Tag Archives: community organizing

Make sure they know what to do: Clarity combats exhaustion, which can look like apathy

Posted on April 12, 2012 by | Leave a comment

My husband and I have a sort of running joke (well, several, but only one relevant here). Whenever he asks me what I’m doing, or what’s going on, I say “advocacy”.

See, the thing is, I talk about advocacy ALL THE TIME.

Shocking, I know.

My preoccupation with the term is evident from my job titles. I am an advocacy technical assistance provider. A public policy advocate. An advisor to the Advocacy Fellows.

And, of course, in my free time, just a regular ‘advocate’.

But the reason that it’s funny, too, is that it’s a word that doesn’t necessarily tell someone much. I mean, what’s ‘advocacy’ to me may not be ‘advocacy’ to someone else. So I can throw it around (and, guilty as charged, sometimes do) without having to really articulate what in the world it is that I mean by it.

And, you know, that’s not too helpful, not when we really want people to advocate.

And not when, by that, what we mean is “organize your friends and neighbors” or “call your legislator” or “write a letter to the editor” or “speak up at the next meeting”.

My favorite part of Switch is this section with studies about how having to make a lot of decisions actually exhausts us, to the point to which it can look like we don’t care. They say that explains why we’re so tired after going shopping (and here I thought it was just because I really don’t like to buy things).

That means that, sometimes, what looks like apathy can really just be exhaustion; people can be literally too tired to do what it is that we want/need them to do, after the effort of figuring out what it is that we want/need them to do, even if they really want/need to do it, too.

This is a big problem, especially since we’re much more likely to spend our energy trying to convince people that they should “advocate”, instead of explaining exactly what that means, what it will look like, and how they can do it.

When they don’t do anything, we call it resistance. Or apathy. Instead of fatigue. Because, to us, how can they be tired? They didn’t do anything! Except they really did–they tried to figure out what to do, and that effort can wear us out.

My favorite part within this favorite part, then, is an experiment where researchers identified those within a college dorm most likely to give to a food drive (they called them ‘saints’) and those least likely to give (‘jerks’). Then they asked both groups to give, except they gave the ‘jerks’ explicit instructions about what to take, and where, even with a map. The saints just got the appeal.

Who gave more?

Those who knew exactly what they needed to do.

And this, people, is really, really, really awesome news. Because, as the authors of Switch conclude, it means that we don’t need to spend our time searching for saints, or trying to cultivate saintliness from mere mortals.

We don’t necessarily need more saints, because jerks with maps will do just fine.

And we can do maps.

What would be super-clear look like in your work? Where can we replace ‘advocacy’ with something that means a whole lot more, to more people? How can we resist our temptation to call it apathy, instead of figuring out if people know exactly what we need them to do? And where do you see this in your own life? And, dare I say it, in your own advocacy?

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Third-order Engagement: Friends don’t let friends advocate alone

Posted on March 29, 2012 by | Leave a comment

While I admit that I’m slow to getting around to try out all of the really exciting tools that I learn about on Beth Kanter’s blog, it’s a very fertile place for new ideas about revolutionizing nonprofits, and it’s the first blog I make a point to check in on when I want to be challenged and reconnected to the field.

Often, posts about technology in nonprofit organizations lead me to think, also, about offline applications of the same concepts, which is exactly the case with this post from this archived post about “third-order engagement.”

The idea, after all, isn’t very high-tech: People are more likely to get excited about something that their friends are excited about. And they’re more likely to be receptive to messages that are conveyed by those with whom they already have a strong relationship.

As the blog post describes, this makes sense for for-profit companies that are learning to facilitate consumers sharing information about products with friends who might want to buy them, too, as well as for nonprofit organizations that can see big dividends when they make it easy for donors and others to find out how their friends are engaged with the same organization, too.

And, of course, it has important advocacy implications.

Are our advocacy efforts set up to make it easy for people to “invite” friends to take a stand with them (with talking points that someone new to the effort can relate to, and engaging actions that people will find enjoyable, and explicit assistance to help people approach friends about the cause)?

Are we investing heavily in our strongest advocates’ potential to bring in new activists, rather than pushing out all of the asks ourselves? Are we moving people from engagement to leadership, and encouraging them to bring their friends along with them? Are we recognizing advocates’ successes in enlarging the pool of the committed, as a “win” in itself? Do we actively solicit new contacts from our current cadre, and do we use technology (databases, social networks) that allow advocates to find other friends and to connect relationally with other activists?

