Category Archives: My New Favorite Thing

Happy Week! The best things this blog has done for me

It’s still Happy Week, and I’ve been thinking about the reasons that I started this blog in the first place, and what I hoped to get out of it, and what it–and, more importantly, the practice of writing it–has done for me over the past few years.

My life has changed a lot over the past 3 years; when I started the blog, the twins were still babies, I hadn’t really started consulting, and, of course, I had 3 kids instead of 4, none of whom were in school full-time.

But, in other ways, it hasn’t changed that much, really. My biggest challenge, then and now, is trying to balance my role as a mom and my passions as an advocate. I still feel pulled into direct advocacy, and then struggle with how family-unfriendly a life that revolves around media work and legislators’ needs is. I still get a huge thrill on the first day of a new semester (and feel like a graduating senior on the last day of class!). I still wish that I had more time to read blogs by really smart people, to get through the ever-growing list of titles to read in my calendar, and to eat a meal uninterrupted.

But, this week, I’m reflecting not just on how I have changed in the time since I started this blog, but also how it has changed me…or, in some cases, kept me from changing. The 6 (2 a year, no?) awesomest things, then, that this blog has done for me, in no particular order.

And, please, because it’s Happy Week: has it done anything even somewhat awesome for you? Would you be willing to share?

  • Kept me in touch with former students: It is truly a delight to get a comment from a student I had a few years ago, or to see a former student and hear that he/she has been impacted in some way by our ongoing relationship through the blog.
  • Expanded the walls of my classroom: While former students are much more engaged than current ones–likely because they no longer have so much reading to do for class!–it is a real asset to my teaching to be able to use the blog as an extension of a conversation we’re having in the classroom, or as a way to connect my students with other thinkers in and outside of the profession.
  • Introduced me to some insightful, passionate people: Some of my favorite people I have never met in ‘real-life’, yet I feel so blessed by the generous way they share their reflections, and even their guidance, online, in their own spaces and here.
  • Kept me engaged with scholarship: While I’d never pretend that my writing here is of peer-reviewed caliber, it is such good discipline for me to have to write, and read, regularly, in order to produce content for the blog. Especially with the demands of my family, teaching, and my consulting work, it would be so easy to let those practices slip by, and I believe that I would suffer, personally and professionally, for it.
  • Connected me to the social media sphere: I don’t think that I would have embraced social spaces online as thoroughly as I have without the blog; it was definitely my motivation to try Twitter, for example, and it complements my personal Facebook engagement, too. I can’t really imagine my life without those outlets, and those relationships, now, and so I’m grateful.
  • Given me an outlet: There’s no denying it; I’m happier now that my husband isn’t the only entity to whom I can vent about policies that are maddening, or rave about organizing campaigns that are inspiring. When I finish a book, I have something to DO, actually, with the sticky notes that I’ve littered it with. And that’s really therapeutic.

    Thank you, those who read and, in so doing, both enrich my thinking and justify my pursuit. YOU are, without a doubt, the awesomest of the awesome things that this blog has brought to me.

    Happy Happy Week, to you!

Happy Week! The awesomest things I’ve seen lately

Image from I Wish This Was

This is Happy Week! So, then, here are some things that make me super happy/excited/energized/hopeful/inspired.

What awesomeness can you share?

IfWeRanTheWorld: What would you do if you could do anything? And can’t we?

FIXES: Innovative approaches to solving major problems, available in RSS feed every Wednesday…like a dream come true.

Social Work Activist Reader: There hasn’t been much new content added to this lately, but what’s not to love about anti-racist, ‘justice-centered social work’? Online?

The Fun Theory: Parenting has taught me how much easier it is to get people to do things if they are fun. Try NOT to smile at the piano staircase.

Minnesota Idea Open: Ann Wiesner at Grassroots Solutions showed me this earlier this year. Crowdsourcing problems, with the added dimension of geographic-based community. It builds identity and addresses real concerns, and I think it’s pretty awesome.

I Wish This Was: This reminds me a little of a photography project I did with immigrant teenagers more than a decade ago, when they cataloged what they saw in the community around them, and what they thought it said about what others thought about them. Except even cooler, I think.

Open Source Leadership Strategies: File this under the category of ‘awesome people who are doing terrific things’, because I met Marisol Jimenez-McGee more than 10 years ago, and I couldn’t be happier to see her sharing her incredible talents in such an exciting way.

The Montana State Supreme Court: Honestly, if I have to try to convince one more should-be voter that his/her vote DOES still matter, in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, I might scream. Thank you, Montana, for meaningful campaign finance limits.

Nonprofit Vote: The good people at NonprofitVOTE are on my happy list for sending me emails every week with resources to help nonprofit organizations engage their clients as voters. I even appreciate their exhortations, because I just love their incessant emphasis on our responsibility to shape the electorate. Love them.

