Ignite!: Getting Your Community Coalition Fired Up for Change

by Frances Dunn Butterfoss

Frances Dunn Butterfoss, Ph.D., captured the attention of academics and practitioners everywhere with her landmark textbook, Coalitions and Partnerships in Community Health, which provided a comprehensive approach to coalitions. Ignite! Getting Your Community Coalition Fired Up for Change is a more concise, user-friendly book geared for community practitioners, leaders, and activists who want to build and sustain innovative organizations and coalitions to improve the health and well-being of their communities. Learn why sustaining and building a coalition is very much like planning, building, fueling, and sustaining a campfi re, and get detailed guidance on how * determine if coalition building is the best way to achieve your goals; * pick the simplest structure to achieve your objective; * build and sustain innovative organizations and community coalitions with the power to change policies, systems, and environments. The book's four parts-Before You Build It, Build It, Make It Work, and Sustain It-provide practical strategies to build coalitions, as well as troops, clubs, neighborhood associations, and other organizations. Whether you're a volunteer or professional, you'll get tools that make it easier to accomplish meaningful and lasting change with Ignite!

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2013

About the author

Frances Dunn Butterfoss, PhD, MSEd is a nationally recognized expert on coalition building and organizational development, with more than 25 years of experience training and consulting with organizations, coalitions and communities across North America. Dr. Butterfoss is President of Coalitions Work and a professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School. She has founded and directed several coalitions and received research support from many agencies and foundations. She has published widely and her textbooks, Coalitions and Partnerships in Community Health and Ignite! are best sellers for academics, practitioners and community activists. Fran is a past President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education. She lives in Yorktown, Virginia with her husband, Tom and is devoted to her three children and five grandchildren.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plus value of Ignite! is that it's short and it uses a campfire analogy. However, for me the Scout-manual level of detail on literal fire-starting was not a burning attraction. A lot of the core content in this book is available for free online from places like the Community Tool Box, as well as in other books on community development. The author does a great job listing all those resources. Another whole star for including the Frieden pyramid. But this book shares what I think is a disturbing deficit in this genre of recommending that coalitions postpone looking into what works until the last step: "Finally, coalitions should research whether strategies that they plan to implement have been tried before and were effective." Why design this process so that you get a bunch of people to put in months of work to form a coalition and then after all that find out that the proposed strategy has been proven to be worthless or harmful? Why not start out with a menu of worthwhile strategies?

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It should be required reading for any class or training related to coalition or community organizing efforts! anyone involved in change work should have this book on their shelves. a great tool!

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book packs a punch and gives pretty much all the information needed for the average person to start their community organizing career. I wish I would have had this about 10 years ago, when I first broke into the non-profit community. Using starting, maintaining and eventually extinguishing a fire as a metaphor to guide the process, the author leads you the process of creating (if you should in fact create one)a coalition all the way through through the process.
Definitely enjoyed this book, not as scary as the bigger book by Butterfoss - Coalitions and Partnerships in Community Health.

[Kaite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won a free copy from the Goodreads First Reads Giveaway Program and think that it interesting. I would recommend it to everyone.