Coalition Work Research Articles

Building Collective Power to Advance Maternal and Child Health Equity: Lessons from the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition.

The New Orleans Maternal Child Health Coalition convenes to support and amplify the work of New Orleans-based individuals and organizations working to reduce disparities and protect the health of birthing families in the New Orleans area. The objectives of this qualitative study were to identify successes, challenges, and areas of growth for the Coalition and develop broadly generalizable recommendations for similar groups seeking to mobilize and advance health equity in their own communities. Using purposive sampling, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 key informants from within and outside of the Coalition. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and data was analyzed using inductive and deductive coding approaches. We identified themes relating to the barriers and facilitators to the maintenance of the Coalition, as well as opportunities to advance the mission of the Coalition. Some themes included structural- and systemic-level barriers to achieving the mission, varying perspectives on the effectiveness of the Coalition, opportunities to enhance the operations of the Coalition's work, and opportunities to involve other individuals, particularly those with lived experience, and non-MCH related sectors in Coalition's work. As the maternal health crisis continues, coalitions like the New Orleans MCH Coalition provide a vehicle to amplify the mission-driven work of people and organizations. Recommendations put forth by the Coalition can also be utilized by coalitions in other jurisdictions.

Adapting rapid ethnographic research in an evolving emergency: Generalizable lessons in resilience

AbstractTo ensure the real‐world utility of emergency ethnographic research, plans must evolve as circumstances shift. The CommuniVax coalition's work provides a case study of this scenario. Using rapid ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and other methods, the six local CommuniVax teams sought to comprehend and improve COVID‐19 vaccine access and uptake. To this end, they responded nimbly to varying community priorities, the pandemic's shifting nature, evolving bureaucratic mechanisms, and political fluctuations. This paper provides specific examples of such instances, highlighting some of the critical decision points that emerged, demonstrating the flexibility needed for effective rapid community‐based research, reiterating the importance of a bottom‐up orientation, and elaborating on the trade‐offs that occurred in decision‐making regarding how best to move forward. This discussion is relevant to tackling any narrowly defined research problem, emergency‐related or not, as well as research seeking actionable answers to specific questions that have practical bearing on human lives.

Civil society’s development in Tunisia’s democratization process, 2011-2021

ABSTRACT In the years following the 2011 overthrow of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the international democracy promotion community enthusiastically embraced Tunisia’s burgeoning civil society. Ten years later, however, when the democratically-elected president Kais Saied began to dismantle the country’s democratic institutions, civil society largely stood on the side-lines. This paper examines what happened during the intervening decade that left civil society’s international funders so disappointed. The paper finds that three key changes over time help explain the gap between donor expectations and what civil society ultimately delivered: the development of an antagonistic and uncooperative relationship between civil society and the state; differences between Tunisian civil society activists and international donors on the types of issues they prioritized and other matters; and an overall lack of trust and lack of cohesion among civil society activists in working towards common goals – despite some successful coalition work around particular legislation – which came on full display after July 2021. This paper contributes to studies of Tunisian civil society’s development process in the context of its transition experience between 2011 and 2021, and of how and why donors continue to ‘miss the mark’ in their efforts to support civil society as a means of promoting democracy.

Urban food governance without local food: missing links between Czech post-socialist cities and urban food alternatives

AbstractFood is becoming an increasingly important issue in the urban context. Urban food policies are a new phenomenon in Czechia, where urban food alternatives to the current food regime are promoted by food movements or take the form of traditional self-provisioning. This paper examines how urban food governance in Prague and Brno is constituted based on the municipalities’ relations with actors engaged in urban food alternatives. We argue that prioritizing aspects of local food system transformation compliant with the status quo is non-systemic and implies a fragmentation of urban food alternatives based on different levels of social capital and radicality. We conceptualize urban food alternatives as values-based modes of production and consumption and focus on values that guide urban food governance in its participatory and territorial interplay with the actors of urban food alternatives. Our analysis reveals that the values underpinning the two cities’ progressive food policies do not match reality on the ground. We propose four types of relations between the two examined cities and aspects of the local food system transformation. Aspects compliant with the status quo, such as food waste reduction and community gardening are embraced, whereas those requiring more public intervention, such as public procurement, short supply chains, or the protection of cultivable land are disregarded, degraded, or, at most, subject to experimentation as part of biodiversity protection. Chances for a successful transformation of the local food system under such governance are low but can be increased by strengthening social capital and coalition work among urban food alternatives.

