Building Alliances for Social Change

Joan Almon

Coordinator, US Alliance for Childhood

In Goethe’s fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily a young prince dies tragically. All the people around him look to a wise old man for help. He says, “Whether I can help I know not. An individual helps not, but he who combines with others at the right time.” 

Individual voices can awaken our awareness by their moral strength. Rachel Carson awakened a generation with her book Silent Spring. But it takes an environmental movement made up of many individuals and organizations to change laws and practices.

Eight years ago I began talking with other teachers and health professionals about the serious decline I was seeing in children’s overall health and well-being. I found that many were seeing the same patterns. All were concerned. All were active as individuals in their separate fields but felt helpless at the enormity of the problem. Each decade brought emerging health problems of which childhood obesity is just the latest. We asked ourselves, what if we worked together as an alliance? Would that make a difference?

That was the beginning of the Alliance for Childhood, formed in February 1999. The Alliance is a small nonprofit organization, and the issues we have tackled are huge. Nevertheless, the Alliance has made a real difference in awakening awareness of the plight of childhood, the underlying causes of the problems, and even some solutions. By bringing together leading figures in education, medicine, and other fields we have gained the attention and respect of the media, the public, and to some extent the policymakers.

In an alliance like ours the function of leadership is clear. Decisions about strategy and action are made by our small board and our officers. We turn to our many partners for help and advice on the issues, as well as their signatures on position statements. As individuals, they can join a particular effort or not, as they see fit. It is a relatively easy way to work with others. 

The next stage of collaborative work is more challenging but brings greater long-term benefits. It is the development of coalitions or working partnerships around specific issues. Here all partners are equal and there is not one guiding organization. Choosing specific objectives for a coalition is important, for generally individuals and organizations have some areas of overlap in their missions but many areas of difference. One must build such a coalition around shared goals. 

The great challenge for coalitions is to resolve questions of leadership and decision making. The magnitude of the problem was brought home to us by one of our public relations advisers. Her firm specializes in working with nonprofit organizations, but she told us they will no longer work with coalitions because the decision-making process is too complex and unclear. 

If a coalition can resolve difficult questions of leadership, strategy building, decision making, and funding, then it can be highly effective in bringing about social change, for it carries the full clout of all its participating members. It is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. 

There is a further stage of collaborative work that the Alliance for Childhood has not succeeded in developing yet but sees as an important aim. To achieve real social change one eventually needs to sit at the table with all the stakeholders—those whose aims are similar to ours and those whose aims are quite different. If one’s goal, for example, is to remove soft drinks from schools and replace them with more healthful choices that are available without pouring rights contracts or marketing aimed at children, then one needs to bring activists, school officials, health advisers, and beverage companies together to discuss what constitutes a healthy drink and how they are to be sold. 

One might call this stage of collaboration the building of “associative” relationships. I know of local associative endeavors for sustainable agriculture, for instance, but do not yet know of examples in the field of childhood. I would welcome hearing of such endeavors. 

Joan Almon (joan.almon@verizon.net) is a former Waldorf kindergarten teacher and is currently Coordinator of the Alliance for Childhood in the United States.