Do we spend at least as much time cultivating a grassroots base as we do trying to mobilize that base towards specific targets?

And, as advocates ourselves, do we make sure that our friends understand why we’re engaged in specific causes, and what that work means for their own lives, and how they can play a part in the effort with us? Do they know that they are welcome, and needed, and valued?

The explosion of social media, and their expansion into every aspect of life, illustrates the fundamental truth that we are relational beings.

That’s true in our social change work, too.

No one should be advocating alone, especially not in this connected age, when so many messages and issues are competing for attention.

After all, when we take a stand, wouldn’t we rather not stand alone?

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Can we ever applaud too much?

Posted on March 15, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Note: Next week is spring break, and I have made the executive decision that I’m taking the week off from blogging. I’ll spend the extra time hanging out with my kiddos, no doubt giving them A LOT of positive feedback.

I swear; I don’t know how I ever managed to be an organizer before I was a parent.

It seems like nearly every day I have an insight, related to life with my young children, that has relevance for my social change work.
Lately, it has been this: we can absolutely never, ever applaud too much the actions we want to see continue.

We’ve been working on this with our kids, especially my oldest son. It sounds ridiculous to us, “Hey, way to go taking your plate to the kitchen.” “Did you notice he just came right upstairs when I asked?” “Boys, great job playing kindly with each other!” “I hear friendly talking—I love it!”

But it never gets old to them. In fact, if we recognize one of them, the others will try to outdo each other, pointing out their own good behavior, seeking the same accolades. And it becomes a positive cycle—they improve their behavior in order to get more positive feedback, which prompts more of it from our end, in turn.

And nonprofit organizations have gotten this message on the donor cultivation side; when we make a financial contribution, we expect to receive a thank-you note, our annual reports list our donors, and we often publicly recognize those whose contributions have made investments in our organizations.

But do we recognize our advocates enough?

Do we send out “success alerts” or “thank-you alerts” as frequently as “take action” ones? Do we invest in tools that can tell us when people have responded to our alerts, so that we can directly and personally honor their commitment? Do we spend as much time talking about what went well, as dissecting what went wrong? Do we recognize the kinds of actions that we want to see repeated, even when the outcome falls short—so that every phone call to a legislator or grassroots member recruited is celebrated, even long before we achieve the policy changes that are our goals? Do we use the pages of our websites, newsletters, and annual reports to highlight “star advocates” the same way that we call out donors? Do we recognize and appreciate and reward advocacy intent and activist activity over and over and over again?

If not, isn’t it worth trying?

Because, really, if a tactic is powerful enough to get my boys to stay in their beds until their fishtank light switches on at 6:45AM, it’s powerful enough to motivate people to overcome our own reservations about collective action and join together to push for social change.

If incessant applause can get my daughter to stop taking off her shoes and leaving them all around the house, it can change the world.

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Acting from identity

Posted on March 6, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I’ve written before about what doesn’t motivate people to take action, to become part of movements larger than themselves—it’s not about the cookies. We know that relationships move people, and that’s why grassroots organizing works, and has worked, throughout history.

But in Switch, (which is super worth reading) there was a really fascinating insight into why people come to advocacy and collective action, and it has added a new layer to my thinking about how to connect to people’s values. The authors make the distinction between decisions made based on consequences—what are the costs and benefits of a particular action—and decisions made based on identity—what kind of person am I, and what kinds of actions does that kind of person take. And they present findings from psychological studies that suggest that people make these advocacy-type decisions primarily from an identity perspective.

What we have to do, then, is help people forge identities as advocates, because, once they see themselves as the kind of people who take actions like this, then they will. And they’ll be consistently committed to activism, even when the stakes are high, the costs are huge, and the benefits are elusive and in the distant future. Because, well, it’s who they are.

But the most exciting part of what the authors present in Switch is the evidence that identities can be forged. People can be primed to begin to see themselves as advocates, and we can help them to incorporate advocacy into their sense of self. It requires helping people to take actions that are small, at first, to bring them into a network of advocates in ways that are fairly comfortable for where they see themselves today, in a process of expanding their identities to encompass advocacy. Where that starts will be different for different issues and different constituencies, but the process is essentially the same…we stop trying to convince people to do something that’s a considerable stretch for them, and instead work to help people see themselves as the kind of people for whom advocacy is completely natural.

