Toolkit for Building Coalitions for Resilience

Addressing the increasingly complex issues facing urban areas requires a city-wide civic process to build local coalitions to guide and foster work at the community level and tap the wide range of resources available in cities. This coalition-building process engages a wide set of interested stakeholders from local government, civil society organizations, the private sector, academia, and community volunteers to identify and pursue locally developed solutions for resilience and climate change adaptation.

This toolkit presents an approach for building coalitions in cities to build resilience. This approach will allow you to:

• Determine whether effective coalitions exist already to build resilience, and how to strengthen them;
• Identify key organizations that have contributions to make to a coalition
• Identify common goals for different stakeholders on the key issues to be addressed

Building coalitions is an ongoing process – you are never finished. Starting up a coalition, though, probably takes two to four months. At the end, you will have the beginnings of a collaboration that you can build on for years to come.