Spend your “extra” day fighting a losing battle

The way I see it, folks, tomorrow is a freebie.

It’s a totally bonus day that we only get once every four years.

You won’t have a February 29th next year, and you got by without one last year. Since we don’t plan on it, then, it’s essentially a total bonus, right?

So here’s my thought:

Let’s “waste” this extra day fighting some battles we’ll almost certainly lose. You know the ones–they need to be fought, to right a wrong or just stir up some trouble for those who need to be troubled. But we avoid them, because it seems more prudent to focus our energies on more attainable victories.

But not tomorrow.

Those 24 hours are a calendar’s gift, so we might as well throw them away on some of these hopeless causes.

My list, to get the day started:

  • Public assistance eligibility for immigrant families–can you think of a less popular cause? But economic hardship sentences some citizen children of immigrant parents to a lifetime of reduced life chances, and financial desperation traps some immigrant women in violent homes. Our public assistance systems are designed to reduce hardship and provide a safety net, and these families–part of our communities–deserve that, too.
  • Tax fairness–okay, so I fight this one on some of the other days, too, but I figure I can spare a few extra hours today. We need a revenue system equal to the challenges that face us, as a state and a country, and maybe this Leap Day can put us over the top.
  • Electing truly progressive candidates to my state legislature–most of the year I’ll do some campaigning for some allies whose relatively moderate views make them important stopgaps in our current political environment, but I have dreams of seeing some folks with big plans and huge hearts elected, and maybe some fundraising calls on this extra afternoon can help.
  • Peace on earth–yeah, I know. But, then, I ask myself: what have I done lately to try to stop war and promote peace? The answer, sadly, is not much, even though I very much want my kids to grow up in a safer world. I’ll spend some time today checking out the activities of peace groups local and international, and find a way to contribute some of my time (or, most likely, my money) as an investment in the future I want for them, and for us all.

The way I see it, we spend too much energy talking ourselves out of some of the fights we really should embrace.

Pragmatism is overrated, and the greatest movements for social justice certainly never conducted a feasibility analysis first.

We have to be strategic, but we also have to be bold. And stubborn. And, sometimes, a bit foolhardy.

So, what’s on your list of losing battles for our bonus day?

Happy February 29th.

Stuff I Love

It’s Valentine’s Day.

And, you know, I’ll admit that it’s not much of a holiday around here–we fall into the “it’s a commercialized ploy that doesn’t capture our feelings for each other” camp.

But, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate that I, too, can pour forth my feelings on February 14th, here is some stuff I totally love.

What are you loving this Valentine’s Day?

There’s a lot of love to go around, folks.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

“You Don’t Speak for Me”

There’s a lot that I really love about teaching–the constant opportunity to challenge my own thinking about critical issues, the incentive to read and stay abreast of developments in social policy, the relationships with students who later become colleagues.

But my favorite part?

When students totally blow me away with their commitment to social change, creativity in pursuit of justice, and all-around awesomeness.

In all fairness, this post is not about my students. But I feel like I can claim them just a little bit, because I worked with them in my capacity as an advocate, advising them on their project and connecting them to policymakers and allies.

And because, if I’m really, really lucky, they might end up in one of my classes one day.

I’m thrilled that this group received the national Influencing State Policy award. They completely deserve it. They absolutely did influence state policy, defusing the anti-immigrant argument that, somehow, attacking immigrant kids helps other college students. Their advocacy, including this video and the petition drive that garnered support from college students around the state, shored up Senate supporters of Kansas’ current instate tuition policy and injected a new theme into the media coverage of the repeal debate, both critical to the ultimate defeat of the attempted repeal.

What I love most, though, is that these students not only made an impact on state policy (in a truly beautiful way). They also demonstrated, for other students and would-be activists, that such influence is within reach and that it can be really fun, too.

I always cry at the end of the video, when this powerful collection of students says, essentially, “Hey, when you’re hating on hard-working immigrant students, you don’t speak for me.”

I am so glad that they found their voice.

And I can’t wait to hear what they say next.

Mission Essential: Nonprofits Vote

One of my favorite finds, in some of my research for this blog several months ago, is Nonprofit Vote, an organization dedicated to helping nonprofits do voter engagement work right. That means that they identify, support, and applaud efforts that are sustainable, integrated, mission-consistent, and, most of all, impactful.

As we tick down to one year until one of the most important elections I can remember (and, yes, I do kind of say that about most of them!), I’ve been reading through some of the case studies and empirical analyses of what makes a successful voter effort by a nonprofit organization, particularly with an eye towards models that work for social service agencies. Nonprofit Votes has hosted some webinars highlighting successes, and there are some lessons learned that are very much worth sharing.