I had just finished reading Switch when I was on a conference call talking about advocacy in the anti-immigrant climate. Two of the people on the call identified their affiliations, as they were, as “community activist” or “community leader.” With this idea of identity-based decision-making fresh in my mind, it sparked a realization: people who define themselves as “activists” are of course going to behave very differently, when presented with advocacy opportunities, than those who lack this identity. But the evidence suggests that people don’t even need to have embraced the advocate identity that thoroughly in order to shift how they see themselves operating within a political context. Even relatively small acts, like signing a petition or putting a sign in one’s window can be the priming that people need to move seamlessly to much larger actions.

I think, really, that we’re part of the reason why this apparently natural psychological transformation gets messed up sometimes, honestly. We make a mistake when we try to talk someone into taking a small advocacy action by prefacing the request with all kinds of disclaimers, about how it’s “not a big deal,” or it’s “just this one little thing,” or “I know you might not have time for this,” because such caveats can push the activity to a sort of marginalized place in one’s sense of self, such that it doesn’t really become integrated into how we see ourselves. They might still do it, but it would be more as a favor to you, or to get you to go away, and that doesn’t shape the way we think about ourselves.

At least, to my non-psychologist’s brain, that makes sense.

I think we facilitate this identity formation when we, instead, invite people warmly and comfortably into a relatively small action, connecting it to the values we know they hold, and making that linkage explicit by saying things like, “I thought that you’d want to sign this petition because you care so much about kids’ access to education.” Or “we’re asking everyone who is committed to ending poverty to come to this forum, so I wanted to make sure you had the information.” Because then they see themselves as, yes, exactly the kind of person who cares about kids’ education or wants to end poverty, and, well, next month, if people like them are writing letters to Congress or attending a house party for a candidate, well, then…

you know us…that’s what we do.

I thought you’d feel that way.

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They’re not apathetic; we’re off-base

Posted on March 5, 2012 by | 2 Comments

It’s almost an axiom among those of us who consider ourselves activists, right?

They (read: those who didn’t come to our meeting, or won’t share our links on Facebook, or don’t have a sign in their yard) just don’t care.

They’re apathetic. Or ignorant. Or confused.

Except, most probably, they’re not.

I’ve long believed that the real answer to getting people engaged with social change struggles is to find an issue that really connects with them. You can’t tell me that people who will take a day of work with no pay to stand in the snow for 5 hours, because they’re so mad that the law changed and they can’t get driver’s licenses are apathetic. I won’t believe you.

So, when people don’t show up to whatever we, in good faith, organize, I argue that it’s probably our fault.

Maybe we’re the ones who really wanted to have that meeting, and there wasn’t an authentic demand for action from people. Maybe we haven’t made a clear connection between the action we want people to take and the change that they can expect to result. Maybe we haven’t helped them to claim their own power, so they have a hard time understanding why it makes any difference if they show up or not. Maybe the issues that we think matter the most aren’t those that most immediately resonate.

Or maybe all of the above.

That’s why I love this story from iconic organizer Shel Trapp, co-founded of the National Training and Information Center (that’s old-school Chicago-style organizing, for us social work types). You should read the excerpt, because I doubt I can do it justice, but the essence is this:

An organizer goes door-to-door in a neighborhood trying to get people excited about working on school reform, because the local school was woefully overcrowded and neglected. No one was anything more than polite, and he was discouraged. He switched tactics, then, and started asking people what their greatest concerns were. It took awhile, but, finally, one woman expressed her frustration with the shopping carts that people took from the local supermarket and left all around the neighborhood. She felt they were a blight and a nuisance. The organizer was perplexed, at first, then incredulous–with everything going on around them, how could they identify the shopping carts as the greatest priority?

Still, a growing number of people kept coming to the meetings to talk about what to do about the shopping carts, and an action at the grocery store resulted in a victory: poles in front of the store to keep the carts from leaving the property.

At the celebration, a woman turned the conversation to the overcrowding at the school. Emboldened, empowered, and heard for the first time, they were ready to tackle the next fight.

