Tag Archives: advocacy

Institutionalizing “government relations”

Posted on November 8, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Sometimes, if we’re paying attention, we can get really good ideas in the most unlikely places.

It’s why I keep a huge stack of those tiny sticky notes by my bed, and why I read voraciously (one of the great side benefits of breastfeeding!).

I recently read David Cay Johnston’s Free Lunch, which is pretty terrifically disturbing all around, detailing the myriad of lucrative and often secretive arrangements that companies (and industries) large and small have negotiated for themselves, and the tremendous (and often hidden) costs of such regulatory frameworks (and lack thereof) to American taxpayers.

It’s a good thing I’m always exhausted, or it might be hard to fall back asleep.

But this isn’t a post about those deals (one can’t even really call it corruption, since it’s mostly completely legal, if not legitimate), or about the importance of transparency or about the reality of corporate “welfare” and what a true accounting of our investments would look like.

No, this is, instead, about the good idea, phenomenal really, that was slipped onto page 203, courtesy of former Cabinet member John Snow, at the time head of the transportation company CSX. He talked about how, key to the company’s successes in the realm of self-advocacy (including all kinds of regulatory allowances, special incentives, and opportunities to shape policy for the industry) was a commitment to “institutionalize government relations” within the entire company. The idea was to ensure that every employee, from the CEO to hourly maintenance workers to engineers to the human resources personnel, understood and valued relationships with elected and appointed officials and the government agencies with influence over the company and its work, and that they had skills and tools to deploy in order to contribute to that aspect of the business.

Granted, Johnston makes a connection between these cozy relationships between CSX and its regulators and an ultimately fatal accident attributed to poor maintenance, but bear with me.

What if we did that?

What if advocacy was seen in our nonprofit social service organizations as a core function, an integral part of the job description of every single employee (and, perhaps even more importantly, every Board member), and an essential skill worth considerable investment across the organization?

What if we didn’t have a “policy department”, but instead every individual charged with programmatic responsibilities (and, ideally, those participating in the programs, too) had strong knowledge of the policies that shape their services and how to make the case for them? What if, every time there was an event in our organizations, we were including elected and appointed officials, so that they would understand and value our efforts as well? What if our Board members could speak eloquently about our work when they encounter policymakers in other settings? What if each of our direct-service employees spoke a few times a year with their own elected officials, building relationships and confidence that would contribute to advocacy on behalf of the agency, too? What if everyone saw interfacing with those who make the decisions that shape the future course of our organizations and our communities as part of their daily job responsibilities, and wove that advocacy into their every activity? What if it was really seamless, so that advocacy wasn’t something at the bottom of the to-do list that seldom gets done, but instead an orientation to our work that resulted not in more sheer doing but smarter, more visible, and more powerful efforts?

What if?

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Posted in Inspiration and Examples

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Last one in shut the door?

Posted on October 24, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In the interest of full disclosure, right from the beginning:

This is not one of those posts with any helpful lessons to impart.

I hope that sometimes you find those, and I am more grateful than you can know for those who share their reactions to what I write, particularly as to how my thoughts at least occasionally contribute to your own journeys in advocacy, learning, community work, and the pursuit of justice.

But, today, I’m just perplexed.

Not too long ago, I was copied on an email from a teacher friend of mine who was asking her contacts to get involved in the ongoing debate over budgets at our local district and, particularly, at the state level. She wrote a little about the challenges she’s facing in her own classroom and emphasized the importance of parents and other teachers including their voices in the discussion over decisions that will shape our children’s futures.

You can see why we’re friends, right?

And I was also copied on the response to her from one of the recipients.

What struck me most was the line about how wrong it is that all of “these kids” are getting free and reduced lunch. Now, the nuance here, and what I’ve been mulling over, is that she wasn’t upset about her own child NOT getting free and reduced lunch. Her apparent anger, expressed on a computer screen, was not over some injustice visited upon her own family, but on the injustice she perceived in someone else’s receipt of something.

Now, to some extent, I get this: I’m upset, for example, when corporations get huge tax breaks that undermine our nation’s financial security, and it’s not because I think I should be getting one, too, but because I object to the basis on which that entitlement is granted.

