Tag Archives: advocacy

The Future of Nonprofits, Part I: Innovating for Advocacy

Posted on December 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

This week, in the spirit of the season of giving, I’m writing three posts related to my thinking on some of the ideas raised in The Future of Nonprofits, and then giving away a copy of the book to a randomly-selected commenter at the end of the week. Today’s post tackles the core of the book–building an orientation to innovation within nonprofit organizations–specifically regarding what I think this means for transforming organizational cultures to embrace advocacy as a central mission imperative. Much of what I’ve written about here before (accepting risk, seeking mission fit, rigorously evaluating advocacy efforts) complements the authors’ insights on what innovation can look like, and can mean, for nonprofits, although I’ve never thought about it as explicitly “innovating” until reading this book.

I look forward to your comments, from those who have read The Future of Nonprofits and those who would like to, and especially your ideas on what the future can look like for our field, and more importantly, for the causes to which we dedicate ourselves, if we commit to building it together.

There’s an analogy in the opening of The Future of Nonprofits about how we respond to a moth in the room–taking the time to usher it carefully outside v. swatting at it with the back of our hands–that the authors use to illustrate how we often deal with new ideas in a nonprofit organization (hint: many of us are swatters). Honestly, I’m not totally enamored with the analogy, because what we often need to do is embrace the “moth” and shower it with the attention it deserves as it grows, rather than even kindly sending it on its way, but it did get me thinking about one of the greatest challenges we face in integrating an advocacy orientation into our primarily service-focused organizations:

We are very anxious about distractions.

Some of this preoccupation with focus is good, of course: none of us would want to work in (or be served by!) organizations without a clear sense of mission and how its activities advance those goals. We owe our clients, especially, accountability, and we need to avoid the temptation to do a little bit of good wherever we can, instead of developing real excellence that can revolutionize our world.

But.

Advocacy is not a distraction.

Nor is it the kind of small side initiative (like the office recycling program that the authors use to illustrate inventions v. innovations) that we can tack onto what we’re already doing, in the hopes that either (a) it will magically make our lives better and our work more effective or (b) it will satisfy our guilt, at least, about what we should be doing, and get people off our backs for awhile.

It requires infusing a commitment to social justice, a willingness to engage even our adversaries, a recognition that standing with our clients requires (at least sometimes) standing in harm’s way, and a passion for mission that becomes a calling.

And that makes it an innovation, in the clearest sense of that word–something that contributes creatively and powerfully to what our organizations should be doing: “creating ways to deliver on their mission through products and services that are insanely great” (p. 23).

But how do we get there? How do we get past this fear that stepping up to the advocacy challenges that so demand our attention won’t, somehow, turn us into these political monsters embroiled in every nasty fight we read about in the papers, or, conversely, detract from our services so much that we cease to be relevant to the causes to which we are committed?

The Future of Nonprofits suggests that what our organizations need, in fact, is more waste. Translating this concept to advocacy, it means time spent contemplating the roots of the problems faced by those we serve, and thinking collaboratively and very intently about the policy approaches that could eradicate them. It means building this time, and respect for it, into our employees’ job descriptions, and into our organizations’ priorities. It means structuring our organizations so that there is room to explore, so that we can be deliberate about our advocacy AND still extremely competent in our services.

Because, really, we can do more than one thing at a time. Even well.

It means that advocacy shouldn’t be the prerogative of just the “policy person” in an organization. Everyone who works at a particular organization should be assumed to be passionately committed to its mission (or they shouldn’t be there), and there should be an intentional effort to weave advocacy responsibilities into their regular work, both so that advocacy initiatives have the benefit of multiple perspectives and so that individuals can be a part of something larger, even, than they own specialized functions. I’ve seen this in practice, with childcare workers allowed to travel for legislative visits on work time, and case managers whose advocacy efforts alongside clients emerge as their most treasured victories, sustaining them during draining periods of direct practice.

It also means that seeing advocacy as an innovation within an organization–a fundamentally new and very potent way to attack the problems that plague us–frames it as an endeavor to be approached with an eye towards evaluation and an acceptance of the risks that inevitably accompany it. That’s a healthy and sustainable way for organizations to embrace advocacy as a core part of their work, rather than that “stuck onto the side” distraction.

Because it’s not.

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Is it time to up the ante?

Posted on December 1, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I know, things are hard enough these days, without going out and looking for trouble, right?

And, yet, here we are.

Here’s the problem: there’s increasing evidence, I believe, that the kinds of online advocacy about which we were so excited just a few years ago are, in fact, too easy.

Because we’re not the only ones who know that it doesn’t take much to get people to sign an online petition or click to send an email to their member of Congress (I know, it’s sometimes not as easy as it sounds, but that, unfortunately, usually has more to do with the nature of our relationships with those we’re trying to get to advocate than with the actual, technical difficulty of taking that particular action, and that’s an entirely different problem.)

