Category Archives: Analysis and Commentary

The What: Maintaining the balance of powers

Posted on May 16, 2013 by | Leave a comment

OK, so, I’m cheating a little bit for this last post of “what week”, because, while this is about a policy itself, it’s one that would–in fundamental and actually quite frightening ways–affect the how of policymaking, too.

In Kansas this legislative session, and in some other parts of the country, too, there have been explicit attempts to cut the judiciary out of the policymaking process.

In my state, this has taken the form of a proposed constitutional amendment to stipulate that only the legislature has the authority to determine what appropriate funding for public education is, so that, essentially, the ‘right’ level of funding is whatever the legislature decides to give, and students and schools would lose their right to seek redress from the courts.

It would be damaging to public education.

And it would be a really dangerous precedent.

History is replete with examples of when judicial advocacy has been a successful path to social justice. Even when individual justices, or even the entire judiciary, is fairly conservative, the way in which the court operates can sometimes lead to surprising conclusions.

In ways that are really promising for the pursuit of the ideals on which the country was founded.

Individuals with disabilities entitled to access, people of color pursuing equal opportunity, gays and lesbians seeking the right to marry…all deserve to have all of the channels of our government open to them.

Sometimes social workers, as advocates, can lose sight of the importance of some of these ‘process’ threats. We have not been very active in the campaign finance debate. We tend to be absent in the fights over collective bargaining rights.

And, so far, at least in Kansas, social workers have not been very present in the constitutional amendment battle about the role of the judiciary, either. Maybe, in part, that’s because school finance isn’t seen as ‘our fight’. And there are plenty of things that are. This session alone, we’ve faced budget cuts, more tax restructuring, drug testing TANF recipients, and elimination of some early intervention programs. Among others.

But if we lose on these ‘whats’, we will find ourselves with very constrained options for pursuing tomorrow’s ‘hows’.

If the other side changes the rules of the game, we will find it harder and harder to win.

It’s certainly not that the judiciary is always a slam-dunk for justice.

But it’s part of the system that, over time, has worked better for securing liberties than any other. And we face far better odds with the courts at the table than without.

So, this, too, has to be our fight.

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The What: We Still Need Voting Rights

Posted on May 14, 2013 by | Leave a comment

More ‘whats’, in policy change.

Or, in this case, policy not-change.

Because, let’s be real:

We still need The Voting Rights Act.

We’re in the era of evidence-based policymaking, right?

Has there ever been a more successful piece of civil rights legislation in the history of the U.S.? No, really?

And so the idea that its very effectiveness is reason to scrap it is not just offensive (and it is; I am fairly chilled by hearing an Alabama official refer to ‘state sovereignty’ as reason to oppose a federal civil rights law). It’s dangerous.

I’m all for the role of the courts in policymaking (more on that tomorrow).

I just think that the U.S. Supreme Court should rule that the Voting Rights Act stands.

I’m glad that there’s a tremendous amount of advocacy going on, even while the Court deliberates.

If you haven’t already checked out these compelling videos showing how VRA provisions in various affected states are making a difference in how people can exercise their civic rights, check them out.

Look at this really great (although, again, disturbing) infographic on why we still need the Voting Rights Act.

You can’t call Antonin Scalia to point out that, Mr. Justice Sir, the right to vote is not a “racial entitlement”, because, um, voting isn’t an entitlement. That’s why it’s called the Voting Rights Act (He, of course, took objection to that, too, supposedly because it makes the legislation too popular for members of Congress to vote against? Como on, two members of the Kansas congressional delegation voted against the Violence Against Women Act, for crying out loud. These people are not afraid of catchy names.)

But you can tell everyone who will listen (friends, family, neighbors, the guy waiting at the post office) that, yes, we still need the VRA. We still need voting rights, in this age of photo identification and proof of citizenship and long lines at fewer polling places.

People bled for the right to vote in Alabama. That history leaves scars, not just on individual psyches but on institutions and ways of doing business.

That is why we need the Voting Rights Act.

Still.

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The What: Investments in Public Health

Posted on May 13, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Usually, this blog is more about the how of policy advocacy and social change, than the what.

I mean, sure, you know where I stand on a lot of issues.

But, for the most part, I use this space to talk about how we pursue change, how we organize, how we work with elected officials, how we use the vehicles available to us to pursue our visions of justice…whatever those visions of justice may, specifically, look like.