So low turnout, or lack of enthusiasm among those we are seeking to organize, should cause us to look in the mirror. Could it be that we’re trying to sell issues that they’re not interested in buying, at least not right now? Could it be that we’re guilty of the same sins of which we accuse our targets–taking our communities for granted, expecting them to acquiesce to someone else’s agenda, and blaming them for acting in completely understandable ways?

Does anyone have a “shopping cart story” of their own to share? A moment when shifting your perspective helped you to connect more meaningfully with those with whom you were working? An anecdote of when apathy was revealed to be something else entirely?

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Stuff I Love

Posted on February 14, 2012 by | Leave a comment

It’s Valentine’s Day.

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

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

What are you loving this Valentine’s Day?

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

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Making Social Justice Personal

Posted on January 31, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Last week, the Sunflower Foundation Advocacy Fellowship had our session on grassroots organizing. Its inclusion in the year-long advocacy development program is one of my very favorite things about the initiative and, indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Sunflower Foundation’s approach to nonprofit advocacy.

I love, love, love that the Foundation understands that organized constituencies are our most vital resource, and that the Fellows are encouraged to think critically about how their organizations can meaningfully connect with those they serve, so that, together, they can create the future we so desperately need.

There’s something incredibly hopeful about starting an intense discussion about nonprofit advocacy with a focus on those we serve–and how we can win victories for justice only by releasing their full participation and their latent power. We start with strategies and the tactics that should flow from them, and think about how to organize so that those tactics work. Only after we’ve built plans to engage our grassroots do we turn to legislative advocacy and message development and even organizational capacity-building.

It’s “begin where our clients are”, translated for macro practice and supported by Foundation resources. And that’s pretty awesome.

But it’s one particular moment from last year’s grassroots organizing session that reverberated in my mind during these past several days, making it clear that it had a tremendous effect on me.

And so I’m repeating it here, and figuring out how I might weave it into my work with social service organizations trying to develop grassroots strategies, and with social workers who are struggling to understand why power is so essential to the realization of our visions, and how we can not only get comfortable with it, but, indeed, embrace it and its pursuit.

The trainer was Rudy Lopez, from the Center for Community Change, and the exercise was this:

Rudy had us close our eyes and think about the one person in our lives that we care about the most–the person whom we most can’t stand to think about being harmed. (This is part of the reason that this exchange sticks in my mind, I think, because I immediately thought about my oldest son, and it’s kind of odd that he’d so quickly come to mind, more than my other kids.) He then prompted us to think about something bad happening to that person, which, for me and for others, was a terribly difficult assignment, even for a few hypothetical seconds.

And then the kicker:

Rudy asked us to imagine that we had the power to stop that pain from happening to the special person in our minds. What would we do with that power?

It sounds simple, I know, but what ran through my mind instantly was this, “I need that power, to keep Sam safe.”

And what I didn’t realize, I guess, without the advantage of months of mental simmering, was that this moment catapulted me into not just being comfortable with power but really craving it, for the “right” reason of wanting to help someone else. Yes, it’s on a very personal level, and, yes, maybe it’s easier to relate when it’s a child you love instead of a community of strangers…but maybe not.

The next step, of course, is to build relationships so that we love, even deeply, beyond our more intimate circles. Then, we’ll reach for the power that would let us protect and serve and support them, too.

Because, the truth is, there is real pain threatening those we love, every day.

And we seldom have the power we need to do much about it.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

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Parenting Resolutions and Social Justice

Posted on January 3, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I have 3-year-old twins.

So, yeah, I hear “I do it!” dozens of times a day.

While my gut reaction, at 6:45AM when I’m just really, really wishing I could sit down with a glass of iced tea (no one wants to see me on coffee-strength caffeine!) and scan the headlines, is often, “Seriously, let me spread the butter on your pancake, sweetheart,” this year I’m vowing to think differently about this.

Because, really, if I’m going to live empowerment, it needs to even start first thing in the morning.

What is “I do it myself!” anyway, if not an expression of our universal need to demonstrate our abilities, and to control our own worlds, and to define our own interactions? What else explains the look of utter triumph on my daughter’s face when she gets her own shoes on, or my son’s glee when he tells his father that he put his own underwear on?

Small victories become not so small when we’re conquering helplessness and overcoming others’ limited expectations of us.