A relatively recent survey of nonprofit activity on Facebook, for example, found that, while only 40% of organizations were able to convert their Facebook fans into donors or volunteers, about 66% saw an increase in people taking an advocacy action. And while that sounds great, because we can always use more activists, it makes me wonder:

If it’s known that people would rather sign a petition than give you a dollar, how much is that signature really worth?

This is related, too, to the common wisdom (enforced by our own experiences) that there’s just SO MUCH out there, and that it can be hard to sort through all of that information. Certainly policymakers feel that way, too, which contributes to their desire to wade through the noise and find that which most resonates with them. Since we can’t count on always aligning with their way of seeing the world, or having their trusted advisors lend us their voices, that means that we need to either make a compelling case related to their constituency (harder to do, somewhat ironically, in the context of online global networking, because of difficulties precisely locating advocates’ geographies) or develop powerful actions that can rise above the chatter…or both.

This question, and the doubt it reflects, matters not just in the short-term, when we really want people to listen to what our advocates are saying. Ultimately, key to building strong movements is people’s recognition that their individual contributions are, collectively, part of something far greater. And, so, if that’s not really the case–if me calling my member of Congress on my own would really make a bigger impact than joining with others to sign a petition or click “like”, then am I really part of a movement after all?

Are we authentically inviting people to transcend themselves and transform their lives, with the sacrifices that such affiliation entails? Or are we selling them the idea of advocacy, in a way that may forever distort their understanding of the real thing? If it’s the latter, what will that mean for the times when we have a really big “ask” of our advocates, if we haven’t been building, at all, but rather engaging in a sort of pseudo-organizing?

Lest we start off the last month of this year with a complete downer, I think that there are some real opportunities to utilize some of the same utilities on which we currently rely to leverage advocacy with real impact. Here are some of my ideas, and I’d love to hear yours, both in your reaction to this whole “time for a game-changer” proposition, and for ways to maximize the power of our online advocacy strategies and dodge the impotent, as we continually react to how our successes raise the stakes.

  • One of the most promising findings from the Idealware Facebook survey was the more than 70% of organizations who attracted new attendees to their events using social media. If we’re building advocacy into all of our events, as well as using social networking to recuit new participants to advocacy-focused events, there’s obvious potential to build momentum for our work using “new” technologies to drive the oldest of organizing axioms: turnout matters.
  • There are some really inspiring and exciting examples of organizations (and, indeed, individuals, who are perhaps naturally better at this than our fortresses!) using online networks to implement completely nontraditional campaigns. There’s no law that says that your online “ask” has to be a petition or an email. Again, sometimes we make the mistake of requesting relatively little, because we think that’s all we can get, when digging deeper, and inviting our advocates to do the same, can both strengthen our relationship and amplify our voice.
  • Those online petitions or social media “fans” don’t have to be THE campaign, and, indeed, they often are not. But when we organize an event to deliver a stack of letters to a policymaker (complete with compelling personal testimonies, appropriate media pressure, and the inclusion of unlikely allies) are we making sure that that effort echoes with those who originally took the online action, so that they see how it fits into the larger strategy and see how they might, in the future, play an expanded role?

    What do you think? What should be the measures by which we judge the effectiveness of our online advocacy strategies–number of participants, or vigor of engagement, or tangible policy changes? Is what we’re doing working, or is it time to push forward?

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    These kids need to eat: Why the connection between advocacy and direct services matters so much

    Posted on November 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    On October 1, 2011, our state agency charged with administering SNAP benefits (what we used to call Food Stamps) in Kansas announced a new rule that changed the way that they calculate income for mixed-status households (where some in the household are U.S. citizens and some are ineligible nonapplicants (a technical term for immigrants who can’t receive benefits and, so, are not applying for them).

    It’s kind of complicated, and it was only through the incredible patience of my good friends at the National Immigration Law Center (whose expertise and willingness to pick up the phone has saved me dozens of times over the past decade) that I understood exactly how it works, but, in essence, it’s this:

    Kansas now pretends that undocumented parents don’t need to eat, so we count all of the household’s income, but only count the number of family members who are eligible for food assistance. This makes it much harder for these families to qualify for SNAP, since the eligibility thresholds are based on income per size of household. None of that was really comprehensible from the initial announcement, which had some vaguely patriotic language about restoring equity and fairness to SNAP, a reference to the term “pro-rata share”, which we’d never heard before, and all kinds of assurances that there would be ample training before the new rules went into effect.

    And, then, on October 4, 2011, an extremely distraught single mother of 5 children, who had recently built a safe life for her family after years of domestic violence, showed up at El Centro, Inc. with a notice that her children’s SNAP case had been closed due to “non-citizen status.” She had no idea how she was going to feed her kids without that assistance, especially so soon after leaving her abusive husband.

    The good news, in this tragic mess?

    She knew where to go, not just to receive some immediate assistance–connection to a food pantry, and help getting her kids signed up for school breakfast, and information about congregate meal sites–but also for some answers about why this was happening to her, and for an ally in what she knew needed to be a fight.

