Yeah, I know.

From our introduction, when he mentioned that he’d made it over to the Brown v. Board of Education site already (it was 9AM), I knew that we were really going to get along well.

The whole day was a complete reinvigoration for me, and my brain is overflowing with ideas and challenges to myself and new applications and affirmation of some things I’ve been mulling for quite a while. But there’s one particular point he made that I almost can’t stop thinking about, and that has kind of totally revolutionized how I talk about advocacy and systems change with nonprofit social service organizations.

It was a really, really great day.

One of my colleagues asked him about the starfish story, and his noted aversion to it. In reply, he talked about how, obviously, some of his work at the DC Central Kitchen involves throwing back the starfish–feeding people who are hungry, employing people who need jobs, meeting people’s urgent needs.

So where’s the social change work? Where’s the advocacy? Where’s the radical revisioning of the possibilities of tomorrow?

Answer: it’s 51% of his work. Not usually more, because, after all, people are hungry and need jobs–if the symptoms we’re addressing through our direct service work aren’t serious and worthy, then we need to be in different mission work.

But not less, either, because if the daily activities of maintaining the organization and addressing those presenting problems (but not their roots) take over, we’re (in his words) “feeding the machine”, instead of solving real systemic challenges.

So what does that mean, then, for a social worker in direct practice, or for an Executive Director of a large nonprofit organization–or anyone in between?

It means weaving consciousness-raising and systems change into your interactions with clients, so that, even as you’re handing out what they need, you’re helping them to question the conditions and structues that perpetuate their crises.

It means surrounding oneself with like-minded and totally committed colleagues, so that the organization can flourish without constantly consuming your energies.

It means, though, more than anything, checking ourselves.

We can’t ever pretend that we have the luxury of only railing against the system that causes hurt, when we have a calling to help heal those wounds, too. And we can’t ever pretend that putting on Band-Aids is enough, because then we’re, unintentionally or not, working to guarantee ourselves future work. Which is unconscionable.

I’d never pretend that finding that 49 and 51 (it’s not a balance, of course, and it can’t be) is easy. Nor would Robert, who spent hours with my fellow Kansans, helping us to think through where our nonprofit sector needs to go, and what it needs to be, to make justice rain down on our prairies.

But that sweet spot is my new mantra, and it explains the way that I see my work and, indeed, my life:

49% meeting people where they are, salving the pains caused by structures that trap people in poverty and racism and violence and desperation.

And 51% trying to tear down those same structures, bringing everything that I know about radical relationships and strategic alliances and the transformative process of helping people find their own power.

If we can get it right, I fully believe, someday I’ll become a baker. Or a farmer.

And Robert can go back to nightclubs, if he wants.

Because our work here will be done.

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)!

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.

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.

Especially on this Labor Day week, because we feel so uncomfortable, often, talking about working for a living, but so very much enjoy talking about our lives as consumers.

We love buying things, right? Even I, who hasn’t seen a television commercial or a magazine advertisement in two years, can’t run to Target to pick up generic diapers without seeing 12 things that I swear I’ve been meaning to get forever.

And, so, because Americans are awesome like this, someone has invented Carrotmob, which is a totally American idea:

Feel good about changing the world, just by buying things.

No, this isn’t one of those “embedded giving” platforms, the much-debated practice of companies packaging their products with charitable organizations’ endorsement, with a small percentage of the sales going to support that cause.

This is much simpler, and, I think, much cooler.

Basically, companies compete to see how socially responsible they can be, and the winning companies get the support of a “mob” of consumers, spending money to reward the company with both higher sales and a lot of good publicity. There’s a real social component (the mobs are literally big groups of people, and the website content is written in a very personal style), which we of course love too, and it’s very “new media”–the website is filled with videos of actions and ways for people to get alerts sent directly to their medium of choice.

So far, “social responsibility” has mainly focused on environmental sustainability, but there are plans for campaigns focusing on labor rights, too.

They’re very open about the limitations of such a strategy (first and foremost, people buying too much stuff is part of some of the very problems they hope to address, and yet their campaigns fuel that), but there’s a real potential to bring in activists who wouldn’t normally engage in petitions or even boycotts, and that’s a part of their model of change.

Check it out, sign up if it appeals to you, and let me know what you think. Is this an exciting example of how to connect people to actions for the social good, or a gimmick that people won’t ultimately pay much attention to? How do you feel about the whole ‘mob’ concept? And about consuming as advocacy? Should we be encouraging people to forego consumption as a political act, or can strategic purchasing be part of our repertoire of tactics?

