Tag Archives: advocacy

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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Thank you gifts: Wonderful Stuff to Share

Posted on May 6, 2013 by | Leave a comment

This week is my blog-a-versary, or whatever you’d call that, so today’s post is just great stuff that I want to share.

I am grateful for you, and for what you’ve allowed me to do over these past four years, and, well, I like to share cool things.

Enjoy.

  • The awesome women at MomsRising created the coolest online advocacy tool I’ve ever seen this year for Valentine’s Day. You could create a Valentine to send to your members of Congress, asking for stronger gun control laws. And, as you’ll see, you can ‘decorate’ it electronically, making it the perfect advocacy project for, say, a 30-something mom and her 4.5-year-old daughter who loves hearts and sparkles. THIS is how you do advocacy with parents, people–asking them to take 3 minutes to do something fun with their children that teaches critical messages about social change. They’re going to the top of the end-of-the-year donation list again.
  • This American Life really outdid itself with the two-part series on Harper High School in Chicago. I am, actually, a TAL fanatic, guilty of using up almost all my data minutes just for streaming TAL on my phone, but this feature on the impact of gun violence on teenagers in Chicago, and on a school in particular, was extraordinarily gripping. It provoked an extra 3 miles on the treadmill because I couldn’t stop listening. Yes, that good.
  • I get posts from epolitics delivered to my email inbox and, while I don’t often share them here, because it’s a bit beyond the niche of this blog, I’m really fascinated by the research analyzing the role of social media and online engagement in shaping how Americans do politics, today, and what that means for all of us, tomorrow. Plus, it helps me understand what wonky tech people are talking about.
  • IREHR, always good for a buzz kill. On Kansas Day this year (yes, there’s a day, people; we celebrate it in school), my good friend Lenny was asked to speak about racism and anti-Semitism in Kansas history. And that’s what makes him, and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which he heads, so important. They remind us of the parts of ourselves we’d rather forget, so that, in remembering, we have a chance to overcome. More than a few times, he’s pointed out how a given politician I’m trying to build an alliance with is a radical with ties to white nationalism. On a road trip once, he pointed out a Christian Identity trucking company. It’s a big burden to carry, this immersion in the nasty sides of everything, but he does it for our own good. And I’m grateful.
  • The award for best email subject line ever goes to Communities Creating Opportunities’ 2013 Covenant for Families initiative, which sent me an action alert this spring titled, “Woe to those who make unjust laws.” That is an awesome use of the prophet Isaiah. Even better is what they’re doing to engage people of faith in social justice work, now across the state of Kansas, where we can use some woe-bringing.
  • Having a great state representative is pretty terrific, really. I am so glad to call Representative Barbara Bollier my elected official. She’s smart, hard-working, and not afraid to take stands on controversial issues. She’s also extremely accessible and quite selfless. Yes, there are still really good people willing to run for office. And I’m glad.

Is there anything you’d like to share, in the cause of well-wishing? The only thing better than my list of wonderful stuff is that list with yours added to it.

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Fearlessness and Humility: Assets in Inquiry and Advocacy

Posted on May 2, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Just when you thought you were done with cholera.

Almost, I promise.

There is one more passage, describing the way that Dr. John Snow worked, that I just really want to share. I’ll quote it at some length:

“Here we have a man who had reached the very pinnacle of Victorian medial practice–attending on the queen of England with a procedure that he himself had pioneered–who was nonetheless willing to spend every spare moment away from his practice knocking on hundreds of doors in some of London’s most dangerous neighborhoods, seeking out specifically those houses that had been attacked by the most dread disease of the age. But without that tenacity, that fearlessness, without that readiness to leave behind the safety of professional success and royal patronage, and venture into the streets, his “grand experiment”…would have gone nowhere” (p. 108).

I spend quite a bit of time reflecting on what makes advocates succeed, sometimes because I’m looking for inspiration to share, and sometimes in the hope that there are specific pieces of advice to pass on.

And while I think that tenacity is widely-regarded as an essential quality in an advocate, because we suffer so many more setbacks than victories, these other aspects of Snow–his fearlessness and his willingness to disregard and even endanger the professional reputation he had built–were just as important. For him, and for us.

Most of the time, our advocacy requires that we convince people to do something different, or at least differently. That means that we have to be willing to be wrong, even spectacularly so, or else we’re probably not reaching far enough. We have to ask questions to which we don’t know the answers. We have to be willing to reach beyond the realm of what we know we do well–direct service, program administration, supervision–and do something that we fear we might not be as good at, because that’s where we are needed.

We have to be not just tenacious, which could be accomplished by doing the same thing over and over again, but also fearless, ready to take on bigger risks or try less-sure things. We have to be fearless for our own sake and also for those we hope to inspire; Snow only got other public health leaders to investigate cholera at its source by first going in himself.

What else would you add to the list of imperative advocate characteristics? What does fearlessness and humility look like in your social change work?