Political Asian America

This article examines the history of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the organization that in the late 1960s originated a new identity, “Asian American,” and a new social movement, “the Asian American Movement” (AAM). Despite its significance, the scholarly coverage of AAPA has been rather cursory. This essay presents the most extensively researched study of AAPA and is the first published article based on AAPA’s papers at UC Berkeley, the newly released FBI files on AAPA, and extended interviews. It develops the concept of “Political Asian America” that, as constituted by AAPA, embraces ideas that are at once pan-Asian and Third Worldist, local and global, and antiracist and anti-imperialist. The article examines AAPA’s politics and practices through (1) developing the concept of Political Asian America; (2) examining AAPA’s intertwined goals of Asian American liberation and Third World radicalism, while raising complex questions about the tensions in coalitional work when Asians and Blacks are racialized differently; and (3) studying AAPA’s internationalist politics that pivoted away from a domestic analysis of race alone. In addition, the secondary aim of the article explores a brief history of the growth of AAPA chapters to show AAPA infused themes of Political Asian America into the nationwide AAM. While short-lived, AAPA’s politics continued to influence Asian American activism to the present through the ongoing organizing of its former members and its ideas that traveled across time and space.

THE MOVING FORWARD NURSING HOME COALITION: A CALL TO ACTION TO SUPPORT NURSING HOME REFORM

Abstract The Moving Forward Nursing Home Quality Coalition advances the goals outlined by the 2022 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report aimed at improving nursing home (NH) quality. Over two years, Coalition committee members – along with a network of national leaders, nursing home residents, and the general public – will develop, test and promote action plans that will improve the way the United States finances, delivers, and regulates care in Nursing Homes. The Coalition is comprised of a steering committee and working committees that align with and advance the seven NASEM goals including; 1) advancing delivery of person-centered care; 2) ensuring a well-prepared and compensated workforce; 3) increasing financial transparency and accountability; 4) creating a rational and robust financing system; 5) designing more effective and responsive quality assurance; 6) expanding quality measurement and continuous quality improvement; and 7) adopting health information technology. Coalition committees have engaged in three of four phases of their two-year work plan including convening stakeholders to prioritize and develop action plans to test and promote change. Throughout the work, committee collaboration has ensured action plans are refined and expanded in synergistic ways to shape state and national policy. This presentation will provide an overview of the broader Coalition work and give context for the other presentations which provide an example of collaborative work leading to proposed recommendations for critical policy and regulatory change around person-centered care planning.