When I was pregnant with the twins, I was so exhausted that I really couldn’t move much, but I also couldn’t handle any of my normal, rather heavy reading, so I read a lot of British novels. And, much to my husband’s amusement, he soon had a very large wife who was sprinkling her speech with phrases like peevish and knackered and bollocks. They are just such appealing words!

Well, consider this Anglophile “mad keen” about what I’ve just discovered: England’s social work degree qualification, adopted in May 2002 and first implemented for the 2003-2004 academic year, requires involvement of what they call “service users” (we’d call them “clients” or “consumers”) in all aspects of social work education (which they call “training”–those crazy Brits!). Yes, ALL ASPECTS. As in, selecting candidates for social work schools, consulting on curriculum, participating in curriculum delivery, evaluating students in the classroom and the field, and design of the overall degree.

The Department of Health funds the Social Care Institute for Excellence in order to develop a national forum for service users involved in social work education, to promote best practices, and to identify barriers. SCIE’s reports are candid about the fact that there are gaps between the stated ideals and the practice. Service users and their organizations cite lack of training and support, condescending attitudes on the part of academic faculty (No!), questions of access, and concerns about stipends’ impact on benefit eligibility as some of the most vexing concerns, and SCIE and some grassroots groups in the country are working hard to try to overcome these.

Still, even acknowledging some of the limitations, this is pretty awesome.

Hey, Council on Social Work Education, we need a similar mandate for social work education in the United States. We need a strategy for how to fully integrate the perspectives of our clients into preparation of students. We need requirements that universities actively solicit clients’ involvement in deciding which students to admit, how to structure education, and who deserves to have the degree that will entitle them to so much authority over the lives of those we serve. We need resources to invest in the organizational capacity of client-driven organizations, both because of how that would prepare them to better participate in social work training, and because our profession should be doing more to invest in the capacity for self-help of those we aim to, well, help.

Individual programs around the country, are, undoubtedly, doing good work in terms of client involvement–starting community collaborations, building alliances with local social service organizations, sending dozens or even hundreds of great students out to work in practice placements–I don’t mean to discount these efforts. But we need a far greater infusion of energy and resources, and a more strategic and concerted collective effort, if we’re going to fill in the gaps, transcend tokenism, and build real partnerships with our most valuable asset–those who legitimize our profession by allowing us to work with them.

Ten years from now, I’d like to see us grappling with the problems outlined by SCIE and their service-user organization partner, Shaping Our Lives: how can we ensure that all clients have equitable access to decisionmaking authority within social work education? How can we quantify the types and magnitude of impacts that clients have on social work education? How can we build on the gains made so far in bringing clients into social work education as instructors, students, and ‘expert consultants’?

Let’s face it, the people who brought us the trifecta of the pub, gravity, and DNA have done it again–shown us the way to the people we are meant to become. I mean, what’s more “American” than the idea of empowering individuals, bringing in diverse perspectives, and highlighting the wisdom of hard-earned experience? We can do this. And we’ll be better for it, as teachers, and students, and as a profession. Thanks, Britain. We owe you one.

But we’re NOT sorry for that whole Boston tea party thing…

These are bleak times for many of us committed to progressive social change and a vision of social justice that includes an end to poverty, full protection of civil rights for citizens and for immigrants, real power for working people, universal health care, and a sustainable environment. The ongoing economic hardship that has plagued our country for all of my twins’ young lives, and a much more constrained understanding of the social contract among policymakers in our state and federal governments, can lead to despair and retrenchment.

Or

We can focus on building long-term movements for social change, the kind that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, are our only hope for bringing about the world as we wish it anyway. What the almost three years since the 2008 elections have taught us, or perhaps reminded us, is that there are no shortcuts, and that we can never, ever, ever stop organizing.

And that’s why, for me, it’s the perfect time for this Foundation Review article outlining how foundations can (and should!) support movement building. It begins with the obvious acknowledgement that philanthropy does not a movement make, and that successful movements must, by definition, be driven by those animating them with their own passions and pains (so foundations have to relinquish control over the ultimate (and even many of the interim) goals, as well as the timeline).

But it analyzes powerful movements from history to define their core elements, and then suggests activities in which foundations can invest in order to infuse social movements with essential resources. My own study of the civil rights movement (I finally accomplished my goal of reading all of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) shows the many points when donations, from individuals and from philanthropic and religious institutions, facilitated the next steps that, combined, built one of the greatest movements for social justice our world has known. The article also illustrates the role that foundations can play in very long-term movement building with a brief history of the conservative movement and the foundations that decided in the 1960s to systematically invest in building capacity–investments that began to pay real dividends with the election of Ronald Reagan and, certainly, is very much in play still today.

