Intergroup Organizations: Collaboration for Community Development

Intergroup Organizations

Organizations or groups are engines in community work. It is not always simple groups or development mode associations. One mode of community work is the constitution of intergroup organizations, committees, platforms, and coordinators who are represented in the various groups and entities.

Sometimes these intergroup organizations try to connect or federate the efforts of relatively homogeneous organizations, as when trying to coordinate actions with specific sectors of the population. On other occasions, intergroup organizations are precisely the means to connect entities that are different around common issues and comprehensive projects.

This practice of organizing connects with concepts like partnership, integration of action, synergy, complexity, etc. and seeks collective action where specific challenges have overwhelmed habitual sectoral organizations. The intergroup organization is the body of work (design and implementation) which meets the individuals representing each group involved in a joint collective action.

Launching a Partnership

According to P. Norynberg, the launch of a partnership must meet eight conditions:

1. A strong political will.
2. A diagnosis shared by all stakeholders.
3. The objectives defined and chosen in common.
4. Methods of implementation, management, and evaluation.
5. A space for comparing the practice of pooling ideas.
6. A pooling of resources and know-how.
7. Time to become known, to understand the logic of each.
8. An essential condition, both the result of the process and that is its food, is living common experiences.

Such conditions may be supplemented by some operating conditions as noted by M. Marchioni:

9. Inter-organization should not replace the role and action of the various member associations; on the contrary, it must act to strengthen them in their specific fields of action.
10. Inter-organizational dedicated to constant activity information to citizens of the area both as regards their activities and their purposes, their income and expenses, etc.
11. The inter-organization is not acting from a minority or majority, but by consensus on issues and initiatives in which all agree.

Structure and Advantages

In addition to the representative assembly, inter-organizations, depending on your goals, can be fitted with other bodies of work or study (commission number) as the tasks are determined.

Intergroup organizations offer many advantages (more possibilities for coordination of activities, the opportunity to concentrate resources on campaigns that bring together the work done by each individual group, and offers residents the opportunity to exercise more power, etc.). But as pointed out by P. Henderson and D.N. Thomas, they also bear some risks. One is that intergroup organization leaders pull them away from their own association.