Coalition We Must?

There is a great deal of talk around building quality programs and presenting a united front to funders. In the funder community - and amongst government officials - there is an increasing call by the state and city for organizations to stop their "siloing" and to come together in increased collaborations - or coalitions.

Coalitions are built on common purpose. Despite differences in special interests and approaches, everyone is gathered to bring resources to children and develop quality environments - yet these days it seems hard to keep coalitions together as so many of us are working from the same limited and proscriptive funding sources. How can we both compete and work together? Perhaps it was not a good idea of make non-profits more "corporate" in making funding and the culture of organizations more competitive. Along with competition comes... not working together but working for self interest and organizational survival.

True coalitions are built from common practices and good ones are those that agree on common language and concepts and can martial resources around concepts that hold true to the work on the ground as they do in expressing the complexities at the administrative level. Coalition we must. Yet, where are we with building those coalitions when out-of-school time field cannot agree on what the field offers as a product. We seem not to be able to agree how to measure the quality of that service or which organization gets to set standards, competencies, and the direction of the field (this had been done through committees at times, but committees grind so slowly the field conditions change before we get the first public draft of whatever is being... "committee'd".

Coalition we must. However, we need to do some damage control in our field - and non-profits in general. The attitude of the free market has gotten us into a great deal of trouble. Out need for competition has led to less cooperation and more duplication of services, our love of free will has led to a rogue attitude of self-interest, and accountability seems something fostered on the non-for-profit community because it has no use in other more lucrative industries. Today, perhaps we can again capture the excitement of a new field of work and connect to our like-minded friends doing this work with us and turn a new page in Out-of-School Time as well as breath a little life back into the Great Society we have allowed to falter and may yet be able to rebuild.