Intersectional Politics of the International Women’s Strike

ABSTRACT Increasingly, progressive organizing faces pressures to adopt intersectional forms of solidarity. Intersectional solidarity consists of an ongoing process of creating ties and coalitions across social group differences by negotiating power asymmetries. This approach to organizing is not a static outcome that movements achieve and preserve. Movements that seek to enact intersectional solidarity must engage in ongoing struggles to sustain it. This article focuses on the case of the International Women’s Strike (IWS) of 2017 and 2018 in Spain. We use this case to identify circumstances that can lead to failures to sustain intersectional solidarity and the consequences of the ruptures that follow. In the case of the International Women’s Strike, initial calls to organize around the subject of women and women’s labor mobilized broad support in 2017. Black women in Spain affiliated with a group known as Afroféminas called on expanding the subject of local IWS mobilization to center the experiences of Black subjects. In a broadly circulated announcement, Afroféminas called out this experience and announced that they would not participate in the International Women’s Strike. The case of the International Women’s Strike in Spain showcases an instance under which the search for intersectional solidarity can generate broad intersectional consciousness even when it leads to separate organizing tracks. The development of autonomous Black activist spaces informed the continuity and deepening of intersectional consciousness but limited the magnitude of the praxis (e.g. Afroféminas did not participate in the broader praxis that generated disruptive tactics and mobilized larger masses). In choosing to consider racism as a form of violence within one system of capitalist exploitation, limited notions of subjectivity dominated IWS. On the other hand, Afroféminas’ withdrawal of participation limited the scope of praxis and raised questions about the representativeness and inclusiveness of the broader movement. Thus, intersectional and oppositional consciousness can emerge from the withdrawal of intersectionally marginalized groups from coalition work while challenging the enactment of mass intersectional praxis.

Community-Driven Concepts to Support TPC Coalition Building in a Post- Roe World

As threats against reproductive autonomy increase nationally, coalition building serves as an essential practice to advocate for the needs of reproductive persons. This experience report focuses on the work of coalition building for those seeking access to alternative family building services and fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization, which rely upon the availability of donor embryo/s. Our report sheds light on the often unseen moments essential to supporting community-driven coalitional efforts, identifies concepts to guide coalitional practice in technical and professional communication, and underscores the value of slowness in coalitional work despite the increasing threats limiting access to reproductive care.

A Kitchen-Table Talk on Disrupting and Dreaming Beyond the Prescribed Curriculum

This kitchen-table talk is grounded in Black and Chicana feminist traditions, with the facilitator, Yvette M. Regalado, senior scholar Drs. Farima Pour-Khorshid, Timothy San Pedro, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Mariana Souto-Manning, and community member Jessica Martell sit down to have a critical and authentic conversation around the real work that is being done to disrupt and move beyond the harmful prescribed curriculum. These conversationalists begin with an ofrenda, an offering, that connects and inspires their work. Then the discussion moves into types of coalition work done in our communities, and finally, we discuss our hopes and dreams for the future of education. So, sit down and dream with us as we discuss the consciousness of (re)defining equity and excellence in education.

In solidarity: The coalitional work of gender justice and language education

In solidarity: The coalitional work of gender justice and language education

The LSU AgCenter Healthy Communities Initiative: Community-Participatory Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change

The LSU AgCenter Healthy Communities Initiative: Community-Participatory Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change

On Dammed Landscapes and Invasive Infrastructures

In this article I turn my attention to two hydropower plants, HPP Dabar and HPP Nevesinje, part of the massive Upper Horizons scheme, which is currently the largest infrastructural project in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Built by the China Energy Gezhouba and financed through a large loan from the Export–Import Bank of China, the enterprise forms a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an unprecedented global development programme that involves nearly half of the world’s countries. The project is being built on the Zalomka, one of the largest sinking rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the world, and its potential impacts are hotly debated and may be extremely far reaching. As Rob Nixon has argued, the mega-dam projects in many postcolonial nations have ‘depended’ on both physical structure and metaphorical discourse on ‘submergence’: of ‘disposable people and ecosystems, but also on the submerged structures of dependence that lay beneath the flamboyant engineering miracles’ (2011: 167). Drawing on these reflections and insights from the energy humanities, blue humanities and infrastructure studies, I consider dams as concretizations that ‘harness, produce, materialise, and symbolise’ (neo)colonial power relations (Max Haiven (2013) ‘The dammed of the Earth: Reading the mega-dam for the political unconscious of globalization’, in Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis (eds) Thinking with Water, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press). Thus, from this perspective, this infrastructural project could be seen not only as ‘Chinese invasion’ through the Belt and Road Initiative, but also an invasion of nature by the nation state, often constituted as the necessary means to pursue a view of national and regional integration towards globalized modernity. Finally, I discuss an invasion of the dominant narrative by resistance, turning attention to the anti-damming intersectional and coalitional work in the Balkans, which includes protests, marches, forums, artistic interventions, and legal pressure aimed at stopping both local and the Chinese state-owned companies from dredging and blocking the rivers. Intervening in the normalized view of the extractive zone – the article argues – these acts of resistance form part of a broad struggle against what the anthropologist Anne Spice calls ‘invasive infrastructures’ (2018) that numerous communities are fighting against in the region (‘Fighting invasive infrastructures’, Environment and Society 9: 40–56).

