Tag Archives: empowerment

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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When we fall into the same old traps…

Posted on January 10, 2012 by | Leave a comment

In this second post for Organizational Transformation week, here at Classroom to Capitol, I’m tackling an ugly reality of nonprofit social service work and, in the interest of full disclosure, my parenting, sometimes, too.

Because the truth is, sometimes the ways in which we interact with those we serve (or parent) serve to replicate the same power imbalances against which we rail, when we view them on the “outside”.

You’ve seen it, no doubt:

  • Eligibility rules that are ambiguous and seemingly arbitrary, the sort of institutional equivalent of “because I said so”
  • Organizational cultures that afford greater prestige to men, and to those higher in the hierarchy (like when we refer to the Executive Director as Mr. SoandSo but the receptionist as “Maria”)
  • Programmatic requirements that force everyone to attend the same classes, fill out the same paperwork, not because those activities actually contribute to the amelioration of the social problems that prompted a particular individual to seek services, but because that’s how people prove that they “deserve” help

    We fall into these patterns of power and oppression not because we’re bad people, of course, but because we’re people, and people tend to seek comfort in regularity and predictability and status, and those pursuits are not necessarily compatible with the promotion of maximum empowerment for those who have historically been marginalized and oppressed.

    But I promised you that this wasn’t just a post about how you should change what you do in your organizations, right? I understand that changing the way we view those with whom we work, in every way from using language like “constituents” instead of “patients” to authentically making room on decision-making bodies for the full participation of those we serve, isn’t easy.

    I understand not just because I’ve been there, as a nonprofit leader and as a consultant to the same.

    I understand because I fight the same internal battles at home, too, where parenting offers opportunities every day to choose to live power imbalances that put me purportedly on top, versus a challenge to figure out how to make our family a sort of laboratory for empowered living.
    On a daily basis, that means that I can’t change the rules without accountability, even though I’m the mom. It means that the kids’ preferences on little things matter just as much as mine, and that, even on the big stuff, I can’t disregard their views without an honest discussion and a full examination of my own rationale.

    It’s not a democracy, exactly, any more than a nonprofit organization is. That’s what people often fear when we talk about transparency and participatory governance in nonprofit organizations, but it’s more like an excuse to duck our obligations to social justice than a valid concern.

    We’re not a 1-person-1-vote family.

    We’re something more, and better, just like our organizations need to be, too.

    Because avoiding the temptation to fall into the same old bad patterns means starting from the premise that power is only as valid as the way in which we wield it, that we can’t decry the abuse of authority in others without being willing to own it in ourselves, and that our relationships will be stronger when they are based on a presumption of equity than when reinforced through hierarchy alone.

    Ultimately, turning our organizations inside out like this should make us stronger advocates externally, too, because we’ll gain an empathy for those targets against whom we’re arrayed when we understand the universality of the temptation to oppress, at least in subtle ways. It also restores some of our moral authority and reduces our vulnerability to charges that “you do it, too.”

    But, more immediately and much more importantly, it will turn our organizations into places where people learn how to relate fully and equally, as agents in their own rights.

    And that’s what I remind myself every time I so want to say, “because I’m the Mom.”

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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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    POWER. What are we afraid of?

    Posted on September 1, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    *Almost two years later, I’m still talking about power, and I’m still confronted with social workers who are really uncomfortable with it. Colleagues, our world needs us powerful more than ever. We have to claim the power we have, so that we can wield it responsibly, and we have to see the power we need, so that we can be the force for change that those with whom we work deserve.

    In every class I teach, I find myself talking a lot about power, not just what it is and why it’s important but also why social workers often have such a negative idea about it. Because that last piece is key, I really believe; as long as social workers are so convinced that power is a bad thing, that we shouldn’t want it, and that we don’t, in fact (we promise!) have any, then there’s no way that we can do real empowerment and little chance that we can bring about the kinds of social changes that our profession, our society, and, most importantly, those we serve, really need.