And maybe that’s where her outrage is coming from, even though her email didn’t reference anything about the costs of the free and reduced lunch program, and even though (whether she knows it or not) our district actually gets more money because of the presence of these students–federal money pays for the meals themselves, and the students receive additional weightings in our school finance formula as “at-risk” students: money that the district then uses to fund our overall educational system, including that of her own child.

But a conversation I had with my own state representative the other day made me think that maybe it’s not even this “we can’t afford it so they shouldn’t get it” rationale, at least not explicitly. She and I were talking about our state’s instate tuition policy, her support of it, and some of the communications she has received from constituents about that support. Her exact quote was something along the lines of, “I can’t understand how people can be so upset about others getting something that doesn’t affect them at all. It’s like they want to deny it just for spite.”

When undocumented immigrants, even immigrant kids, are concerned, I certainly wouldn’t rule out the influence of spite.

And certainly it could be immigrant children and those who look like them who were in the mind of the woman upset about free lunches (the literal kind), too.

Because our instate tuition policy does not cost the state. The students pay full price, and our higher educational system isn’t funded on a per-pupil basis anyway. The universities themselves, who certainly wouldn’t support a policy that harmed them, have been the strongest supporters. And the constituents that are contacting my representative are, themselves, also eligible for instate tuition, if they chose to attend one of our state schools.

So they’re not upset because they aren’t getting something, and they can’t even be upset because they’re paying for someone else to get something.

Instead, it’s more of a scarcity thinking, kind of to the extreme, what I’ve been mentally labeling a “last one in shut the door behind you” mentality, that views one’s own gains in life as so precious that denying those same tools to others seems like the only way to preserve them.

And, I’ll admit. I just don’t get it.

I think that I need to, because this kind of thinking is finding its way into our public policies, and because I need to know how to advocate with those who have adopted this “I don’t need it but no one else should have it” rationale. But I can’t quite crack the code, so to speak, to figure out where to start. Which is why this post doesn’t have answers.

Please, wise readers: help me. Where have you encountered these same reactions, and to what do you attribute them? What am I missing that would make this make sense, and where do I start in building some bridges (at least in communication) with those who approach life from this perspective?

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Posted in Background Reading

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The Most Dangerous Burnout?

Posted on October 20, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Several conversations lately have me worried about burnout.

Not the individual “I’ve had it with social work and think I’ll open a bakery instead” kind of burnout (I have this thought occasionally, but I really, really don’t like waking up early. And I don’t think my customers would necessarily appreciate running political commentary. So I stay.), but the whole movement “maybe this whole social justice thing is too hard and times are tough so maybe we just can’t do this” kind of burnout.

And, truthfully, this kind scares me a lot more.

In a comment to a blog post awhile back, a colleague talked about how hard it has been to stay engaged in the political debate, since many progressives felt like it was “our” moment in 2008, and there’s a sense of whiplash in the intervening 3 years.

In some of my consulting work with nonprofit advocates, I had a very experienced lobbyist with a well-respected organization tell me that her greatest concern, looking forward, is how many of those alongside whom she has advocated are already giving up, saying that the more conservative legislature and Governor we have in Kansas today is simply more than they can stand.

And, perhaps most chilling are the conversations I’ve had with a few elected officials in our state recently, none of whom have answered my, “so, can we count on you to run again in 2012?” question with anything close to an adamant affirmation.

And I don’t blame them. Any of them.

It’s tough to spend every day advocating on what seem like lost causes, and so many of our dearest struggles seem that way these days: budgets that protect the most vulnerable, progressive civil rights legislation, adequate supports for families, equal rights for women, strong environmental standards, a solid regulatory framework for health care reform…fill in your own “lost cause”.

I wish we were winning more, too.

But the reason that I’m so concerned about these signs of movement burnout is that we will surely lose, and likely lose more ground than we even fear (and, perhaps, more than we’ve even won!), if we step away. If we wait for a better day, or someone else to take up the charge, it will likely never come.

But, lest this post turn into some inspirational poster with an odd animal photograph (is my kid’s classroom the only one to feature those?), here’s a quote from one of my all-time favorite social work advocates. Ever.

“We are all being told that we have to be pragmatic and recognize that this is not a “good” year for social issues, especially if they cost money. That implies that there may yet be a good year for social issues, if only we have patience. But no Congress has ever come to Washington vowing to make things right for the poor, the vulnerable, for workers, or for the environment. In that sense, this year is different only in degree.”

