations. Motivations related to building social capital are associated with positive attitudes toward collaboration and the individual's desire to maintain cultural traditions and compliance of customary conservation rules, which are embedded in broader social norms (Foster-Fishman et al 2001). In this case, the individual's behavior is influenced by the extent to which such norms approve or disapprove of conservationist behavior (Steg and Vlek 2009).…”