is-important folks” than with the “just-do-it crowd.” In fact, I think
public policy specialists have a serious communication problem with
the “just-do-it” types. Let me use a couple of examples to illustrate:
Last spring, at an Oregon workshop intended to improve exten-
sion professionals’ skills in areas linked to public issues education
work, I heard a county agent remark about coalition building that
“there is a real danger in a process or system. People may feel it is
manipulative, like leading sheep.” Later I heard this same agent ex-
plaining, in a pretty animated way, how a natural resource issues
consensus group he was involved with quickly went from “confron-
tation to visioning” and spent a long time on that so members of the
group could vent their energies on how the land “could be and
should be,” rather than on how they disagreed with one another.
This agent still claimed to have no use for “process people” —
after he had become involved as a subject matter specialist in a
coalition-building process he apparently felt was constructive. Why
the paradox? I will not attempt to identify all the possible sociological
and psychological factors. I will tell you what it seemed like. It
seemed like his intense interest in the issues the coalition was ad-
dressing just plain overpowered his fears about negative reactions
from people who might feel manipulated by a process (I suspect this
person’s actions offer a clue about what to emphasize in order to
communicate effectively with people leery of process).
Recently, while philosophizing about how to build coalitions, an-
other critic of “process people” told me he believes “they use those
big words so you’ll think you need them. That is part of the stinking
problem.” How about some emphasis, he added, on common sense?
How about emphasizing the importance of truly caring about the
issues you are trying to deal with, so that comes across to the clients?
How about more emphasis on the importance of real expertise in
subject matter closely related to the coalition’s field of interest?
Wild rambling? I do not know. You can find support for a range of
viewpoints. For example, these last comments do not seem incom-
patible with Lesson #8 in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Cluster
Evaluation Final Report on Innovative Public Policy Education Proj-
ects (Greene, Hahn and Waterman, pp. 25-26):
Public policy education can be effective in the absence of a for-
mal coalition, but not in the absence of the spirit or broad in-
tentions of a coalition, specifically, the commitment to mean-
ingfully incorporating diversity — by offering policy alternatives
that reflect different points of view and, at root, different values
— in the form and function of the program offered.
In that same evaluation, a coalition member said, simply: “Coali-
tions should be bound by a purpose and not by a structure (p. 26)
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