  • Face-to-face contact is by far the most effective way to increase voter turnout (increasing turnout anywhere between 6-14%, depending on the population and the type of election), especially with underrepresented populations. Of course, making those face-to-face contacts with potential voters is very time-consuming and extremely expensive…unless you happen to see them on a regular basis anyway because, I don’t know, maybe they are your clients?
  • The particular study from which I’ve pulled these data was conducted with nonprofit social service agencies, working with a variety of constituencies, in Michigan, and it’s a scientifically rigorous examination of how agency-based voter engagement, specifically, impacts voter behavior. That means that they had random assignment to control and “treatment” groups, the latter defined here as one group at each agency that received a voter registration appeal only and one group that had more sustained communication around voting and its significance. Importantly, some of the participating agencies had NEVER done voter work with their clients before, which makes the results all the more promising, especially for those who might be (wrongly!) thinking that it’s too late for them to develop a 2012 strategy.
  • The key findings, the ones that I think are so exciting? Clients in both treatment groups had a higher likelihood of voting than those in the control group. The likelihood of voter turnout increases proportionally with the nonprofits’ level of voter engagement effort, so it really does pay to go beyond just putting up the “Please Vote” posters (probability of voting increased by about 9% with each contact). Clients in both treatment groups were not only more likely to vote, but also more likely to encourage their family and friends to vote, which means that the same “word-of-mouth” system on which we rely for referrals and health education and so many other critical functions works for encouraging civic participation, too, allowing nonprofits to expand their reach far beyond those they directly serve. Among all forms of voter assistance nonprofits provided, new voter registrations and voting reminders were the two forms of contact that make the biggest difference in increasing voter turnout.

    There’s nothing “magic” about these organizations, or about the people they serve. Your clients are likely just as responsive to thoughtful, targeted, sustained communication about voting and why it matters as these folks were, and your organization just as capable of integrating these activities into your work.

    In the world of social services, we devote considerable energy to emerging practices with success rates that are anything but guaranteed.

    We know that changing the face of the electorate in the United States will make a difference in the kind of hearing our concerns receive, and the kinds of public policy priorities that rise to the top of the agenda.

    And now we know something more about how to make that happen.

    And so we must.

  • Nonprofit Policy Forum: A peer-reviewed journal for geeks like me

    I know. It’s not every day that someone’s getting emotional about a peer-reviewed journal. I mean, who uses the term “peer-reviewed” in conversation, anyway?

    But, people.

    Put yourself in my shoes.

    This thing rocks.

    The Nonprofit Policy Forum is a pretty new journal, which, in today’s age of the declining significance of print media, is fairly significant itself.

    And its content is all available online, which is huge in the world of the peer-reviewed, since my former students find themselves abruptly excluded from academic literature as soon as their access to the university’s considerable subscription library expires.

    AND, it focuses on policy process and content, and how both affect and are affected by the nonprofit sector. In other words, giving greater official legitimacy to the study and practice of advocacy and policy change, by nonprofit organizations, as well as discussing emerging policy trends that impact how nonprofits operate.

    So, now you understand.

    In the first issue, which is the only journal I can remember ever reading in its entirety, is an article reporting that putting clients (here, “constituents”) on a nonprofit Board of Directors and increasing their participation in strategic decision-making significantly increases the intensity of the organization’s advocacy, just as receipt of government and foundation grants tends to decrease it.

    In other words: what we know to be true about the countervailing pressures that weigh on nonprofit organizations in the advocacy arena, confirmed empirically and actually citable. Oh, happy day!

    There’s also an interview with Ambassador Andrew Young, specifically discussing the effectiveness (and limitations thereof) nonprofit organizations in shaping policy and a conceptual paper outlining how foundations can approach their philanthropy with an eye towards transformation and systems change. And an article introducing the challenges related to the emergence of social businesses has particular relevance for social workers, who can struggle at times to find ways to practice ethically and effectively in these newer organizational models.

    I’m never one to pretend that academic journals make the world go ’round. Perhaps that’s part of why I’m so hard-pressed to find the time to submit to them?

    But, when sometimes I feel very much like an outlier in the world of academia, given my particular areas of interest, it is very affirming to find communities of like-minded souls, and to be able to turn to their ideas on which to build my own. The way that scholarship is supposed to work.

    Here’s to happy reading (and citing)!

    Evaluating Advocacy, de nuevo

    It’s “update” week at Classroom to Capitol.

    As I read through previous posts for my summer maternity break hiatus, I found a few that I really wanted to revisit, rather than repost. This is the last of the three that I have chosen for this week, with new thoughts and, of course, new questions.

    One of my academic interests over the past couple of years has related to questions of how we evaluate advocacy efforts: How do we know advocacy “success”, short of absolute policy change, so that we can build on it? How can we assess organizational capacity for advocacy (to have a better sense of who will succeed, and also to know where to invest)? What kinds of interim goals should form part of an advocacy strategy, and what kinds of benchmark measures should mark our progress?

    Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to apply my study and training in this area to practice through work with the Sunflower Foundation and its advocacy initiatives. It’s tremendously rewarding to be able to not only help individual advocates and nonprofit organizations seeking to develop an advocacy voice figure out how they’ll gauge their work, but also to be part of this evolving field and to work alongside a funder investing so much energy in contributing to good practice around these questions, too.

    I love it.

    More recently, my work with the Sunflower Foundation has allowed me to contribute to some of the Alliance for Justice’s conversations about how they evaluate advocacy, both on the front end (in terms of organizational capacity) and as advocates and their donors seek to determine the relative impact of different advocacy strategies. I’m very excited about AFJ’s revised advocacy capacity tool, which will be available online soon, and particularly about their approach to this work, which is aimed at getting as many organizations as possible to evaluate their own capacity (in a variety of areas; it’s a pretty thorough look at the inputs that we believe position an organization to succeed in advocacy) in order to build the field of knowledge about what makes a difference in ultimate advocacy success.

    In Kansas, our hope is to eventually be able to help a given nonprofit organization know where it sits, on some of these capacity measures, compared to an aggregate of its peers, and also to develop strategies that are at least likely to lead to enhanced capacity in those same areas, so that we can build a strong cadre of advocate organizations across the geography and in different fields.

    Refining these measures, and these tools, is important not just because we want to know what works in advocacy (so that we can get better and better and win more and more often), but also because being able to demonstrate how our theory of change is leading to tangible results should push more funders to feel comfortable supporting advocacy (or, at least, to expose that their real fears are taking a stand on controversial issues, and we need to know that, too!). We’ve come quite far in the past few years, such that advocates are no longer left to flounder to come up with benchmarks, and no longer grasping for what might make sense for measurement. It’s tremendously exciting, for the academic side of me, but especially for the promise that these tools hold in making our advocacy more robust, more acclaimed, and, ultimately, more integrated into what nonprofit organizations do all day.

    And it’s great to be part of it.

    If your organization is interested in advocacy evaluation and/or assessing your organizational capacity for advocacy, we should talk! I’d love to connect you to resources and (full disclosure!) include you in some of our field-building efforts, too. Because once we know what works, we just have to gather the courage to go after the money to do it.

    And, then, we’re unstoppable.

    Admitting Failure

    One of my oldest son’s favorite family games is “let’s talk about Mommy’s bad decisions.”

    Yes, seriously.

    It started from a comment I made once in disciplining him, about how bad choices have consequences, and even Mommy and Daddy have discovered that through our own mistakes.

    As is perhaps to be expected, he really latched onto that concept (although, somehow, it’s the idea of Mommy’s bad decisions that have captured his imagination, much more than Daddy’s!), and so the aftermath of his own disciplinary consequences often includes a recitation of Mommy’s bad decisions.

    Speeding tickets are some of his favorites; I think he likes the imagery of the flashing lights.

    I thought of Sam, and how obvious it is that he’s learning from these mistakes (and how much he delights in knowing that he’s not alone in making them!) when I read about this relatively new website: Admitting Failure.

    It was started to help those in the development community learn about each other’s failures, own and move on from their own, and create a climate in which failures are acknowledged as a path to greater innovation and excellence, with the understanding that people’s lives are literally at stake.

    Here’s what they say about why the site is important:
    “Competition for financial support in the aid sector has resulted in a ‘worst practice’ – secrecy. This site and those who support it are attempting to correct that error, and create a best practice of openness, transparency and honesty. We’re all in this together. We’re on the same side in the fight against poverty, inequality and unnecessary suffering in too many forms. Let’s admit our failures to find greater successes.”

    You can submit your own failure to the site (failures are rated based on users’ perceptions of the honesty and insight shared by the fail-er), browse others’ failures, and discuss failure itself, and the role it plays in progress, with others engaged in similar work.

    I think it’s pretty awesome, and I have so many ideas for how a similar culture of openness about failure could make a difference in the social service world, too, where we certainly fail, and where we certainly have a lot to learn from those failures.

    We have a lot of collective knowledge, for example, about what hasn’t worked in preventing teenage pregnancies, or helping adolescents avoid drugs, or fighting poverty in single-mother households, or getting low-income neighborhoods mobilized for civic engagement. We just aren’t doing that much to share those failures, and to even sort of celebrate them–not in a “yay, we failed!” way, but in a “we can own this and become better for it” way.

    The other day, my son got distracted while playing his computer game and ran out of time to help me with a cooking project he’d been looking forward to. He wailed, and then he said, “that’s kind of like when you overslept, Mommy, and you were late to work and got in trouble” (for the record, it was in 1994). I told him he was right, and I offered to set the kitchen timer the next time.

    We fail.

    And we learn.

    And, if we’re lucky, others fail. And they share.

    And then we learn, too.