The advocate? Nancy Amidei, the woman behind the “ketchup is not a vegetable” campaign.

The year?

1982

It’s always an uphill climb, no matter who sits in the White House or even how many votes we control in Congress. Trying to vanquish injustice is like that.

And, while I don’t have the answers to how we guard against this burnout and how we collectively care for each other so that we can continue on, I’d argue that the stakes have never been higher than in the next 13 months, at least.

Our causes are no less noble for being long shots. Our clients’ and communities’ needs are no less urgent. And our roles are no less critical. And, together, we can not just hang on, but even carve out some victories.

And maybe even turn some tides.

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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

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Now more than ever: Local Government Matters

Posted on October 10, 2011 by | Leave a comment

My students are studying local government this month in my Advanced Policy course.

They’re often somewhat surprised to see it included in the course outline–it’s not in the master syllabus, certainly, and it’s not a topic that they have encountered before in their social work education.

But I argue that it’s critically important for social workers and those who care about social justice, now more than ever.

And, you know, sometimes I really hate to be right.

A debate that exploded two weeks ago drove this point home, alarmingly.

The District Attorney in Shawnee County, Kansas, home to our state capital and just an hour down the turnpike from my home, announced that his office would no longer prosecute misdemeanors, including most domestic violence complaints, due to limited financial resources. Specifically, he required a $350,000 payment from the City Council (where he argued most of these cases originated) in order to continue the prosecutions.

It’s horrifying to think that perpetrators of domestic violence could rest assured that they would not face prosecution for their crimes, not because they hadn’t done something very, very wrong, but because the government can’t afford to do the right thing.

But it’s not surprising, not really.

With the federalist relationship between states and the federal government falling apart in a flurry of massive cuts in discretionary spending and unfunded mandates and devolution gone astray, state budgets were stretched to the breaking point. Then, all too often, state governments intent on dismantling the social contract used constrained finances as an excuse to retrench, even when the bottom line improved.

And, of course, in the process, local governments got squeezed, especially given their dependence on the kinds of taxes (property and sales taxes) among the hardest-hit in this recession.

And who do they squeeze, as the folks at the end of the line?

Those most vulnerable, of course–kids, whose schools are struggling; older adults, whose fixed incomes can’t easily absorb the costs passed along; individuals who rely on the public commons, which is eroding and in sore need of investment; and victims of crime, whose search for justice can apparently be sacrificed in the name of fiscal expediency.

We absolutely must hold local governments responsible for decisions like this. Government at all levels needs to hear that it’s not acceptable to balance budgets on the backs of those most in need.

But we also have an obligation to connect the dots, and to hold the federal and state governments accountable for the impact of their decisions, and for the reprehensible attempts to pass the buck to local entities.

Local governments didn’t create these problems themselves, and they can’t solve them alone, either.

We need advocates in the local government arena, though, where the cuts come home to hurt.

Now more than ever.

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Preventable Train Wrecks: Federal Budget Advocacy

Posted on October 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The new federal fiscal year just started.

Which would be a noteworthy event if, say, we had a budget that actually started on the fiscal year, with new budget authorization for the federal agencies whose work is so important to our individual and collective well-being. If the new fiscal year meant the actual resources we need to do the critical activities that support the nation’s most fervent desires and greatest needs? Well, these days, that sounds nearly miraculous.

Instead, we have a perpetual mess that few can understand and no one can control, or even predict. The one constant for we social workers is that we will have to scrimp and scrounge to find the money to do what needs to be done, with a growing resentment towards a government, and a budget process, that isn’t supposed to make our jobs this much harder.

When I talk with social work advocates about the federal budget, as I do in class every fall and in conversations with nonprofit leaders throughout the year, their reactions to the whole affair are pretty much the same:

Disdain, disgust, disengagement…with periodic disaster, whenever the (usually very) small slice of the federal budget that funds their work is threatened, or rumored to be so, since few social service providers have enough direct information about the federal budget to know for sure.

This means that social work advocates have a rather spectacularly dysfunctional relationship with the federal budget. We fail in our federal budget advocacy in some rather routine ways, and those failures have implications not only for our own programs and constituencies, but, indeed, for the fiscal health of the nation as a whole.