But, for this week, I’m turning to a list of post ideas that are more about what our policies should be, than about precisely how we get there.

Basically, they are issues that have been bugging me, and so here they are. It’s “the what” week, all week.

Today, I’m thinking about cholera.

We have the technology now to make devastating diseases like that history and, yet, they’re not.

All because we don’t invest as we should in sanitation, in public health information-sharing, in early detection, in research.

In other words, budget retrenchment could literally kill us.

The Ghost Map makes this point, when it calls London’s sewer system one of the great triumphs of the modern age.

Our technical capabilities today demonstrate that we can respond to environmental and health crises with massive projects that are feats of engineering and impressive displays of collective will.

Emphasis on the can.

Not necessarily the will.

Today, technology enables the city of New York to know that, during a power outage, people need information about safe insulin storage, because there’s a telephone system people can use to report problems and ask questions, and because those data can be collected and analyzed efficiently. As described in the book, we’re keeping ourselves safer and making our lives better by “amplify(ing) the voices of these local experts” (p. 225).

We can build maps online that show, immediately, where there’s an outbreak, or a water main break, or any other kind of natural or unnatural breakdown that threatens our health.

John Snow could not have imagined the capacity we take for granted today.

And, yet, there is a real risk that global economic policies will endanger all of our lives by forcing austerity measures on governments in the developing world. As they disinvest in public health, threats cross borders. Too many children in the U.S. fail to get critical immunizations–not just because their parents object, but also because too many of our children lack regular access to medical care. We need to update our waste-removal and recycling systems and ensure that our disease detection infrastructure is up to the task of evolving illnesses.

We have built the finest tools we can imagine, and our ability to use them continues to grow nearly exponentially, yet they will atrophy if we don’t continue to invest, in the hardware and software and people power needed.

That’s why we have to see our public spaces, and the revenue that sustains them, as critical investments in our collective well-being. Truly, combating dangerous retrenchment isn’t just about ‘quality of life’. It’s also just about life.

Taxes as anti-cholera insurance.

Maybe that’s a frame we should try.

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Close knowledge makes a difference

Posted on April 30, 2013 by | Leave a comment

There was another part from The Ghost Map that made me think about social work, and about you all, which means that it ends up here.

So, yes, just a little more cholera.

See, the doctor who ended up tracing the spread of the disease, and documenting the outbreak in a way that gave needed credibility to germ theory and ultimately brought down the idea of ‘miasma’ (smell=disease), was from the neighborhood.

He lived near Broad Street, where the pump contaminated with cholera was located, and that intimate knowledge was essential to helping him untangle the truth.

At the time, remember, most people thought that, since smell brought disease, dirty houses (read: poor people) would have the most illness, because they would smell bad. There were many low-income households in and around the area infected with cholera, and, so, most of the ‘outside experts’ were quick to conclude that it was their poverty, and the smells associated with it, that were quite literally killing them.

But John Snow knew better.

He knew of wealthier households living next to poorer ones, where both fell ill. He knew of very poor households that nonetheless maintained immaculately clean homes. He knew that most of the stereotypes were flawed. He knew that people were dying–real people, with grieving families–because he knew many of those afflicted.

This knowledge meant that he couldn’t fall back on the prevailing wisdom or the platitudes about poverty and disease. He could see facts more clearly, and his inquiry had an urgency stemming from his investment in the community and its suffering people.

And that, I believe, has lessons for social work advocates, too.

I believe that we can work effectively across communities, and that skills and relationships and real empathy are just as important as ‘matching’ membership on specific criteria.

But I also believe that it might be easier to miss things, nuances that really matter, if we see a community more as monolithic, which we’re more likely to do if we’re not embedded in it. I believe that too much distance can render us less effective, less committed, and, ultimately, less likely to succeed.

That’s one of the reasons that social workers make great organizers, and great advocates–we’re on the ground and we know how these issues work and we tend to notice details. We know and care about our work, and that matters for how we engage with it.

In history and still today, being close to the truth makes it more likely we find it.

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Blind Spots and Grave Errors: Why do we think we’re immune today?

Posted on April 25, 2013 by | Leave a comment

My oldest son is prone to getting really (REALLY) into something, for a brief period of time, and then moving quickly on. As parents, we try to keep up, encouraging his inquiry and trying not to reel too much when he abandons one topic for another.

For awhile, this winter, it was cholera.