    Being bilingual helps me a lot when it comes to defining power. The Spanish word for the noun “power” is the same as for the verb “to be able to” (poder), so I talk with my students about how power, essentially, gives one the ability to do what it is that one wants to be able to do and, really, to make someone else do what it is that one wants that other to do. Some of the definitions I like include “the ability to recognize one’s will even against the resistance of others” (Weber, in Gerth and Mills, 1946); “possession of control, authority, or influence over others” or “ability to act or produce an effect” (Merriam Webster Dictionary); and “capacity to influence the forces which affect one’s life space for one’s own benefit” (Pinderhughes, 1987). When we start from that understanding, power doesn’t sound quite so dark.

    One of my big emphases, too, is a distinction between actual power and the feeling of being powerful. As social workers, sometimes we’re so afraid of real power that we just talk in “squishy” terms about it, which can lead to so much confusion about what power is that we abandon the real thing in favor of something that just sounds good. I’ll never forget, when I was assisting in a power analysis with some Latino youth and the lead organizer asked, “who has power in your community?” One young woman answered, “we do, because we’re the future…” It was obviously something that she’d heard, maybe from a teacher or maybe from a social worker, and, while we like the way that feels, the truth is that such a misconception kept her from being fully powerful, because she couldn’t analyze who held power and what power she and her peers might hold over those power players. We do ourselves and our clients no favors when we lead them to believe that they are more powerful than they are—what they (and we) really need is the ability to analyze power relations and to engage in collective action designed to enhance individual and group power.

    We talk about sources of power–character, position, reputation, knowledge, authority–and we talk especially about relationships as a source of power, because that helps us to see, as social workers, how the assumption of power (double meaning intended) is integral to the practice of social work; if we didn’t have any power with/over those with whom we work, what possible influence could we expect to have over their lives?

    And then we get to the core issue, for me: social workers’ fear of power. I have to admit, I don’t totally, innately get this reluctance to admit and claim power. I often tell students that my dream job would be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it’s because of the authority that comes with that position. I love power for what it can enable me to do in pursuit of social justice, and I’d love a whole lot more so that I could be a whole lot more effective.

    But I have to understand social workers’ fears about power to be a part of helping our profession get over them, and I think that my discussions with students and those in the field over the past several years have given me some insights. There’s a universal concern that power corrupts, because it certainly can. And there’s also a reluctance, I believe, to give up social workers’ martyrdom, this idea that our profession is noble precisely because it is relatively powerless. Many social workers also have negative experience with powerful interests opposed to their own or their clients’ well-being, and, absent more just conceptions of what power looks like, it takes on a ‘bad name’.

    The reality is clients want to work with powerful workers. Power can only be shared by those who have it, so a powerless social worker cannot, by definition, practice empowering social work. Those social workers who are more powerful, both within their own organizational contexts and in the community arena, are also more successful. And that’s what we should be in this business for, after all, not the satisfaction that comes with feeling that we’re sacrificing for some futile aim. And if that doesn’t convince us to pursue power, we must recognize that abdicating our claim to power abandons the field to those who don’t share our values and aims. Power vacuums are always filled, and we can’t afford them.

    So, tell me, what gives you power as a social worker? When do you feel powerful? When do you feel powerless? What are your fears about power? Where do those fears come from? How could you gain power within your organization? What would it take for you to commit yourself to that this year?

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    A Bloody Brilliant Idea

    Posted on August 30, 2011 by | 7 Comments

    *Honestly, I had kind of forgotten about this until I went through the archives to find posts to use during this last week of my maternity leave. In the intervening years, I’ve seen more of my colleagues bringing clients into the classroom, so that students can gain their perspectives on agencies and social workers, and, almost without exception, students find that extremely valuable. It still falls short, though, of this idea that those who use our services should have some real authority over who and how we deliver them, not just have to volunteer their expertise to try to educate us out of our own worst tendencies. I haven’t done anything to move in this direction, either, but it’s on my list as I head back out into the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    This is how you do it: Building Movement survey

    Posted on May 10, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    My obsession with Building Movement has been well-documented.

    They’re nice about it and keep sending me emails about their efforts, which mostly revolve around encouraging and then documenting the really phenomenal activities of nonprofit social service organizations to integrate direct practice and advocacy, in a way that empowers their clients and energizes their staff.

    It’s really good stuff.

