Coalitions for Advocacy and Collaboration

The number of practicing child and adolescent psychiatrists (CAP) is roughly 8,500 throughout the United States, with most states having one or more counties with no child and adolescent psychiatrists.2,3 States with expansive rural areas have greater numbers of counties with no practicing CAPs (see Figure 1), making them both disproportionately underserved and in need of strong child mental health treatment advocates. Advocacy work at the local and state government level is often most successful with constituents working with their legislator.4 Advocacy can occur on the individual level, but often one voice is not sufficient enough to effect change. Coalitions have been utilized as a political vehicle to create a more expansive or powerful voice to the issues being debated, response to legislative initiatives, or to create public awareness. This article describes the development of a coalition of stakeholders vested in child mental health in Maine, a rural location. This coalition became a unified call to guide policy formation and to address state legislative and budgetary issues affecting child mental health. Lessons learned from the creation of this coalition are shared and used to guide creation of coalitions in other states.