As in, specifically, the cholera outbreak in Victorian London, and its contributions to the study of epidemiology and the development of modern sanitation.

He made a ‘ghost map’ showing how a cold outbreak could travel through his school, modeled after the map that Dr. John Snow made to finally prove that cholera resulted from contaminated water and not from bad smells.

And I, to make sure I could understand what he was talking about (and because most of his interests are, actually, quite interesting), read The Ghost Map myself.

And one part that stuck with me was how absolutely certain the best minds of the day were, at the time, that the deadly diseases they confronted must come from the smells of the sewers and of the decay with which they were surrounded. It made so much sense. London smelled really bad, according to almost all contemporary sources, and people were frequently ill, so, then, it made sense that the two would be related. They kept on believing this, even when houses with worse sanitation suffered lower death rates than the richer houses that happened to be downstream. They believed it because it seemed so right, even when data suggested that it wasn’t. At all. They believed it even when believing meant studiously ignoring countervailing facts, and even when believing one way led to behaviors significantly more likely to result in their deaths. They took clear action based on these flawed beliefs, never apologizing for or even seeming to doubt the veracity of beliefs based on no sound science at all.

The author asks, and we must ask ourselves, “How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline–the sociology of error” (15).

Because, of course, this wasn’t the first time in history when powerful beliefs that defy truth have led to grave errors. During one outbreak of plague, a belief that the disease was spread by dogs and cats led to mass extermination which, of course, increased the plague, since it was actually spread by rats formerly kept in check by the dogs and cats (120).

And it wasn’t the last.

We have, with a greater or lesser degree of consensus, believed that interning Japanese-Americans would keep us safer; that cigarettes have no ill health effects; that people with mental illnesses belong in institutions; that nuclear power is infallibly safe…

We console ourselves that that was then, before we knew, because we don’t want to contemplate the very finite limits of the knowledge we have today.

And that’s our blind spot, this idea that we could be just as wrong now, about something else, as we recognize in hindsight. We could be ignoring just as many warning signs, about what’s wrong with our economic structure, or what it will take to really make schools work, or what supports young families need to thrive.

We could be just as wrong. And the consequences could be just as tragic.

If we don’t keep asking, why? And wondering, maybe?

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We need ‘Little Critter’ books for justice

Posted on April 23, 2013 by | Leave a comment

At least around my house, woe befall the Mommy who, in running out the door with her hands full of kids and all their stuff, forgets to turn off a light.

Because, apparently, Dora the Explorer told my twins that leaving lights on kills penguins. And polar bears.

And they really like penguins and polar bears.

It’s great, really, the way that they have been indoctrinated into a conservation ethic. My oldest son won’t throw away anything from his lunchbox, in the hopes that everything can be composted or reused.

They would never leave the water running when they brush their teeth, the same way my generation learned to put on seatbelts automatically.

And they, because they are 4, are never shy about reminding the rest of us.

It’s everywhere they turn, and they’ve learned, and they become our social conscience.

The WonderPets save arctic animals, too, and the Boxcar Children recycle, and even Nancy Drew has an Earth Day mystery.

It’s a plot line, yes, but it’s also a way of life.

It’s the way of their lives, now, and so the way of ours.

And that made me think: we need to get on the ‘get them through the children’ bandwagon.

I mean, if Little Critter can save the Earth, can’t he (is Little Critter a boy?) fight racial injustice? End homelessness? Oppose heterosexism? Combat the stigma associated with mental illness?

If children all over this country watched TV programs and read children’s books and had cross-promotional tie-ins about economic inequality and the evils of social service retrenchment, grown-ups would hear about it every time we proposed massive tax cuts or bashed unions.

If Dora had to go past the DMV and around the bank and through the neighborhood with the inadequate police protection and the broken streetlights, in order to get to the office to pick up her food assistance (all while hauling around her twin baby siblings), my kids would be asking me why we make it so hard for people to get help.

And maybe that would help to spark a movement, the same way that my kids now excoriate each other if they find the refrigerator door left open.

Maybe we have some episodes of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood to write: I think they are going to organize to keep Wal-Mart from taking over their local businesses while squeezing their suppliers.

If it was on Netflix, my kids would totally watch that.

