Most coalition coordinators only ever work with their own coalition. For more than 20 years, we’ve had a rarer vantage point: we’ve worked alongside, trained, and mentored more than a hundred coordinators working to address substance misuse, traffic safety, problem gambling, and more. When you watch that many people tackling similar challenges, patterns start to surface that are valuable to share.
Here is the first and most important one. Nearly every coordinator we’ve met shares a deep, genuine passion for the work and a real concern for the people they serve. It’s close to universal. And because it’s universal, it cannot be the thing that explains which coalitions build lasting change. Passion is the constant, not the variable.
What varies is quieter: how coordinators think, whether they use a process to guide them, and a handful of skills they either develop or don’t. These three map onto the framework we teach at Banyan, the Improving Outcomes Framework, but we noticed the patterns long before we had tidy names for them.
Mindsets: the difference that’s hardest to see
Mindset is often invisible to the person holding it, which is exactly why it’s the hardest difference to see from the inside and the one a mentor is best positioned to name from the outside. Four mindsets, more than anything else, showed up in the coordinators who moved their communities forward.
They didn’t fixate on the problem
The coordinators with the strongest outcomes understood their problem deeply, including the data, the patterns, and the risks, but they didn’t stop there. They knew their community’s strengths. They could tell you what was already working to change behavior, what the healthy norms in the population were, and how to amplify them. And they communicated in a way that built genuine concern, drawing real awareness to the risk, while always offering a path forward. They understood that concern without hope just leaves people stuck; that people act only when they can see both a reason to and a way to. This is the Positive, Hopeful, and Generative mindset, and it shows up in something as small as the questions a coordinator asks. The strongest ones ask their stakeholders what they see rather than assuming they already know, whether about the stakeholders, about the population, or about what will work.
They knew one strategy would never be enough
It’s natural to look for the answer: the curriculum, the campaign, the policy. It makes intuitive sense. Those who succeeded understood their issue was adaptive, not technical. It couldn’t be solved by a single strategy or delegated to a single expert. So they layered strategies as capacity allowed, looked for ways to leverage other efforts already underway, and, critically, kept pulling diverse stakeholders and perspectives into the room. They didn’t just tolerate feedback from community members; they genuinely valued it and went looking for it, again and again, because they knew their approaches had to be built with the people living the problem, not for them.
They planned around systems, not just individuals
The coordinators who tended to succeed understood that the systems surrounding a person shape the choices that person makes, and they planned accordingly. They studied the systems at play, engaged the stakeholders who sat inside them, and eventually placed strategies across those systems rather than betting everything on changing one individual at a time. It’s the difference between telling people to make the safer or healthier choice and building an environment where that choice is the easier one.
And the hardest mindset of all: they started with the belief, not the strategy
This is the one we watched trip up even the strongest coordinators. Someone they respect recommends a strategy, and the pull to simply adopt it is enormous, because it feels like progress. The Socio-Behavioral Mindset asks for something more disciplined and less comfortable: first understand the beliefs driving the behavior, then choose a strategy suited to shifting that specific belief. Gathering that understanding takes time, and making meaning of it takes more. And the coordinators willing to do that patient work consistently saw stronger outcomes.
Process: knowing one isn’t the same as using one
Here’s something that surprised us early and stopped surprising us a long time ago. Almost every coordinator we’ve worked with knows their work should follow a process. Most have even learned one. Far fewer let it guide their day-to-day decisions.
That gap, between knowing a process and using one all of the time, turned out to be one of the clearest dividing lines we saw. The coordinators who intentionally followed a process understood their focus population’s context more deeply, understood the beliefs driving the behavior more precisely, and chose strategies better suited to changing it. Just as importantly, they built in time to reflect and evaluate, always with the intention of doing it better the next time through.
And next time through is the phrase that matters. The most common pattern we saw: a coordinator learns the process, runs it once, and moves on to the next urgent thing. That’s understandable. The coordinators who kept improving returned to it, each loop sharper than the last.
One more piece is easy to overlook: if you’ve learned a process but haven’t yet taught it to your coalition, the work will keep running through you. If the goal is a coalition that does the work alongside you, and it must be, then the process has to belong to all of them, not just to the person leading the charge.
Skills: what moves a room of stakeholders
If mindsets are the lens and process is the scaffolding, skills are what let a coordinator act on both. Two are the foundational skills in the Improving Outcomes Framework: communication and courage. A third, facilitation, showed up right alongside them.
Communication
A coordinator is communicating almost constantly: building a shared vision with stakeholders, building shared understanding of the data and the context, and reaching the focus population through campaigns and other channels. Strong communication is how the right stakeholders get engaged, how trust and capacity get built, and how beliefs ultimately shift. It’s also, we’ve come to believe, the quiet engine of retention. When a coalition member drifts, it’s usually for one of three reasons: they don’t feel connected to the vision, they’ve never been told specifically how they can contribute, or they don’t have the capacity to do what’s been asked. All three are communication problems. The coordinators who kept people engaged were the ones who communicated a vision members felt part of and who made specific asks of specific people and built their capacity to do it.
Courage
It’s easier to convene the stakeholders you already agree with. It’s easier to keep doing a strategy the way it’s always been done. It takes courage to gather genuinely diverse stakeholders when your instincts say you already know the answer, and more courage to challenge an assumption, sometimes your own, or a strategy that’s simply familiar. But adaptive challenges require a bit of discomfort. Every time we watched a coordinator find that courage, it elevated not just their own work but their partners’ too, and the outcomes followed.
Facilitation
The strongest coordinators do not talk their way through a coalition meeting. They build a thoughtful agenda and then facilitate, because the stakeholders are in the room to share their insight, not to absorb the coordinator’s. That means knowing how to draw wisdom out of the person who’s gone quiet and how to navigate the person who’s taking up all the air. A coordinator who can motivate a community and then genuinely open the floor to it is building something that no longer depends on them alone.
What this means, and why it’s hopeful
Look back across all three, mindsets, process, and skills, and notice what’s not on the list. Not passion. Not how much someone cares. The coordinators whose communities changed weren’t the ones who cared most; nearly all of them cared deeply.
That’s the hopeful part, and we want to be clear about it. Every one of these differences is learnable. Mindsets can shift with deliberate practice. A process can be adopted, taught, and returned to. Communication, courage, and facilitation are skills, and we’ve watched people build every one of them. The passion, the hardest thing to teach, is the part you almost certainly already have. What’s left is the part you can learn, and we’ve spent over 20 years watching people learn it.
Wherever you are, that’s where we start. Our Improving Outcomes: Framework Training walks through the mindsets, the process, and the skills together, and our Guide Service offers ongoing support as you put them to work with your coalition. You’ll also find more on this in the Partners, Stakeholders, and Coalitions section of our FAQ.
Banyan Collaborative works alongside professionals across public health, traffic safety, substance use disorder prevention, violence prevention, community coalition work, social services, education, law enforcement, and beyond. Whatever the issue, if it involves complex human behavior and systems-level change, we’ve worked in that space and we know how to help. To explore how we could support your work, please reach out through our contact form.