Assessing the Capacity of Community Coalitions to Advocate for Change Panel at the Aspen Institute

Research has shown that high-capacity coalitions are more successful in effecting community change. While a number of coalition assessment tools have been developed, documentation is scarce regarding how they are implemented, how the results are used, and whether they are predictive of coalition success in collaborative community change efforts. Developed for a health promotion initiative of a major health foundation, this tool is designed to assess coalition progress in eight key areas across twelve different community coalitions, over the course of a three year initiative. The session focused on a coalition assessment tool that was designed by Innovation Network to assess changes in coalition capacity over time. We shared lessons learned from the first year of the initiative about developing and deploying the assessment tool, as well as what these tools can–and can’t–tell you about a coalition’s capacity in conducting community change work. In addition we shared how information collected from this assessment can be communicated back to the coalitions using data visualization approaches to effectively communicate the data.

Download the presentation handout here: http://www.innonet.org/resources/node/718