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Posted in Inspiration and Examples

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Influence is our goal, and other reminders for the home stretch

Posted on April 29, 2013 by | Leave a comment

In Kansas, our state legislature comes back from the recess next week, and May promises to be a long month for social work advocates, as we battle over major budget and tax cuts, with significant implications for vulnerable populations in our state.

And so it seemed like a good time to gear ourselves up, with a little refresher on lobbying.

And what works.

I hope that my fellow policy advocates will weigh in, too, with their best advice, for how to break through to policymakers, how to sustain ourselves, and how to stay grounded in the realities of our clients and the perspectives of the world outside the dome.

  • We give elected officials reason for being. We cannot ever forget that, without our phone calls, and our pleading, and our presentations, policymakers would not have a legitimate role in government. They are our representatives. So don’t ever let them make you feel bad, when you’re chasing them down in the hallways or calling them on a Saturday morning or sending them another email.
  • Stories may not convince, but they do increase investment, and getting policymakers and allies invested in our policy issues is our greatest challenge. If we can get others to take on our fights as their own, we have essentially one.
  • If you can only inform or influence, don’t forget that influence is our goal. We know a lot about our work, and we have so many things that we want to say, but information overload can reduce our effectiveness, and we can’t afford that. A personal connection with a policymaker can bring you much more influence than all the information in the world, and swaying policymakers is the reason we’re in this work.
  • Don’t forget to pack your social work skills and values for the trip to your capital. The humor and collegiality and value base that sustain us in the most difficult social work will sustain and serve you in policy advocacy, too, but it can be too easy to slip into another persona, in the halls of the capitol, instead of wrapping ourselves in our social work-ness.

What gets you through to June or July or whenever your ‘break’ in the policy advocacy world comes? What advice would you share with those who are just beginning in this journey?

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Nonprofits as Environmental Stewards

Posted on April 22, 2013 by | Leave a comment

earthday

It’s Earth Day.

It’s an event that didn’t really even exist, to celebrate a movement that barely did, when I was young.

And my kids have been talking about it for a month in school.

Because it’s a different world, in terms of our understanding of the urgency of environmental stewardship–conservation, preservation, defense.

And nonprofits need to be part of it.

To be certain, I am not the first to point this out. There are entire organizations dedicated to helping nonprofits reduce their environmental footprint. There’s a pretty awesome guide to taking concrete steps towards more sustainable practices, while living your mission.

But I spend a lot of time in a lot of different nonprofit organizations, especially those actively trying to achieve broader-scale social change, and it’s clear that we still have a lot of room to grow.

I totally count myself among the guilty:

  • Bought thousands of American flags, for a good visual for rallies, all shipped from China? Check.
  • Made hundreds of posters on non-recycled posterboard, most of which didn’t get recycled later? Check.
  • Drove 100 miles roundtrip every single day, usually by myself, to lobby in our state capitol? Check.
  • Printed more hundreds of thousands of flyers than I ever want to remember (and postcards, and petitions), for all variety of different issues? Check.
  • Bought supplies at the place with the best price and non-odious labor practices, without checking their sustainability policies at all? Check.

And we rationalize it, don’t we? Because our causes are so important, and our budgets are so strained, and our time seems more precious than fossil fuels. So we tell ourselves that any shortcut we can take is worth it, or we even stop seeing the environmental costs as part of the campaign analysis.

But we can do better than that.

Our children deserve it, and our would-be allies and advocates will come to demand it.

The advent of more developed technology makes effective mobilization without a heavy environmental cost more feasible. We can ‘be’ places that we are not, and we can make our voices echo, without burning up a lot of trees or oil.

We just have to figure it in, the way that we slice issues and map targets and plan tactics. On Earth Day, and every day, so that our victories can last forever, but our footprints will not.

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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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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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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

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Voluntary Transparency, and what it could teach us about advocacy

Posted on April 9, 2013 by | 2 Comments

Another fantastic post from the always-terrific Beth Kanter, about whom many great things are said on the Internet every day, and they’re still an understatement.

This one is about what it could mean for the nonprofit sector if the data from 990s (those reports that the backroom folks at your nonprofit prepare, all about your organization’s finances and governance) were really available, publicly, in a usable format.

I think it’s a fabulous idea, and I’m totally for it. In addition to the exciting potential benefits described in the post, I also think that having such data discussed openly in a public forum (as well as the fact that it would be public, period) would help the nonprofit sector in our advocacy as a sector, too: instead of relying on anecdote to defend ourselves when elected officials argue that we are wasteful or unaccountable, we could use actual, representative, nearly real-time, sector-wide datasets to demonstrate our fiscal acumen, just as our impact should speak to our true accountability.

The post suggests that a dataset seeded with nonprofits’ 990 information could:

  • Enable analysis of sector-wide issues such as “economic downturn on nonprofits”
  • Facilitate discussion of the “relationship between public and private dollars in providing social services”
  • Add to insights about different types of nonprofits (the post mentions 501(c)4 lobbying organizations
  • “Enable more people and organizations to analyze, visualize, and mash up the data, creating a large public community that is interested in the nonprofit sector and can collaborate to find ways to improve it.”