The biggest errors are these (and, of course, it goes without saying both that these are not universal and that I include myself among the culpable):

  • We take as truth the common wisdom about the federal budget–today, that there’s a “crisis”, because we don’t understand enough about the process to make those analyses for ourselves.
  • We look only at a portion of the budget, very seldom weighing in on the big picture, so that our advocacy becomes a real elbowing match, as we fight for meager portions with others (mostly other social service types) relegated to our corner of the budget.
  • We totally overlook the revenue side, as though, somehow, the tax debate was not our fight, which essentially dooms us to vying for a tiny piece of a shrinking pie.
  • We get involved way too late, mobilizing our constituencies only when there’s a perception of real threat, and, even then, we don’t/can’t help those same constituencies understand all of the factors at play that create the crisis. This sets up our grassroots folks to make panicked phone calls, without much context, to “not cut the funding for XYZ”, which, while not necessarily an ineffective lobbying technique, is anything but empowering. We need those who receive our services to understand where the funding comes from, how to make the case year-round, and how the viability of those services is affected by other political and economic factors. Talk about teachable moments.
  • We let the ugliness of the process excuse our inaction. I hate the “shadow budget” as much as the next do-gooder. I’m appalled at our tax code and frightened about the future of our entitlements. I think it’s inexcusable how much money we spend on things that don’t really matter, and how easily our spending priorities are distorted by raw political considerations. Yes, yes, and yes. But that doesn’t mean that we can afford to sit this one out, or that the illogic and sometimes sheer nastiness of the federal budget process makes it an inappropriate or unnecessary realm for our best advocacy efforts.

    Because the results are predictable: when we’re not there, at least not until the end, our voices are not reflected in the budget, which is, after all, fundamentally a statement of values–the same way that my own checkbook register shows what I care about enough to spend money on.

    And we can do better. We must. Because the hard questions aren’t going to get answered if we’re not even asking them.

    And because our clients deserve far better than crumbs.

    I regularly read the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ federal budget analyses, even the footnotes that I sometimes struggle to understand. I scan the policy priorities of some of the other major advocacy groups that watch the federal budget. I read national news coverage of the budget battles, and I attend public forums and listen to commentary from my own congressional delegation. And I pay attention to discussion about process reforms–the ways that we could make our budget negotiations go better so that the resulting budget would be better, too, even though sometimes the appropriation v. authorization talk makes my eyes glaze over, too.

    Because advocating with and for those we have the honor to serve means being in the toughest fights.

    And the most tedious, nauseating, and overwhelming, too.

    Let’s make this the last federal fiscal train wreck we fail to prevent.

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    Posted in Questions you're embarrassed to ask

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    We don’t need more lobbyists, but we do need you

    Posted on October 4, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    I was giving a presentation awhile ago to an incredible group of Latino college students who have committed themselves to working as educators in under-resourced schools, mostly with Limited English Proficient students. Their presence in those classrooms, as not only highly-trained teachers but also true role models, will absolutely make a difference.

    I’m honored every time I get to work with them.

    Mostly, we talk about policy.

    I walk them through the basics of immigration policy and how it affects their students, and what they might expect to see in their classrooms in terms of the effects on families and, by extension, on how children can learn.

    I help them understand our school finance formula and what it means for at-risk students, and also how the debate over school finance is shaping how patrons view English-language-learners and immigrant students within their schools.

    And, together, we think about how they can be advocates, and educators, and how finding ways to embrace both of those roles provides their students the best chance of success.

    And when I talk with groups like these, my core message is always the same:

    To [end poverty], [counter racism], [win fair immigration policies], [pass a truly pro-family budget], we don’t necessarily need more lobbyists. You know that I think that lobbyists play an essential role in the policymaking process, but I don’t pretend that it’s for everybody, and I don’t think it’s the key to the victories we so desperately need.

    Instead, what we need is everyone, from the primary role that does feed their souls (parent, teacher, direct-practice social worker, chef, librarian), finding ways to integrate effective advocacy into that work, so that their interactions with public officials spring from an authentic and renewing place in their lives.

    That would be game-changing.

    If members of Congress and state legislators had to respond to millions of people who aren’t lobbyists, and certainly don’t think of themselves that way, but who are justifiably outraged by a policy injustice that affects their work or their communities, and who took the 10 minutes to contact their lawmaker to demand redress…they’d notice.

    It’s the reason why students and teachers and parents who come to testify on a particular issue in the state legislature get the committee members to put down their newspapers and sometimes even applaud, the way that we lobbyists seldom do.