    The last piece of theirs that I’ve been combing through is called Catalysts for Change (I even love the title), and it presents the major findings from a survey of more than 450 nonprofits in California, about their efforts to transcend mere service provision to become a real force for social change around the issues presented by their clients, along with case studies of the organizations doing this best, to provide inspiration to the rest of us.

    They frame this work as helping clients become change agents and, indeed, recognize their inherent capacity to transform the systems that trap them, and I just kept nodding my head as I read. But not all of the report is good news–Building Movement discovered, not surprisingly, that nonprofits are, for the most part, missing opportunities to engage their clients in these revolutionary ways, for all kinds of predictable reasons about limited resources and limiting philosophies.

    Some of the lessons I took from these nonprofits’ experiences, and the efforts of Building Movement to catalog them:

  • Many more organizations are engaged in externally-focused advocacy (more than 80%) than in grassroots organizing and capacity-building within their own client base (fewer than 50%). Board members are likely to participate in advocacy, but quite unlikely to interface with clients on this work. This strikes me, in many ways, as odd: why are we more willing to stick our necks out and expend our own energies than get our own houses in order, so to speak, by fully equipping and utilizing the considerable power our clients represent? How can we expect institutions of power to include our clients’ perspectives if our own organizations haven’t fully embraced this? It makes me wonder about how we’re shaping social workers’ views of the world, and of those we serve, and how we can work from the inside out to turn our organizations into forces for change.
  • Smaller organizations are, perhaps predictably, less likely to incorporate advocacy into their work, but, given the number of nonprofit service providers with fewer than 25 staff, it quickly becomes clear that we cannot afford to relegate social change work to only the big players.
  • The challenging (to use their rather euphemistic term) economic context seems to be encouraging, not discouraging, advocacy activity: desperation breeds courage sometimes, apparently, and, here, organizations are reaching out beyond direct service work as an extension of their survival mechanism. Here, too, though, there are some real missed opportunities: only 25% provide clients with the opportunity to register to vote, and only 10% connect clients to elected officials’ forums, when making the case to these power brokers is clearly in organizations’ own direct financial interest, in addition to critical for advancing the issues on which they work.
  • The organizations highlighted in the case studies all have that rather indefinable organizational culture that supports advocacy, and the leaders of those institutions point to that as a core feature that supports their work. About two-thirds have explicit structures (strategic plans, mission statements) that call for and provide accountability for these social change activities, and these organizations out-perform their peers on engagement, including on the more elusive client-empowerment measures (at a level of statistical significance, even!). That makes it obvious that cultivating organizational support for both an internal and external social change orientation needs to be a focus of leadership efforts.
  • Unlike several years ago, direct service providers reflected a familiarity with the terms “civic engagement” and “social change”, even if we as a field still lack common definitions or a universal commitment to these ideals. Building Movement suggests, and I agree, that this points to a real opening to institutionalize these ideas in nonprofit management. This advocacy is perhaps best viewed as a continuum, too; while very few organizations are engaged in collective activism, relatively many are comfortable with direct contact with elected officials. There are certainly roles for organizations along this spectrum, and finding these niches starts with conversations.

    I’m going to highlight some of the case studies later this week, but I’m interested in your reactions to these findings, too. Does anything surprise you? How does knowing what this really looks like, rather than what we might guess, matter? What questions need to be answered as part of this project of “field transformation”? How do these findings dovetail, or contradict, what you experience in your own organization?

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    Is “participation” overrated?

    Posted on April 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    Sometimes I write this blog because there’s something that I’m really excited about that I want to share, or because I’m soliciting others’ opinions and experiences, or because I’m delving more deeply into a certain topic and I need this forum to organize my thoughts and involve my community.

    And then, sometimes, I write about something that is kind of haunting me, about which I have a really sinking feeling, because I hope that writing about it will somehow make me feel better, and lead me to a place where I can do something productive with those concerns.

    This post falls into that last category.

    I teach a class on global poverty in the summer and, this spring, in getting ready for it, I read The White Man’s Burden, a really interesting and often provocative examination of western development aid to “the rest” of the world.

