Strengthening Your Community Coalition
Contents
Opioid Coalition Building
Coalitions Can...
- Conserve resources
- Achieve more widespread reach within a community than a single organization ever could attain
- Accomplish objectives beyond the scope of any single organization
- Have greater credibility than individual organizations
- Provide a forum for sharing information
- Provide a range of advice and perspectives to lead the agency
- Foster personal satisfaction and help members to understand their jobs in a broader perspective
- Foster cooperation between grassroots organizations, community members, and diverse sectors of large organizations.[2]
Steps to Building a Coalition
- Analyze objectives and determine whether a coalition should be formed
- Recruit the right people. Think outside of the box to recruit a wide variety of stakeholders from different sectors
- Devise a set of preliminary objectives and activities
- Convene the coalition
- Anticipate necessary resources.
- Define success to your coalition. What are you measuring? What are your targets? How and when should they be reached?
- Maintain coalition vitality. This can be done through meetings, events, and strong communication
- Make improvements through evaluation. Actions done by coalitions should be fluid. Once targets are reached, the actions being taken may change. Consider how actions need to change if targets are not being reached. Don't collect data for the sake of collecting data. Evaluate what this information means and use it to understand and maybe even adapt your actions, measures, and targets to fit the current situation.[3]
- Find the right program for your community. Blueprints Programs for Healthy Youth Development have a database of over 1,400 programs already established. See what's working for other communities at their website.
Coalition Examples
Fed Up! Coalition to End the Opioid Epidemic
Platform:
- Take all measures necessary to ensure that opioids and other controlled drugs are prescribed more cautiously.
- FDA must:
- Prohibit marketing of opioids for conditions where risks outweigh benefits
- Consult its advisory committees before approving any new opioids.
- Add an upper dose and a suggested duration of use on opioid labels.
- Designate naloxone an over-the-counter drug.
- Ensure that abuse-deterrent opioid formulations are NOT marketed as less addictive.
- DEA must mandate prescriber education, free of pharmaceutical industry bias, for all DEA registrants who intend to prescribe more than a 3-day supply of opioids.
- HHS, DEA, and Congress should immediately reduce barriers to buprenorphine treatment.
- Congress must increase funding for evidence-based addiction treatment.
- Congress must incentivize states to mandate prescriber use of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs.
Coalition to Optimize the Management of Pain Associated with Surgery (COMPAS)
Mission: To educated all those involved in pain management decisions about acute pain management strategies that minimize the need for opioids.
COMPAS also will provide education on how to implement multimodal analgesic strategies and how to measure success for patients and hospitals alike.
Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA)
CADCA is the premier membership-based non-profit organization representing adult and youth coalition leaders throughout the United States and internationally - all working to make their communities safe, healthy, and drug-free. CADCA's model for community change represents a comprehensive, evidence-based, multi-sector approach to reduce underage and binge drinking, tobacco, illicit drugs and the abuse of medicines.
Recruiting Non-Traditional Partners
Real Estate Agents
Funeral Home Directors
Anyone that has family member who passes away and comes through, funeral parlors can talk about safe disposal of unused drugs, prescription drug drop-boxes, and drop-box locations.[6]
Veterinarians
Faith Communities
Programs like One Body Collaboratives and software likeMeet the Need can help engage and equip churches to participate in their communities.
See the Opioid Epidemic Practical Toolkit: Helping Faith and Community Leaders Bring Hope and Healing to Our Communities for ideas about what your faith community can do.
Tips for Reaching Out
- Important to build relationships[8]
- Find the gatekeeper - who is someone that other people will trust[9]
Partners and Their Potential Roles
- Local Health Departments
- Hospitals
- Pharmacists
- Primary Care Physicians
- Pain Specialists or Pain Centers
- Nurses
- Health Plans and Insurance Companies
- Local Law Enforcement
- Corrections
- Treatment Providers
- Faith Communities
Tools & Resources
TR - Strengthen the Coalition to Reduce Opioid Abuse
Scorecard Building
Potential Objective Details
Potential Measures and Data Sources
Actions to Take
Actions for Individuals
Resources to Investigate
More RTI on Opioid Coalitions
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SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT: [fill out table below]
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