    So my goal in talking with people like these students is not to steer them from their chosen path and make advocacy their one true calling.

    It’s to make advocacy a part of their way of life, in small, seamless ways, with the assured knowledge that doing so will play a part in reshaping the policy landscape that impacts the work, and the people, that they really care about.

    Relax. We don’t need more lobbyists.

    But we do need you.

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    The “how” matters. A lot.

    Posted on September 27, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    My consulting work will has slowed down, a lot, over the past two months, as I stepped back to spend some time with my growing family. I don’t miss the stress of trying to make work phone calls while kids are clamoring for fruit snacks, but I do miss, very much, the opportunity to play at least a small part in the work of some really inspiring social service and civic organizations.

    I’m ready to get back to “normal”, or at least my version of it.

    Getting ready for some of my fall work, though, and making plans for the future, has prompted me to reflect more on the impact that I have on those with whom I work, and on how this phase of my career builds on my past experiences, and some other thoughts that may quite honestly be more insomnia-provoked than truly interesting.

    But this insight, I think, means something, to me and to the organizations with which I’ve worked over the past couple of years.

    HOW we do advocacy matters, especially in adverse political and economic times like these.

    That’s one of the primary lessons that I’ve tried to share with organizations, especially those just beginning to integrate advocacy into their services. I don’t mean the sort of standard “there are no permanent enemies” advice (which, okay, I’ve never been all that good at anyway).

    Instead, what I try to help clients understand is that, when we lose SO OFTEN, we have to build our campaigns so that there are real, tangible victories that can be salvaged, celebrated, and, most crucially, built upon, from the wreckage of the failures (that always hurt anyway).

    And people, be they advocacy-averse Board members of a large social service agency, or social justice advocates assembled at a progressive church, usually start to nod when I mention those losses. Because they know them; they’re what they fear. So talking about them openly, from the very beginning, helps to take some of the “sting” out. And, with the inevitability of failure, at least to some degree, on the table, then we can talk about how you build “loss-proof” campaigns, the kind literally guaranteed to bring your organization significant benefit, regardless of the ultimate outcome.

    To some extent, this means thinking carefully about how you’ll measure success, and building in the kinds of interim measures (increasing your membership base, attracting new donors, raising your profile) that, while not empirically demonstrated to lead to later advocacy success, matter on their own rights.

    But what I push organizations to plan for, and what I mean by the “how”, is the need to construct strategy and choose tactics that are designed to build the power of individual leaders within your organization and to strengthen the relationships among them.

    This means that, when you have the choice between going alone to a meeting with the Mayor or spending the time to prepare community members to facilitate it, you choose the latter. You hold regular meetings with your leadership to let them make the decisions about how to proceed, especially at difficult junctures. You encourage them to collect postcards or petitions, even if you doubt they’ll influence the decision-makers, because you want them to practice their messages and build their base. And you utilize reflections to help them name their advances and process their grief about the loss, rather than buying into the “winner takes all” logic of our current political system.

    It means that you recognize that, while falling short of your ultimate policy goal is virtually a given, irredeemable failure is unacceptable. And so you plan to prevent it.

    And that way, you win. Even when you lose.

    And that makes all the difference.

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    Posted in Tips and How-Tos

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

    Posted on September 26, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    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)!

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    Posted in My New Favorite Thing

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    Evaluating Advocacy, de nuevo

    Posted on September 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    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.

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    Posted in My New Favorite Thing

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    Ethics and Advocacy, de nuevo

    Posted on September 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    We're held to the same Code of Ethics, even with the "holes"

    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 first of the three that I have chosen for this week, with new thoughts and, of course, new questions.

    One of the first twenty or so posts that I wrote for this blog, back in June 2009, dealt with the ethical challenges faced by advocates, organizers, and other macro practitioners. I outlined some of the biggest holes, as I see them, in the NASW Code of Ethics, and how vague, contradictory, or rather unworkable guidance there can cause problems for those of us whose social work practice doesn’t really conform to the traditional, agency-based, more direct interaction model.

    I continue to weave content on ethics into all of my classes, and I continue to struggle, at times, with some doubt about whether what feels like natural and “good” community or advocacy practice is really the most defensible, based on my social work Code of Ethics. And I continue to be frustrated by the relative paucity of dialogue about those gaps in our ethical guidance, and especially about the self-doubt that creeps into my practice, and, I know, into the minds of my students, too.

