Title: Forming a Formal Coalition of Youth Organizations

Introduction

Successful collaboration is challenging. Peter Raducha and USA national youth organization Youth in Action developed a functional partnership among almost two dozen national organizations. The project still needs to improve but was successful in helping groups recognize their strengths and weakness and understand how best to work together. The following text was written by Mr. Raducha in order to help guide other youth organizations through the process of facilitating collaboration.

Mission

The mission of this project is to guide youth organizations through the process of developing effective and meaningful collaboration.

The Youth Engagement Alliance

The following contains a list of suggestions towards the development of an alliance to improve youth engagement, citizenship and communities. It is based on a model of collaboration that brings together youth, youth organizations and funders to achieve this common objective by sharing organizational strengths and staff to achieve a common purpose.

A) Hold a collaborative, professionally facilitated 3 day meeting with key organizations in youth engagement field. Determine common areas and objectives (via consensus), goals and time line towards improving youth engagement and citizenship.

*Note-Each organization must have at least one youth staff representative in attendance.

B) Develop interactive vision, mission and plan of action.

C) Match youth organizational strengths to areas of need in agreed upon plan of action. Determine prospective roles and responsibilities from aligned organizations. Determine time, staffing and funding needs to carry out each component of an interactive plan. Create consensus on plan and funding requirements for specified time period.

D) Match funding needs with each foundation's mission and objectives to set up a collaborative funding strategy to accomplish the agreed upon plan. Commit staff and resources to carry out the plan (per organization). Using development staff from each participating organization, create joint proposals to foundation groups to secure funds for each required area of the plan (can involve recommended for-profit organizations to fulfill one or more elements of the plan).

E) Involve/co-develop neutral technical assistance/management team to link funders with organizational alliance. This team oversees Implementation of mission and objectives and reports to all aligned organizations and foundations to assure forward momentum and timely fulfillment of agreed upon objectives, roles and responsibilities. It is also responsible for providing overall evaluation of the joint project(s). The process should be built in up front as part of strategic planning sessions and it should include training/capacity building for each organization and the group as a whole. It includes assistance with the development of each organization's specific processes, outcomes and long term impact/evaluation methods. New staff should be identified from recommendations of participating Foundations.

F) Create an arbitration team. It can be from legal cousel or participating organizaions and/ or foundations. It is important in case one or more organizations fail to fulfill their roles and responsibilities and require removal/replacement. This group will only operate as a backup or replacement for the technical assistance/management team (mentioned above).

G) Hold Quarterly and/or bi-annual Executive director meetings to discuss progress, successes, shortcomings and ways to better achieve the plan to improve youth engagement. Again, at least one youth staff for each organization must be in attendance or in phone conference.

H) Hold a joint event to announce objectives, results, highlights of the plan and results to date.

I) Make a Bi-Annual report back (while the joint-project is in progress) to all funders with special emphasis on results generated from leverage and synergy of collaborative effect.

J) Make a final report generated from the technical assistance/management team with input from one representative from each organization. Highlight successes, shortcomings, areas to be improved etc. towards a second collaborative funding cycle to improve youth engagement. In other words, learn from the mistakes, and know that adjustments/improvements will be necessary (including adding/removing organizational partners), and keep our sites on the overarching goal of improving youth engagement and citizenship.