    And, because it’s an organization that weaves advocacy into its direct services, the social worker with whom she met that day did things a bit differently, perhaps, than would some in a similar situation.

    • She made copies of the letter, because she knew from her advocacy training that USDA prohibits adverse action against eligible beneficiaries because of a nonapplicant’s immigration status, so, at the least, the title of that letter was unacceptable.
    • She asked questions, not just about what the mother intended to do now, but about what the SNAP case worker said (and didn’t), because she knew that USDA also requires disclosure about the voluntary nature of nonapplicants’ immigration information.
    • She got permission to share the mother’s story, not just with agencies for referral purposes, but with Office of Civil Rights investigators, with the organization’s public policy consultant, and with the media. She helped the mother write out her own story and explained how sharing her struggle would connect to future advocacy efforts.
    • She organized a meeting, where mothers who had had the same experience came together, learned about the new policy, and worked together to strategize about what could be done. They made posters to tell immigrants that they are not required to disclose their status if they’re not applying for benefits, and they wrote out their own testimonies, together.
    • She asked for help, reaching out to advocates with connections to national organizations, USDA officials, U.S. senators, influential community leaders. Together, they made a plan, which now includes not only the civil rights investigations but advocacy campaigns with members of Congress, an organized media push, and exploration of possible lawsuits.
    • She utilized radical practice skills to help that first mother, and the ones who poured into her office in the days to follow, understand that, just because the new rule is allowable doesn’t make it acceptable policy. She held their hands and looked into their eyes and said that it’s wrong for our country to allow children to go hungry because we don’t like their parents, and she vowed to work alongside them to make it right.

      It’s an advocacy effort that is far from resolved; indeed, Kansas is just one of the first states to use this allowable option to apply more restrictive income-counting rules to mixed-status families, and they most certainly won’t be the last. It’s a struggle with an uncertain resolution and, in the meantime, children are hungry and mothers are desperate.

      But there are real, concrete ways in which this whole scenario is unfolding in a far more hopeful way than it could have, and it’s because of the existence of an organization that believes that direct services make advocacy more authentic and more effective, and that only advocacy and organizing can provide a context in which direct services can succeed. One serves as a vehicle through which to collect the stories, document the evidence, and mobilize those affected. The other deploys those considerable resources in a strategy designed to bring lasting change.

      Their coexistence ensures that direct services never become about placating an oppressed community, and that advocacy never forgets its reason for being.

      These kids need to eat.

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    “Sacred extremes” in policy development

    Posted on November 10, 2011 by | 2 Comments

    One of my favorite blogs, which I’ve mentioned here often before, is Community Organizer 2.0, written by the enthusiastic and wise Debra Askanse. She had a post quite awhile ago that has stuck in my head; I jotted down a line of it and have been carrying it around on my “to think about” list all summer (What? Doesn’t everyone have one of those?). The blog post is about key principles for moving ideas forward, and the piece that resonated most with me is the idea of “sacred extremes”–those essential pieces that make a particular project stand apart, or that are absolutely crucial to its success, around which you must not–cannot–compromise.

    And I’ve been thinking about that idea of sacred extremes, perhaps not surprisingly, in the context of policymaking, and policy advocacy.

    Because, while much of the conventional wisdom around policymaking emphasizes the importance of compromise–and it is inevitable–our statute books are replete with examples of where too much compromised destroyed an idea, diluted a solution, or stunted potential. In the advocacy process, abandoning your sacred extremes can mean death to a coalition, or sour you on the whole policymaking arena, both prices that we really can’t afford to pay.

    So what do I mean, exactly, by “sacred extremes” in policy? How do we know them when we see them? And how do we protect them?

    The memory that echoes in my mind is when a powerful state legislator offered me the “compromise”, in 2004, of an instate tuition bill that would allow immigrant students without lawful status, but whose paperwork was already filed, the opportunity to attend Kansas post-secondary institutions. She knew that we could get that bill through the process pretty easily, in comparison to the complete standstill where we were stuck with the broader instate provision at the time, and it would have still helped a lot of kids.

    But it would have left out all of the hard-working immigrant kids without a line to stand in–for whom there simply is no category of relief–and it would have put our colleges and universities in the business of verifying immigration status for these kids, a dubious expansion of their powers. Undocumented immigrant students, and their right to dream big dreams regardless of the status of their families’ paperwork, were the core of that legislative struggle.

    They were a sacred extreme.

    And so we walked away from that offer.

    Because, ultimately, the only sure way to protect what is most precious in the policy process is to be willing to abandon everything else in order to get it. Even then, there’s a very good chance that losing everything is, indeed, what will happen.

    But when we remember that incrementalism is often code for “give them a little something so that we don’t have to deal with them anymore,” and that policy windows of opportunity are often slammed shut by a tiny victory, it’s a pretty clear choice.

    Without those sacred extremes, we can end up with something that isn’t, in fact, better than nothing.

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    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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    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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    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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    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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    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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