A Coalition That Worked

Abstract

Everyone who has done political organizing for some time knows that building coalitions that work is difficult. I had not been doing political organizing for a very long time when I took the job as Health Care for America Now (HCAN) State Director for Pennsylvania. So I really didn’t know what I was getting in to. I had done some work in a few coalitions, and one of them—which I’ll talk about in a moment—was dysfunctional. But I hadn’t recognized that; if dysfunction is not the norm for coalitions, then disagreement, conflict, and tension certainly is. And yet coalitions are indispensable to issue advocacy, especially but not only on major and difficult issues like health care reform.