Strategies for Building Statewide Power: An Examination of State Multi-Issue Coalitions
By Ryan Alexander and Scott Nielson

Since the mid-1990s, an ever-larger portion of government funding and public-policy authority has moved from the federal level to the state level. Devolution, block grants and recent U.S. Supreme Court and federal court decisions have all given this movement momentum.

The move to the states presents funders and their grantees with both challenges and opportunities. Powerful and wealthy interests that dominate federal policy have surfaced at state capitals as well. Getting the attention of politicians and state agencies is increasingly difficult. In addition, many state legislatures and agencies are understaffed and ill-equipped to handle increased responsibility.

At the same time, this transfer of authority has yielded exciting political and social reforms at the state level. Our most successful experiments in education policy, environmental protection, consumer rights, health care reform, campaign finance reform, and community and economic development stem from state models.

These reforms often are the result of hard work by public interest organizations that have built political sophistication and organizational capacity by participating in permanent, multi-issue, and statewide coalitions. The state-based coalitions pursue statewide strategies, leverage scarce funding and pool expertise, to form an effective and democratic voice.

Many funders have been slow to respond to this shift. While well-supported community organizations successfully represent the interests of citizens at the local level, and national single-issue advocacy groups channel resources at the federal level, neither community nor national single-issue interest groups have developed sufficient power to be players in state capitals.

Funding Coalitions

Like many nonprofit groups, coalitions expend valuable time and energy searching for basic resources to carry out existing and potential programs. While the groups funded by State Strategies Fund (SSF) accomplish a great deal on budgets of $200,000-$250,000, an additional $75,000-$100,000 would increase their capacity and accomplishments several fold.

Increased and dependable support from national funders is especially crucial. In many states few if any local foundations support coalition work. Indeed, coalitions must often compete with their member organizations for local donors and individual membership. Structurally, the coalitions must insure the success of their constituent partners, and must place themselves at the end of the line when approaching funders. In a sparse funding climate, there often is little or no support from grantmakers to coalitions.

General-support grants are the life-blood of coalitions, allowing them to devote resources where needed and to respond to coalition partners rather than to funders. But if general support is not possible, grants earmarked for capacity building and leadership development are in high demand. Specific support in areas such as research development, list enhancement, and new technology, as well as multi-year grants, also enhance the groups' efficiency and effectiveness.

The Role of the State Strategies Fund

The State Strategies Fund (SSF), a project of the Proteus Fund in Amherst, MA, is a collaborative grantmaking program supporting innovative state-level strategies to increase citizen participation and advance political reform. The funded coalitions are neither grassroots organizations nor issue-based groups, although they work with many grassroots groups and most coalitions do significant issue work. The coalitions focus largely on strategies that involve and empower disadvantaged constituencies. SSF grants have proven effective in several areas:

• Dirigo Alliance and Maine Citizen's Leadership Fund
• Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action (MAPA)
• Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN)
• Wisconsin Citizen Action and Wisconsin Citizen Action Education Fund.

These coalitions reflect the unique political cultures of their home states, but they also share common characteristics. They are all permanent, statewide entities that define themselves by their values and points of view, rather than by any single issue, or any one constituency. All pursue multi-issue agendas, and enjoy remarkable breadth of representation and constituencies including labor, civil rights organizations, and environmentalists. The coalitions share three fundamental operating goals:

• Build broad-based and long-term growth in power and influence, instead of endlessly 'reinventing the wheel' in occasional, reactive and de facto coalitions.
• Take people and organizations from issues to agenda to vision - always rooted in practical politics.
• Join and cross-fertilize constituencies and their values and strategies - e.g. political groups and non-electoral, community organizing issue groups.

The coalitions supported by the SSF are all non-profits. They advocate legislation only to the extent permitted, and do not engage in electoral or partisan advocacy. Yet, SSF has found that the research, education, convening, and issue-development work of these non-profits was strongest where there was also a 501(c) 4 or a political action committee that could conduct activities foreclosed to non-profits. A 501(c) 4 organization allows membership organizations to conduct lobbying activities and engage in limited partisan political activity.

