Future Directions

The future success of anti-drug coalitions will depend on their ability to adapt the lessons learned over the past decade to the needs and challenges of their communities.  While no over-arching coalition blueprint exists, these lessons point to six key elements of effectiveness that coalitions can incorporate to enhance stability and success. The skills needed to build and maintain a coalition are not inherent in the process;  the role of training in developing a viable, effective organization has become increasingly important.  The National Community Antidrug Coalition Institute, envisioned in the pending Drug Free Communities Act legislation, will provide the kind of training and technical assistance the field urgently needs.  Additionally, the legislation requires coalitions to procure local matching funds, enabling them to forge partnerships with businesses, foundations and community agencies necessary to sustain coalitions when Federal support ends.  To survive in the environment of accountability both in the public and private sector, community coalitions must be able to document their successes.  Process and outcome evaluations are critical components of any coalition strategy.

Future exploration should focus on matching coalition strategies to community resources, services, and drug problems.  Community assessments are essential to quantify community drug use and the associated costs.  This understanding is useful in shaping strategy, but it is also needed to provide a picture of the infrastructure so important for effectively addressing key issues. Future research should include creating a comprehensive assessment tool to aid coalitions in properly evaluating community needs and how to match those needs to  various strategies.

Coalitions often get started because citizens perceive a crisis in their community. The crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s led to the rapid emergence of coalitions across the country, particularly in the cities hardest hit by the devastating effects of crack addiction. More recently, underage binge drinking has mobilized communities to organize coalitions to attack the problem at many levels. As coalitions achieve some of their goals, or the crisis abates (as has happened in some areas with crack cocaine), sustaining the coalition can become problematic. Coalitions are only a framework for people and agencies to work together, according to Leonard Saxe, professor at Brandeis University and Principal Investigator of Fighting Back, who believes that the best coalitions have brief lives, coming together to develop initiatives that are then institutionalized within the community.

Join Together’s Dr. David Rosenbloom notes that some coalitions may “stall out” several years before they actually shut down.  They stop growing, the intensity of activities decreases and nothing new is happening.  New groups form to focus on other strategic goals.  He believes that coalitions are by their nature impermanent, bringing together groups of concerned citizens around specific problems.  In other words, coalitions strive to achieve a common understanding within the community in order to get community institutions to address the same issue. Moreover, it is the permanent community institutions, not the coalitions, that must make lasting change. Several of the coalitions in the Knight cities that Drug Strategies studied provide examples of coalition “stall out” that ends in termination, merger with another organization, or adoption of a new mission.

The very process of creating community coalitions has produced benefits.  “If Fighting Back were to go away tomorrow, we’ve still changed forever the way business is done in this town,” said Jane Callahan, Director of Fighting Back, Vallejo, California. “We started out to address substance abuse, and along the way we learned some things about citizen participation and reinventing democracy that can be applied to any problem.”

Whatever the future holds for anti-drug coalitions, they have proven effective in engaging many different segments of the community in a common campaign, led largely by volunteers who care deeply about their children and the future of their neighborhoods.