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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Going Stanford University and about coalition

I am in my third week now as a student of Stanford University through Coursera.org.

Yes, I am enrolled to a university far from my residence in the Philippines and am scholarly enjoying it, albeit coping with time and other pressures. It felt really inspiring to be in school again.

I enrolled in many subjects but for these months (until December 2012), I focused on Organizational Analysis and another crash course on Creativity.  My other courses will commence its classes by next year, 2013, and will be attended online although in another foreign prominent university. Neuroethics and Philosophy will pre-occupy my thoughts in the first quarter next year.

Our professor in OA course handle the discussion via video lectures and interactive discourse. Through this, distance is no longer a problem and attending the class can be flexibly adapted within my comfort zones. I could listen to lectures with much ease at home, even if I am sprawled on bed. Despite the given resources for readings, I also read other related documents and take notes, too.

Reflection on experiences is much significant above all when theories are applied and we, students, could only relate it with our personal historic accounts specially on matters that touched us the most.

This week, after taking my quizzes, I am seriously considering the question posted by our professor for discussion relating to Coalition. Since it interests me a lot, I thought of sharing it here, too, for keeps. My essay (which I posted in our forum is italized below).



In my country, most social organizations develop into a coalition to fulfill specific goals. These goals are either political, social, economic, interfaith, or cultural in nature but intent on seeking reform, changes, developments, and for improving social cohesion.
Developing a coalition is basically an integral part of social interaction inspired by some ideals people wanted to translate into reality.
By experience, a broad coalition of advocates was organized when like-minded leaders and experts sat in an informal meeting to discuss and evaluate a specific condition that is affecting a large number of populace caught in a war or conflict situation. Their evaluations resulted to identified recommendations, one of which is to form a lose coalition of non-government organizations and individual experts from the academe to create a greater force to demand from the national government to stop military offensives in hinterland areas that caused massive internal displacement. They also wanted to create venue to address the concerns of the displaced community including psychosocial response for traumatized children, women and men. Because of the massive or magnitude impact of violence, response from other communities were generated including supports from local government council, and from civil society from other regions. Members of the organizations begun pro-actively sharing their skills and resources to pull all efforts toward disaster response and conflict deescalation. Those experts in psychosocial response engaged themselves in trauma healing for war survivors. Those who were able to generate resources for relief operations and medical missions joined together in taking care of the health, sanitation and needs of IDPs. From the academe, the historians, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists also engaged themselves in documenting the conflict situation and sharing all these information to media workers and international institutions that are sympathetic for humanitarian causes. They also called on other local governments to empathize with their cause by showing and explaining to them the ill-effects of war to people, properties, economy, politics, ecology, relation and specially, the children. Hence, although members are diverse in their skills and expertise, they all contributed to their general goal of addressing the needs of war-torn communities.
In a post-conflict reflection, the experience made the leaders of these organizations decide to sustain the coalition as a broad network of peace advocates and peace constituents of the region. They decided to network with humanitarian organizations to delve potential areas of partnership and for resources. By this time, they agreed to create its structure, by-laws, and have decided to strategize the organization's vision, mission and goals. After the war, they advocated for peaceful settlement of conflict between the government military forces and with rebel groups through negotiations and through grassroot-based peace-building efforts. The latter constitute more of culture of peace education, peace policy advocacy, and interfaith dialogues.
These group of leaders and organizations started their efforts in year 2000. They are still existing nowadays and are deeply involved still in peace education, psychosocial intervention, disaster response and the like, although I noted that the bulk of the tasks is already lessened as relative peace in our region is enjoyed and negotiations with dissidents are sustainably addressed by the government nowadays. By these, I am saying that the coalition here lasted longer and in fact, its in its 12th year of advocacy works. Lately, members have also commenced assuming concerns for ecological protection, climate change impact mitigation, and of supporting indigenous peoples rights. Those in the academe have also continued their efforts. Other civil society at the national scale have also adopted the same pattern of work in the last decade and many of the leaders in our region were instrumental for their formations too.
The internal management is not without challenges. All of these leaders of institutions are diverse in character, of systems, and inclinations. Decision-makings for specific organizational directions are sometimes barred by differences but this is eventually resolve through tolerance and recognition of their uniqueness. When its difficult to agree, they'd opt for consensual agreements and see what is doable at a given circumstance and limitation.
Added to the challenges here is the consideration of policies and systems of external support organizations, such as funding agencies, who'd oftentimes internally conflict with the organization's system. So far, this concern have not so much impacted on the programs and operation of the organization. Open communication and flexible arrangements have helped this through.
As the coalition evolved, members have also adapted to changes and developments. Their expertise are continually honed thus, readily providing them answers to emerging problems and capacitating them to bridge gaps. So, I cannot say that they are merely doing some fix-ups or are providing palliative measures to issues or to impasse. However, through this all, the coalition remain cognizant of its limitations.
This experience is unique to peace-builders in our region. Political organizations in a broad coalition has a different story to unravel, too.