S. County, Pittsfield Community Groups Explore Formation of Coalition

By Kathy Keeser
Special to iBerkshires
10:09AM / Monday, February 01, 2010

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Photos by Kathy Keeser Kathy Cardella and Paul Deslauriers of Berkshire Co-Act facilitated the meeting on cooperation.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The difficult economy is spurring greater cooperation amongst the Berkshires health and human-service agencies. That's what led some 60 health and human-service workers from South and Central Berkshires to met Friday, Jan. 29, at First Methodist Church to discuss forming a community coalition.

Crisis often leads to people being able to "put aside their pettiness and be able to work together. Here, we are getting close to that crisis," said Paul Deslauriers, facilitator for the initiative, who spoke from his experience as a community organizer and sited examples such as the Loma Prieta earthquake in Los Angeles 20 years ago.

That's not always easy for organizations used to being independent, said Carolyn Burns, executive director of Berkshire Children and Families, and an initiator and participant of collaborative efforts locally and statewide.

"From the viewpoint of the traditional nonprofit, each has their own base of funding, their own group of supporters and board of directors and they have worked hard to develop that," said Burns, talking about  the difficulty of taking collaboration to the community level. "It is natural to hold onto what you have. But to keep going as they are in this economy, where even level funding is losing ground, puts them in danger of eroding away if they keep going as they are. It is very challenging, but we can come up solutions that are better for all of us."

Al Bashevkin, executive director of the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition, which will celebrate its 24th anniversary this June, spoke about its formation in 1986 after the closing of Sprague Electric Co. in North Adams and how the loss of that major employer affected the area. Bashevkin likened what can be achieved in community collaborations to a chorus. 

Participants broke out into smaller groups discuss barriers and brainstorm possible solutions in transportation. Kate Agin, community outreach representative from Western Mass. Electric Co. is in the middle. In picture at right are Al Bashevkin and Carolyn Burns, left.

"The choral director takes the many voices and brings them together into one beautiful voice," he said. "What is important is for the coalition to be consistent and to be there over the long haul, to find a way to make sense for the people of the community and that they are part of [the coalition]. It is important to make alliances with people of all walks of life. To work from the bottom up and the top down and to find common ground. It often means giving up who we are to find that common ground."

The meeting was organized by Deslauriers, executive director of Berkshire Co-Act, working with Kathy Cardella and other members of the citizen-based collaboration of volunteers and non-profit organizations.

Berkshire Co-Act launched last April in Pittsfield to "more effectively address issues related to assistance and nutrition throughout Central and Southern Berkshire County."

Prior to the meeting, local nonprofit leaders returned answers to Deslaurier's surveys asking what they felt to be important community issues. 

Transportation in the rural county was the top response. Jana Hunkler Brule, program manager for BerkshireRides, a program based in Northern Berkshire that works to remove transportation as a barrier to Berkshire residents, spoke about the collaboration necessary to coordinate transportation needs.

"We have to end the 'go it alone' response from agencies. We have to make better use of existing resources by pooling the resources, which increases the cost effectiveness. But it can be hard and it will feel like you are giving up control," Brule said. "You really can share transportation and share resources. Working together and thinking through solutions, you can work out the details such as who takes the van when."  

The reasons stated for developing the community forum included providing a response to reduced funding and increased needs; networking; developing partnership opportunities; and pooling available resources.

"We want to create a new forum to more effectively and more efficiently bring solutions to issues and create system that was sustainable, self sufficient and reliable for the community," said Deslauriers.

For more information, contact Deslauriers at Berkshire Co-Act, 413-232-7888 or info@co-act.org to learn what are the next steps will be.