In 2012, I promise to offer my kids more chances to do for themselves, and more understanding of why that matters so much. The same way that, as an organizer, I try to default to others’ own efforts on their own behalf, to accept and celebrate their attempts to do for themselves, rather than taking the easy way out–making breakfast before the kids get up, or just getting the agenda done on my own, or striking a deal with the city councilmember when we see each other at a committee meeting.

When we’re building capacity and helping people to claim their own power, “easy” isn’t what matters. There’s no extra credit for shortcuts. Instead, people should authentically own their own experiences and have room to try on their own.

Whether they’re 3 or 43.

Resolved.

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Connected Citizens in the New Year

Posted on December 13, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I read the Knight Foundation’s Connected Citizens report (subtitled, “The Power, Potential, and Peril of Networks”) a few months ago (it came out in late April, I think, but, giving birth kind of put me behind in my reading this year), and I’ve been thinking about it more lately as I look to the future, especially since the report is, itself, in part an effort to predict where and how networks may change our lives and our efforts for social change, in the years to come.

I expect that some of the questions the report poses, and some of the hypotheses it suggests, will filter into my thinking and writing about advocacy (especially in the online context) and community organizing over the coming year, but here are my reactions as we straddle this period between the past and the future, at the (almost) dawn of 2012.

  • Do we truly have greater transparency today? Or does the proliferation of information mean that it’s that much easier to hide the important stuff, in the midst of a lot that doesn’t matter? I’m torn about this, really–on the one hand, there’s the demise of traditional investigative journalism, with all that that means for our ability to uncover the truth and publicize it; on the other, there’s the rise of citizen-supported journalism and independent cataloguing of so much that happens in our world. I know it sounds clichéd, but it’s like “the truth is out there,” but will we be able to find and recognize it, in the middle of so much…stuff? And what does that mean for our efforts to be megaphones for the voices that are so often silenced, as we know we must, in order to truly empower those whose stories need to become part of our policy narratives? Since policymakers are vulnerable to this same information overload, how do we push past the noise to be heard?
  • Will technology enable us to turn ever-more inward, or seek and build alliances with unlikely partners? Or both? How do we resist the tendency towards silos, or, indeed, is such homogeneity all bad, in terms of building strong identity? Since, again, policymakers are people, too, how will their increasing reliance on what their “friends” prefer, in terms of policy approaches, and, indeed, even what their social networks hold as “truth” and “information” impact our ability to construct policy solutions that can cross rigid ideological lines? I’m not too optimistic, really.
  • How can we engage our crowds so that the barrier to participation is minimal but still meaningful? As the default for “participation” becomes quick engagement, how do we invest in the deeper relationships that are truly transformational?
  • Social workers know how to “design for serendipity.” From our direct practice experiences, we get the idea that we cannot predict outcomes flawlessly but must, instead, create the spaces (physically and, more importantly socially and psychologically) for real magic to happen in people’s lives. This makes us, I believe, champion “network weavers”, if we can leverage those clinical skills into social change work.
  • Anyone who has ever read the comments on an online newspaper article about immigration policy knows the link between anonymity and the deterioration of dialogue in a public sphere. The challenge here, as we increasingly shift to broader conversations detached from a local, identified context, is to figure out how to cultivate relationships that breed accountability while taking advantage of the boundary-less nature of online networks.
  • We can all get excited about the rise of mutual support and the tremendous potential of networks to address real, pressing need. But we should also be very afraid of the parallel risk that such indigenous resource provision becomes an excuse for abdication of our collective (read: public) (read: we still need taxes) responsibility to uphold the social contract and provide for the needs of those without strong networks in the first place (because such network resources are, like nearly everything else in this world, not evenly distributed).

    Again, there’s more there than what I’ve captured here, including some thoughts relevant to my work with the Sunflower Foundation, particularly this question of whether measuring network health and strength can tell you how close you’re getting to a desired change, given that networks are, by definition, rather uncontrollable and certainly dynamic entities. But, in chiming in so late on the conversation, I’m partly hoping to restart it a bit, since we know that we’ll be dealing, increasingly, with networks in our work in the years to come–indeed, they may become the default way of approaching our shared concerns–and we need to understand how to engage them effectively, how to critically evaluate their roles and their shortcomings, and how their existence will shape ours.

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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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