The most important question to ask yourself when action planning

🍁Happy Fall🍁 

It’s the season of sweaters and apple picking and pumpkin spice. 

And my personal favorite - the changing colors of the leaves. There is this incredible tree in our neighborhood, visible from our front door, that turns brilliant shades of yellow and orange and red over the course of the transition from summer to fall. The very top of the tree has just started to change color. 

Over the course of the next several weeks, the entire tree will gradually change color until it’s brilliantly aflame, and then the leaves will start to fall, until eventually the tree is left bare. It’s a transition I love watching. 

One of the amazing things about Fall colors - every leaf is unique. The shape, the shades, the imperfections. They’re each adding unique value and, ultimately, when we look at the tree as a whole, creating a sum that’s greater than its parts. 

This is exactly how I want us to think of our coalitions and their membership. 

And it leads to what I think is the single most important question to ask yourself during coalition action planning - 

What’s our unique value add? 

What do we collectively bring to the table that other organizations/agencies/actors in our community don’t? 

What can we do that others are not doing and cannot do? 

What gap can we fill?

Grounding your action planning in this question about unique value add is vital. 

I’ve been working with two very different coalitions recently, and in both, we’ve intentionally rooted action planning efforts in this question. 

There is a school mental health coalition where we’ve articulated this unique value add as the three prongs of our mission statement - and that mission statement is now driving our action planning, both for the coalition as a whole, as well as for specific pilot projects. 

There is a rural health coalition where we’ve honed in on mobile care as a key focus area. We’re still in the process of articulating our unique value add, but we’re centering that as the key goal of our initial information gathering with mobile care providers in the region. We’re aiming to understand their experiences, challenges, and opportunities, and get their direct input about where our coalition can add unique value to what’s already happening in the community. Is it as a convener? As an advocate? As a data gathering and sharing entity? As something else? To be determined, but the answer(s) will drive our action planning, and ensure that whatever we end up doing is actually valuable and not duplicative or counterproductive to existing efforts. 

Along with the question of what our unique value add is as a coalition, a couple important bonus questions to consider: 

• What can we create that’s greater than the sum of its parts? The whole point of a coalition is to bring together multiple entities for collective action - so what can we create by working together that’s more than what we could accomplish simply working in parallel?

• What is each organization and individual’s unique role within the coalition? The key to recruitment and retention of coalition members is ensuring they have clear roles and responsibilities that they are uniquely suited for. 

So, as we commence this Fall season, I invite you to explore or revisit the question of what your unique value add is - as an individual, as an organization, and as a coalition. Send me your thoughts!

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