Since the push to get the IRS to release these data publicly will take awhile, and since my reading of A Voice for Nonprofits (which included interviews and data culled from nonprofits that voluntary released them) is pretty fresh in my mind, I am thinking about what it could do for our nonprofit sector if we just went ahead and started a culture change to bring the same kind of disclosure voluntarily that Beth’s post argues for requiring.

I’m not talking about the kind of coerced and cumbersome ‘accounting’ some states are considering requiring of nonprofit organizations.

I don’t even mean the trends, noted at least by me, of more nonprofits including their strategic plans and annual reports (and sometimes even their 990s) on their websites.

I mean, what if organizations were really open, with each other, with their donors, with their clients, about the kinds of advocacy in which they engage (at least after the fact, since total transparency is sometimes not strategic)? So that we could learn, from each others’ experiences, about what works, and what doesn’t; about how much advocacy is needed to ‘tip’ issues (a sort of dosing effect); about how organizations’ advocacy practices change as their organizational profiles change; and about how advocacy differs within sub-sectors of nonprofits (in a sort of sector-wide extension of the kind of research included in A Voice for Nonprofits)?

And what if, by sharing in that way, we could also gain the corollary benefit of just normalizing the advocacy experience, so that nonprofits see how common it really is (because I’ve truly never met any nonprofit leader who regularly passes up a chance to try to convince a powerful person of how important and impactful their work is)?

What does your organization share, and with whom, about how and when and why you advocate? What would it take you to share more? And what would it mean for you if others reciprocated?

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Posted in Background Reading

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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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Root causes and urgent fires: Building an Advocacy Agenda

Posted on April 2, 2013 by | Leave a comment

One of the most important, and most time-consuming, parts of my advocacy technical assistance with nonprofit social service organizations is to help them craft their advocacy agendas.

This isn’t just about making a list of changes we’d like to see in the world.

It’s not about checking ‘advocacy agenda’ off, so that the organization is recognized for advocating.

It’s about building an agenda that focuses the organization’s collective resources–people, knowledge, expertise, relationships–on those policy issues that are determined to be most central to the mission, most impactful for those they serve, and most ‘ripe’ for change.

Done correctly, an advocacy agenda can increase buy-in from constituents, who appreciate the chance to shape the organization’s priorities, bring along allies who look to the organization for signals about the policies that warrant attention, and complement direct services, by fostering changes in the conditions that create and perpetuate need.

Especially in a climate of recession and retrenchment, though, many nonprofit social service organizations feel pressure–internally, at least, if not from external players–to advocate primarily for restoration of critical services, investments in core infrastructure, and capacity to deliver programming.

When an advocacy agenda could easily be filled with 6-8 examples of really important services that have been restricted or even eliminated, it’s easy to understand why a lot of organizations stop there.

That kind of advocacy agenda, though–one where nearly every priority item relates to the organization’s ability to meet its own bottom line, in a way–does not wield the same moral authority, bring people together across sectors, or, ultimately, carry as much potential for fundamental change as an agenda that also addresses some of the root causes that could really change lives.

This need for balance, then, this sort of ‘dance’ between a desire to incorporate root causes and live up to the aspirational visions that many nonprofits have embraced for their work, with the urgency of defending the tools that allow them to meet people’s needs and advance their basic functions.

For example, one of the organizations with which I’m working addresses child abuse prevention. As they begin to shape their agenda, they are very open about these different ‘pulls’.

On one hand, there is a need for stronger criminal penalties related to some forms of child endangerment and maltreatment. Funds that sustain forensic interviewing and emergency supports are threatened, and funding for foster care programs–including tuition forgiveness for children who age out of care–is far below what it really needs to be. There are needs for more parenting classes and mental health services, especially as the child welfare system feels the strains of other systems that have suffered cuts of their own. The organization knows that it could do far more, for more families, with more resources.

On the other hand, the organization’s leaders are acutely aware that, as witnesses to what happens when society fails to invest adequately in families across the board, they are well-positioned to add critical perspectives to debates on education policy, workforce development, anti-poverty efforts, and health/mental health. They understand that even the best intervention for a family identified as at-risk of child maltreatment is, already, somewhat late, and they want to shape what happens long before that point.

So, as we bring clients and partners and staff into conversations about what should ‘make’ the organization’s advocacy agenda, they are intentional about seeking to balance the priorities that will warrant their attention between those that reflect those underlying root causes, and those that are urgent needs that cannot be ignored.

There’s no magic math to it. And pragmatism and limited hours in the day will likely always mean that blazing fires win out, at least to a certain extent.

But these conversations are important, and finding ways to carve out at least a little of the organization’s advocacy capacity to dedicate to stemming the need is, in its own way, urgent too.

As the proverb goes, we have to stop babies from being thrown in the river.

Even while we’re trying our best to pull them out.

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