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The link between not enough and too much

Posted on April 16, 2013 by | Leave a comment

For some work I’ve been doing–some for a health foundation, about the advocacy capacity of the ‘healthy eating/active living’ sector, and some for an anti-hunger organization–I’ve been spending quite a bit of time learning and talking about what food insecurity really means, and, in particular, why addressing hunger is an essential part of combating obesity.

The Kansas Association of Community Action Programs, an organization I’ve worked with a lot in the past few years, recently released their 2012 Hunger Atlas, describing what hunger looks like in Kansas, and what it means for health in the state.

And, when people hear ‘hunger’, they think skinny. ‘Hunger’ triggers visions of emaciation, even though very few people who experience hunger in the United States look like that. And those associations matter, because what people think they know influences very much how they respond, even to something as basic as our human need for food.

Anti-hunger organizations today often get push back from donors, advocates, even their own staff, when the people who seek food assistance–at pantries, commodity programs, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program eligibility sites, communal meals–don’t ‘look’ like they are hungry.

Which means we have a lot of work to do.

Because the truth is that being food insecure means that you don’t know where you next meal might come from, which absolutely shapes the decisions you make at this one.

It means that you don’t have good variety in your diet, that you’re lacking key nutrients, and that your meals are irregular, all of which can lead to being overweight. It means that your food budget is stretched, and we know which foods offer the cheapest delivery of energy. The link between obesity and food insecurity isn’t ironic, it’s inevitable, with the way that our food system is structured, whether we are ready to face that or not.

Being ‘malnourished’ means poorly nourished, and that might look like underweight, or it might look like overweight, but it certainly means unhealthy. It means a problem.

And we have to message it that way.

Until everyone has access to enough healthy, affordable food to feed their families well, we can’t even begin to pretend that obesity is a personal problem, instead of one deeply woven into the structures that shape our decisions. Obesity and hunger are not two separate issues. They are two sides of the same coin, a coin that presumes that nutrition is a commodity to be bought and sold, instead of a basic human right, and each side has tragic consequences for individuals and for society.

Obesity is a wicked problem to solve; it’s an adaptive challenge if there ever was one, one which will require us to change the way that we do almost everything.

Including fight hunger. And talk about it.

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Not paying enough today

Posted on April 15, 2013 by | Leave a comment

This is what taxes look like in Kansas now:

kansastaxes
Image credit, Think Progress

Hence my complaint:

I am not paying nearly enough in taxes today.

In addition to the lower rates enacted in the massive tax cuts in 2012, there is the fact that I don’t pay nearly as high a percentage of my income in sales taxes as do lower-income households that consume more of their income. And the tax deductions I get to claim for my homeownership (although Governor Brownback wants to eliminate those, in order to help close the budget gap), and for the contributions I make to my children’s college savings account (thereby, really, reaping state subsidies for my children’s future educational advantages). Those are worth thousands of dollars, and I never have to take a drug test for those public benefits.

But it’s not only not enough as a percentage of my income; that part more just chafes at me, because it doesn’t seem fair that we make quite a bit and pay not so much.

It’s not enough in terms of what we really need, and what our state will have to go without.

I don’t pay enough in taxes when I have to turn around and write checks to our public school so that my kids can have a counselor a few days a week, and so that there are adequate supplies in the classroom.

I don’t pay enough in taxes when I hear that our community mental health centers have waiting lists for crisis appointments.

I don’t pay enough in taxes when some of our sidewalks, in a very walkable city, are nearly impassable because of needed repairs.

I don’t pay enough in taxes when we’re not investing what we must in the commons, and in our collective well-being, such that we then retreat into our private realms, where we finance what we can out of all that is left.

It’s tax day, even if it doesn’t really feel like it. We have work to do, so that this can be a day of celebration again.

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Is there such a thing as ‘too passionate’ to advocate?

Posted on April 11, 2013 by | 6 Comments

I am pretty passionate about a lot of issues.

I guess that has been established, no?

On a weekly basis, I’m actively advocating on anti-poverty policy, domestic violence, immigration reform, early childhood education, mental health, hunger, GLBT oppression, and public education.

I care about all of those things–and more–deeply.

But over the past several months, my reaction to another issue has forced me to consider, in a way that I really haven’t before, if sometimes there are issues we are too invested in to be effective advocates.

See, I’m still fundamentally not okay, at all, about the fact that someone could get access to high-powered weapons and blast into a school and murder first graders.

My Sam is a first grader.