Bringing these ideas to our progressive work requires some shifting on the part of foundations, to be sure, so that they see themselves as movement strategists, more than as funders, with a commitment to changing the terms of the debate so that, ultimately, the kinds of policies we support are seen as “natural”, because we’ve framed them that way. If progressive foundations are to build the kind of world they seek, they’ll need movements to create it. And those movements will happen much more surely if they can hire the people they need, purchase the media to communicate, and conduct activities in pursuit of their vision.

And that means, yes, multi-year grants and general operating support and transparent, mutual relationships with those receiving investments. It means not expecting grantees to demonstrate their unique “niche”, but encouraging collaboration and even “duplication”, as reflecting convergence of focus and enhanced overall capacity. This report uses the term “advocacy infrastructure” to talk about these long-term investments that cross organizational and issue boundaries.

But putting all of this on foundations is unwise and unfair. Community organizers, direct service practitioners engaged in social change, and all of us who care about building movements need to think beyond single-issue campaigns, too, and develop relationships with philanthropists so that we can help them to see the future through our same vision.

We need to have clear strategies related to each of the components of successful movement building: base-building, research and framing, strategic power assessment, organizational management, engagement and networking, and leadership and vision development. We can’t expect foundations to invest in these activities if we continue to zero in on tactics immediately and populate our grant applications with detailed descriptions of what we’ll do, with little attention to the who, and, most importantly, the why.

One of my favorite parts of this discussion was the inclusion of direct service providers as a key avenue to base building. That thinking builds on foundations’ existing relationships with social service agencies and could leverage those considerable resources for real power building. It’s also significant that their discussion of leadership development transcends the intense “academies” that are fairly popular with foundations (and, absolutely, potentially very impactful), because they have a pretty high initial “cost” of entry, and we need leadership capacity development at all levels of engagement.

Of course, my interest in advocacy evaluation made me hone in on the discussion of outcomes and assessment, especially because it’s very true that our nascent field of policy and advocacy evaluation misses many of the elements of movement building that would need to be included in a more comprehensive evaluation. There’s a table at the end with the stages of movement building, the five core elements, and benchmarks for each that I’ve printed out to refer to for my evaluation practice; it’s only a beginning, but it’s a good place to start. This piece is critical not only because it will add to the field of knowledge about what works and increase our understanding about social movements, but also because speaking philanthropic language about accountability and measures can help us to bridge these gaps.

As the authors say, “Foundations do not make history. They fund it.”

And then I’ll have even more books on my nightstand, to retrace the victories and the roles that activists and the philanthropists who invested in them played in creating the victories that we can’t imagine living without.

Here’s to a brighter future and the movements that will bring it.

We’ve got long-term work to do.

One of the things that I appreciate the most about the work of the Building Movement Project is that they don’t just give nonprofit social service organizations advice (and exhortation) about integrating direct services and advocacy. They also provide true inspiration, in the form of case studies of organizations, all of them imperfect and just as stretched as any other, that are finding ways to make this dual mission work and, in the process, are transforming their engagement with clients and attacking injustices in their communities.

The case studies that accompany the Catalysts for Change report are particularly instructive, I think, because they include a wide range of nonprofit organizations (from relatively large health care centers to indigenous community centers to very grassroots groups working on domestic violence, for example), have strong representation from the poorest communities in California (where the studies are located), directly discuss barriers encountered by organizations and how to overcome them, and highlight the individual leaders that personalize and personify this commitment to advocacy through services.

Each case study highlights lessons learned: don’t panic if staff leave because they’re not comfortable with the activist direction (you’ll attract new staff who are!); break down silos between advocacy and direct services (they have to be integrated to be sustainable and effective); make sure your funding strategy and your Board selection align with your emphasis on advocacy (otherwise, you’ll be fighting those who should be your allies!); be prepared for backlash (center on your mission and stay true to your values); give your clients real power within the organizational structure; partner with organizations that can enhance your work without trying to co-op your community; and invest in client and staff capacity for advocacy leadership.

My favorite case studies draw out how radical direct service provision is, in itself, a powerful force for social change, which captures what I believe about working with clients for transformation and points the way to integration of clinical and macro practice.

Imagine selecting one of these case studies for a Board retreat where you’re discussing a new strategic vision and how you can involve clients more fully in your work. Or sitting down with your direct service providers to brainstorm how you could transform your programming so that it’s more integrated with your advocacy priorities. Or just curling up on those days when it seems like everything you want to see in the world is elusive, to be reminded that there are good and courageous people, and that they’re sharing their own experiences to be a light unto your path. And then imagine that the next Building Movement Project case studies feature…you!