DecolonialMovidas: María Lugones's Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through Cosmologies

Decolonial<i>Movidas</i>: María Lugones's Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through Cosmologies

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

This article engages movement as a methodology for understanding the creative coalition work that we carried out for a project series called Into the Light (ITL) that used research from university archives to mount a museum exhibition and then develop an interactive public education site that counters histories and ongoing realities of colonial eugenics and their exclusionary ideas of what it means to be human in Canada’s educational institutions. We address different movement practices, both those initiated by ableist-colonial forces to destroy difference and by our coalition of co-resistors to affirm difference. We apply a decolonizing and Anishinaabe philosophical lens alongside a feminist disability-informed neomaterialist and dance studies one to theorize examples of ITL’s “choreographies of co-resistance”. Anishinaabe knowledge practices refuse and thus interfere with colonial-eugenic practices of erasure while enacting an ethic of self-determination and mutual respect for difference. The ripple effect of this decolonizing and difference-affirming interference reverberates through our words and moves at varying tempos through our bodies—traveling through flesh, holding up at bones, and passing through watery, stretchy connective tissue pathways. These are our choreographies of co-resistance as actions of mattering and world-building.

A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

Abstract: This article offers a specific methodology: an autoethnography of decolonial feminist witnessing to invite the reader into the world of the praxis of navigating institutional spaces recognizing where these entrances and departures are imperfect, messy, violent, and filled with resistance. The author offers examples of coalitional work through local and transnational experiences that were fostered through survivance in colonial systems. Recognizing how multiple institutions shape people's lives, this article highlights lived exemplars where the author traverses academic and legal institutions. The author reflects on witnessing in the courts as a legal expert witness. The role of narrative and witnessing is central to a decolonial feminist praxis; therefore, the author reflects on a state-wide consortium to end violence, where opportunities to narrate stories were facilitated in a performance. To conclude, the author reflects the self-in-coalition as a response to the material violence of coloniality in institutions.

Digital Public Policy: New Priorities for Nonprofits

Abstract For decades, tax policy has shaped the outer boundaries of the policy agenda for the nonprofit sector. In this research note, we argue that the breadth and implications of the sector’s digital dependencies necessitate an expanded policy agenda that includes the regulatory domains defining digital spaces. Digital policy issues matter existentially to the sector writ-large, and thus deserve greater attention from scholars, funders, nonprofit leaders, and policy makers. We make this case by drawing on findings from two recent reports. The first one evaluates awareness of digital policies in the nonprofit sector. The second explores the role of nonprofits on digital policy issues during the first year of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Overall, we highlight the many digital policy issues that matter across the sector, and we underline why opportunities for future advocacy and coalition work are numerous, diverse, and existential.

An Antiracism Community-Based Participatory Research With Organizations Serving Immigrant and Marginalized Communities, Including Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders in the United States Pacific Northwest: Qualitative Description Study With Key Informants.

