Smith County Food Security Council: Utilizing Community Coalition Action Theory and Coalition Effectiveness Inventory
Founded: 2018
Leadership: Made up of representatives from key organizations that facilitate the coalition’s action teams and workgroups
Action Teams: Children and Schools, Healthcare, Urban Agriculture, Faith-based and Non-profit Groups, Community Awareness and Advocacy
The Smith County Food Security Council (SCFSC) has been a model of excellence among hunger free community coalitions. Dr. Valerie Smith, one of the SCFSC founders, emphasizes two helpful resources that have bolstered Smith County Food Security Council to their current level of success.
After a thorough research process, Dr. Smith identified the Community Coalition Action Theory (CCAT), developed by Dr. Butterfloss and Dr. Kegler, as the ideal outline to setting up the coalition. The CCAT identifies fourteen interrelated elements that are crucial to a coalition’s success, such as consideration of the community context, the coalition developmental stage, and the coalition membership. When SCFSC began, the young coalition consulted CCAT and identified community context as an element to focus on given the coalition’s infancy. SCFSC was able to partner with the East Texas Human Needs Network to obtain a snapshot of demographic and food insecurity data across Smith County. This knowledge contributed to a better understanding of the community, providing helpful context for the SCFSC to both better address the needs in its community and move on to other elements such as recruiting coalition members.
As SCFSC got off the ground, Dr. Smith and the leadership team also actively solicited feedback to supplement the CCAT development roadmap through a tool developed by the CDC called Coalition Effectiveness Inventory (CEI). CEI is a tested and validated 74 items survey that helps determine if key elements in a coalition are present, present but limited, or absent. The survey report for SCFSC has shown that areas of improvement include task administration and meeting facilitation. In response, SCFSC has been able to specifically target these areas by hiring a coalition coordinator for administrative tasks and to help leaders in the coalition to better facilitate meetings.
To learn more, contact SCFSC at scfsc@stpaulchildren.org. Click on the highlighted links to access these free tools!
Author: Zane Peng
12/14/2020