Coalitions have achieved new policy outcomes that were inconceivable even 15 years ago. In Nevada, for example, PLAN helped enact the groundbreaking Employment Non-Discrimination Act over powerful and well-funded adversaries in the Christian Right. In Minnesota, MAPA powered the successful campaign to curb corporate welfare by imposing public interest accountability on corporations receiving state tax credits.

Coalitions succeed when they can enroll and energize diverse constituencies willing to pool resources and work toward a common vision. Member organizations in turn benefit through the ongoing development of their capacity and influence.

Common Practices

While activities vary from state to state, all coalitions must begin by fostering permanent working relationships among diverse constituencies. Coalitions' ethic of collaboration is a major change for many member groups, which often are defined by their focus on specific issues. All coalitions share the following goals and practices.

Initiate citizen engagement strategies

Frequently, citizen engagement is the coalitions' most innovative and important work. For example, coalitions provide the structures, motivation, information, and organizing that can make voting an effective, satisfying and habitual act.

The WCAEF's Latino Vote 2000 Project, "Su Voto Es Su Voz," was the first non-partisan Latino registration and Get Out the Vote program in Milwaukee. WCAEF deployed a multi-organization program of voter registration, with rallies in targeted wards, neighborhood organizing, intensive phone calling, and literature drops. This initiative helped increase voter turnout in Milwaukee by 10 percent citywide over 1996, and 30 percent over 1996 in targeted wards.

List enhancement - using sophisticated databases to augment membership lists with demographic and voter data - is another tactic that leverages the coalitions' membership. An increasingly diverse range of funders supports list enhancement. This information is used to identify and mobilize volunteers, voters, activists, donors and other leaders. When several organizations cooperate on a list-enhancement project, organizational strength in specific areas can be assessed and coordinated.

Incubate new organizations

In many states, some disadvantaged and minority constituencies are not sufficiently organized to have an effective voice on issues that affect them. Increasingly, the coalitions start and nurture key constituency organizations. Once on their feet, many of these new organizations become invaluable coalition partners.

PLAN in Nevada linked powerful groups, such as labor and trial lawyers, with smaller organizations such as Latinos for Political Education and the Alliance for Workers' Rights, providing resources to start the organizations and make them effective partners. PLAN's director, Bob Fulkerson, said, "Seeding these organizations brought new voices to the work, helped deliver an important base to the coalitions, and shifted political power in the state."

Conduct public education campaigns

Coalitions use organizing, public education initiatives, leadership development, and other citizen engagement strategies to accomplish their objectives. Many efficient, innovative and successful tactics developed by state coalitions flow to regional and national levels. Debates have moved into the mainstream on health care, sprawl, corporate accountability, environmental protection, education, and affirmative action, among many others. Coalitions have a track record of focusing on issues that affect whole agendas and cut across diverse constituencies, such as tax reform and campaign-finance reform.

In ballot-initiative states such as Maine, Massachusetts, and Arizona, coalitions have passed sweeping campaign finance reform measures at the ballot box that would never have succeeded in the legislature. These initiatives bring new players to the table, attract resources to support citizen engagement and training, recruit new supporters and mobilize voters.

Improve organizational capacity and develop new leadership

Many coalitions make building the capacity of member organizations a top priority. They aim to develop leaders and provide training in many areas. In its recent Ten-Year Strategic Plan, PLAN decided not to increase its own staff, but instead to expand the capacity of its member groups in technology, resource development, media relations, campaign skills and constituency outreach. Funding the organizational capacity of coalitions is a cost-effective approach to reach multiple audiences and broaden the scope and impact of their work.

Conclusion

Properly funded and staffed, coalitions inject new energy into diverse populations, and innovative democratic practices into our civic life. They have entered and changed public debate on difficult but vital issues. Both community groups and national-issue organizations will look increasingly to coalitions to feed them ideas, leaders, new practices and technologies, and to test other innovative strategies. Without the coalitions, the energy of these two sectors rarely meet.

However, coalitions will not approach their potential without a significant increase in resources and attention from funders. As noted above, these groups accomplish remarkable feats with budgets between $200,000-$300,000. The future of American politics belongs, it appears, to those who operate most effectively in the states.

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