    So, I’m revisiting this topic in the hopes of enlisting other social workers in not only offering some of their consultation, but also joining in the conversation about what may need to be added to our NASW Code of Ethics, or perhaps tweaked a bit, for we macro social workers, who, after all, deserve clear ethical guidance just as much as our clinical colleagues–just as our clients deserve just as clear an understanding of the ethical rules that shape us.

    In class, I raise a lot of different questions about ethics in advocacy and organizing: means v. ends, informed consent, competency, loyalty to employing agency…but below I’ve tried to distill those thorniest areas that truly vex me, with some examples of how these issues manifest themselves in practice. I’d really appreciate other macro social workers willing to share some of their own ethical dilemmas, or any social work professionals willing to offer some insights from their perspective as people committed to living our Code. Ethics are, after all, about protecting those we serve and the reputation of our profession, both causes of critical importance to me as an advocate. So we have to get this right.

  • The dual relationship thing always gets me: So, our Code of Ethics doesn’t have an absolute prohibition on dual relationships, but we are instructed to avoid dual relationships where they could harm the client. Sounds reasonable. Except, in community practice, this is often pretty tough. Do I keep someone out of a community organizing effort because we also go to church together? I can’t. Yet when they get somewhat confused about how I relate to them differently as an organizer than as a fellow parishioner, is that introducing the potential for harm? What about when someone I’ve been developing as a leader asks me to come to her high school graduation. To not go would seem to deny the power that that diploma has for her, but, when I do go, I’m inevitably asked to come to dinner at her parents’ house, and they want to talk about my kids, and…where do you draw those lines?
  • Boundaries v. “whole person” organizing: I can talk on and on about how we need to integrate organizing into this full sense of self, and I totally believe that, but then, I have to live it, too. I mean, my own children are a big part of the reason that I work for the social justice causes I do, and, yet, if I’m supposed to maintain boundaries around a professional relationship, I have to be careful about how much I divulge. It feels awkward, and it is awkward, and sometimes a little disingenous. But I don’t want to be responsible for someone being confused about whether we’re “friends” or not.
  • Dignity of every person in nasty advocacy fights: So I do immigration advocacy, right? And I know that my Code of Ethics means that truly underhanded tactics are off the table, then–I wouldn’t want to be that kind of lobbyist, anyway. But to what extent do I need to uphold the dignity and worth of those who would seek to, say, shoot members of my community from helicopters like feral pigs?
  • Informed consent and compromise: I struggle with this one a lot; we can never truly say that we “represent” any community (which is why I’m a proponent of advocacy with instead of advocacy on behalf of), but, even when we’re practicing empowerment and maximum participation, there are going to be those who would be affected by the policies we promote (or oppose) who haven’t been consulted in any meaningful way. And, when it comes to the inevitable compromises, coalitions can fall apart and even those with whom you have been working closely can feel that their interests were not well-represented by those who were at the table. How can I ethically work as their “social worker” knowing that I can’t get their informed consent for every possible outcome of the policy change process?

    There are other issues that have cropped up–Can I work ethically in coalition with organizations whose values are not perfectly aligned with social work’s? Can I advance the interests of one group of clients over another, in pursuit of incremental policy change? Can I represent an issue as being worse than I can prove it is (if I really believe it to be so)? The list above, though, represents my kind of perennial ethical challenges, the ones that I feel really torn about, and the ones where I feel that I’ve probably made some missteps, in both directions–sometimes not practicing great social work out of an abundance of caution, and sometimes walking in a gray ethical area.

    A favorite social work instructor of mine once said that some of what we call ethical dilemmas are really just crises of conscience–where we know what to do and just need to muster the courage to do it. And that’s the case, sometimes, with advocacy: we know when we should stand up and speak out, and, in fact, our Code of Ethics demands it.

    I’m glad every day that I belong to a profession that expects people to take real risks in order to bring about a more just society.

    But I do wish that I had a Code that defined “client” more the way it is in my practice, that offered more guidance for my greatest dilemmas, and that created a more standard and workable ethical framework so that my macro practitioners would feel as compelled as our clinical colleagues to follow it.

    Our clients, whether they make a 50-minute appointment and sit down across a desk from us, or march side-by-side on the institutions of power that shape our lives, deserve no less.

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