And, while I completely agree with those who lament that it takes that kind of random gun violence to provoke an uprising, instead of the numbingly, achingly routine gun violence that robs thousands of young people of their futures–in less public but no less tragic ways–somehow, undeniably, this, for me, is different.

So, while on just about every other issue, I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at laying out a case, using language of common values, building bases of power, and finding middle ground, when it comes to guns, I am sort of totally unreasonable.

I can’t seem to articulate arguments much beyond: “WHY do you need assault weapons? WHY?”

I admire, greatly, and support financially, the work of nonprofits who have seized the momentum created in this opening window of opportunity to push for better gun laws.

And, I mean, I advocate.

I sign their petitions and I have written to my members of Congress. It doesn’t make me feel better, in this case, the way that it usually does, but I have.

I joined 1 Million Moms for Gun Control, and I am heartened to the point of awe at how they have turned their outrage into action, and how they’re building a movement with people who never realized they were movement-builders.

But when it comes to really engaging in social change, which requires, well, ‘engaging’ people, I struggle. It’s hard for me to get much past the “NEVER AGAIN”.

Sometimes I cry.

I can talk about deportation policy at cocktail parties. I can debate the (nil) merits of drug-testing public assistance recipients in line at the grocery store. I actually respond to those email forwards that people send around about Social Security and unemployment benefits.

But, when it comes to gun, I feel like I’ve got a blind spot. I sort of freeze, because I really have trouble comprehending that others aren’t moved in the same way, to the same place, that I am, by the horrifying realization that we are so vulnerable, while there are so many speedy and efficient ways for people to kill.

So I hope, dear readers, that you’ll give me some context here. Are there issues on which you feel like you’re ‘too close’, or ‘too charged’, to be effective advocates? Are there some causes that you have to stay away from, because they are too painful for you to take on? Are there issues where you cheer from the sidelines, not because you don’t care, but because you might care too much?

Or have you learned to channel these emotions, so that you can be a potent force even on issues that are triggers (absolutely NO pun intended; I couldn’t think of a good substitute word) for you? Do you have any advice, that might help me get enough virtual distance, so that I can sort of get over myself and be actually helpful?

Because I want to be. I’m just not certain that I don’t, maybe, want it too much.

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Advocacy Evaluation and Being ‘Data-Informed’

Posted on April 4, 2013 by | Leave a comment

I wrote a post not too long ago about ‘data-driven cultures’. And then I read Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, and, in just a chapter, Beth Kanter and her co-author changed, somewhat, how I talk about the role of data in nonprofit organizations.

Social services aren’t ever going to be totally ‘data-driven’. There are a lot of factors that impact our decisions and our programming.

And that’s how it should be.

Rather than trying to make social workers slaves to spreadsheets, or pretending that we can make rational every factor that influences our operations, we need to become data-informed organizations, embracing both the power of data and its limits.

As Kanter advises, we need to spend a lot more time thinking about the data we collect than we do collecting it. As I see in the advocacy evaluation collaborative of which I’m a part, we need to find ways to unobtrusively gather data–weaving that into the work as much as possible–so that we have time to sit around and talk about what this means (which, in some cases, is how we ‘analyze’).

We need to resist the temptation to dump data on someone’s desk, thinking that our work is done when the report is published. I ask my clients, from the very beginning, what it is that they hope to learn from a given evaluation effort, what questions we need to ask to figure that out, and with whom they need to share the answers they glean. We plan for usefulness from the start.

It makes me think about an organization I have worked with over the past 18 months or so, which has a Quality Improvement Department–staffed with just a few full-time employees, whose job it is to cull through the organization’s data, looking for patterns and making sense of what they see, and also to systematically share information with others within the organization, so that, together, they can ask the most important question:

“So what?”

But this distinction between being data-driven and data-informed has special importance in advocacy, I think. We’re always exhorted, in advocacy, to have ‘hard facts’, as though the stories we share about policy impact are somehow too soft and squishy to be meaningful.

But the best nonprofit advocates already know that the most powerful advocacy comes from weaving data and narrative, from analyzing numbers to answer hard questions, and from relying on all kinds of knowledge to inform our decisions.

In advocacy, we know that being ‘data-driven’ can lead to outcomes that don’t work for individuals who don’t fit a typical pattern. We know that data don’t change hearts and minds, and that developing power requires creating spaces for people’s voices.

We know that we must be data-informed.

And driven by a vision.

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