Asian American (AA) community leaders, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NH/PI) community leaders, and allies in the United States Pacific Northwest expressed concern that there are families and children from AA communities and NH/PI communities who experience and witness acts of xenophobia and racism. This can cause racial trauma. The long-time practice of aggregating AA and NH/PI data contributes to erasure and makes it challenging to advance health equity, such as allocating resources. According to AAPI Data's long-awaited report in June 2022, there are over 24 million AAs and 1.6 million NHs/PIs in the United States, growing by 40% and 30%, respectively, between 2010 and 2020. Philanthropic investments have not kept up with this substantive increase. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine emphasized the need for effective partnerships to advance the health and well-being of individuals and communities in antiracism and system-level research. The aim of this community-based participatory research qualitative description study was to identify perceptions and experiences regarding racial discrimination, race-based stress, and racial trauma; intergenerational healing and resiliency; and sharing the body with science from key informants of an academic and community partnership to inform antiracism coalition work. This partnership includes academic researchers and community leaders from community-based organizations and a health care organization serving immigrant and marginalized communities, including AAs and NHs/PIs in the United States Pacific Northwest. In total, 10 key informants joined 1 of 2 participatory group discussions via videoconference for 2 hours in 2022. We used a semistructured and open-ended group interview guide. A qualitative participatory group-level assessment was conducted with the key informants and transcribed. Interpretations and meanings of the main points and the main themes were reflected upon, clarified, and verified with the key informants in real time. The field note-based data transcripts were manually coded using conventional content analysis. Reflexivity was used. There were 6 main themes: prejudice plus power in racism definition and working in solidarity to counter lateral oppression/false sense of security, microaggression as multilayers, "not assimilationist by nature" and responding differently to white superiority, intergenerational- and identity-related trauma, what is healing among People of Color and through a lens of resiliency and intergenerational connection and knowledge, and mistrust and fear in the research and health care systems surrounding intentions of the body. The themes highlight the importance of internal and intergenerational healing from racial trauma and the need for solidarity among communities of color to combat white supremacy and colonization. This work was foundational in an ongoing effort to dismantle racism and uplift the community voice through a cross-sector academic and community partnership to inform antiracism coalition work.

DIS/POSSESSORY DATA POLITICS: From Tenant Screening to Anti‐Eviction Organizing

AbstractIn this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice‐based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti‐eviction campaigns. This has been particularly important in the wake of corporate landlordism in which evictions are executed through opaque shell companies. Tenant‐made tools attempt to undo this uneven landscape in which landlords own troves of data about tenants, but in which tenants don't even know their own landlords’ names. While opening up all eviction data to the public might appear to be an antidote, doing so can also provide screening companies with even more data to use in blocklisting. In my examination of this conjuncture, I forge the analytic of dis/possessory data politics to map out the violence of tenant screening data predation while also problematizing the technoliberal impulse to open up all eviction data. Yet dis/possessory data politics also attest to care and coalition work marked by practices of possession beyond logics of theft, banishment and techno solutionism.

Instituting Racial Equity: The Allegheny County Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health Initiative.

In 2018, The Live Well Allegheny: Lifting Wellness for African Americans (LWA2) Initiative was developed to support six priority, Black communities in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to address health equity in chronic disease. The LWA2 coalition members participated in ongoing anti-racism and racial equity sessions with a nationally recognized anti-racist facilitation team. The sessions included a 2-days experience in January 2020 along with follow up meetings throughout 2020. Surveys were administered to understand their perceptions related to anti-racism and oppression and subsequent actions as a result of the sessions. Additionally, we conducted nine in-depth interviews with organizational partners (January -May 2020) to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the coalition and inform future activities. Ten participants completed the post session surveys. Seven out of 10 survey respondents felt they had a good understanding of how oppression (racism, sexism, capitalism) influenced their life and work. However, the majority indicated needing the tools to implement anti-racist strategies in their work. The in-depth interviews with organizational partners revealed that racial equity was of concern to all partners but there was variability in intentionality around racial equity as a core element of each organization's mission, goals and subsequent actions. As a result of the interviews, coalition members developed a racial equity statement and theory of change for implementation in the coalition work and within individual organizations along with a plan for implementing an equity audit of the coalition. Coalitions of this kind should be intentional about implementing continuous strategies related to anti-racism for structural changes toward achieving racial equity in their overall work.