    As I get into that class this summer, I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts and questions to share about the best way for the U.S., in particular, to support development in other countries, about the connections between anti-poverty policy here and around the world, and about the rise of social entrepreneurialism and other “innovative” strategies that, really, shouldn’t seem so innovative at all.

    But, today, it’s a relatively obscure passage, from a sociologist and politician with whom I have a rather, um, complicated relationship: Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

    Here’s the quote, and then here’s why it’s haunting me:

    “The socially concerned intellectuals…seem repeatedly to assume that those who had power would let it be taken away a lot easier than could possibly be the case if what was involved was power” (from White Man’s Burden, p. 144).

    When I read that quote, I think of all the times that I’ve used the word “empowerment” rather loosely, about all of the references we make to “participation” (even when we know that it’s kind of token), and about all of the barriers that exist between people who have been deliberately stripped of their real influence and the reclaiming of that power over their own lives (not the least of which, of course, is the view that power is zero-sum, and the loathing those in power have for the idea of relinquishing it).

    I’ve always been skeptical at best of “consensus-based organizing”, always believed that power is won by those on the margins, not benevolently granted to them by others. That’s why I talk to my students so often about the importance of seeking and increasing their own power, because those who are powerless can never hope to empower others.

    But, still.

    I’ve been thinking a lot in the past week about this quote, and about how reluctant we are, even within our social service organizations, to really share power, not just allow people to give “input” or “participate” in some pretty meaningless way. I’ve been thinking about the damage we can do, truly, when we pretend that what people’s participation is getting them is real ownership, when it’s not, and about how those experiences can turn entire generations away from the exercise of real power and the struggles required to win it.

    So here’s what I’m hoping you’ll share in the comments, to perhaps put my soul a bit at ease:

  • What do “participatory” structures need to have to ensure that it’s real power that’s being shared? How can we tell participation in name only from the meaningful kind?
  • Where have you seen power change hands in marginalized communities, and what transpired to make that happen?
  • How should we talk about power, and empowerment, and participation, to ensure that our own language isn’t part of the problem, distorting the concept to the point of making it unrecognizable?

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    Equally-shared Social Change

    Posted on January 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    One of the books that I read during my maternity leave was Equally-Shared Parenting. My husband and I are trying to figure out how he can create a work schedule that will allow him to play a larger role in our child-rearing responsibilities, since my work/life balance is great, except for the elusive idea of any free time when I’m taking care of kids all day and working most of the night.

    It’s a pretty inspiring book and has given our family a lot to think about, and to work towards.

    But it also has implications for our social change work, too, especially the part that chides us all to remember that, when we hoard work, what we’re really doing is hoarding power.

    It doesn’t feel like that, does it?

    When we stay really late and come in really early, when we spend our anniversary registering voters on a Saturday, when we work through yet another maternity leave, when we sacrifice our health and family and friends and sanity, all because we care so very much about the causes to which we dedicate ourselves (um, obviously, all of the above are just hypothetical!)…

    We feel like we’re doing it for others, like we’re being so very good.

    We need committed advocates, not martyrs.

    Except there’s nothing honorable about structuring our work, or our campaigns, or, indeed, our movements, so that it looks like they’d fall apart without us.

    There’s nothing moral about keeping information close to our chests, so that then we can argue in good faith that we really DO need to be there, because no one else knows how it’s done.

    There’s nothing particularly laudable about making ourselves seem indispensable.

    And there’s nothing particularly fun about it, either.

    So, just as Equally-Shared Parenting means that we divide responsibilities so that no one’s saddled unjustly, and no one can feel smug and superior, either, I think we need a mental frame for “Equally-Shared Social Justice”, where we work alongside our colleagues and our grassroots leaders, making decisions together about what, and how much, needs to be done, and collectively owning both the input and the outcome.

    It’s a more authentic, and empowering, way to approach the reality that there IS always more that can, and maybe even should, be done. At home, in the capitol, in the streets.

    Because the truth, of course, is that we aren’t the only ones: Not the only ones who can take care of the kids, not the only ones who can write the press release, not the only ones who can pull off the legislative meeting, not the only ones who can handle parent-teacher conferences.

    Painting ourselves as such is unfair to the fullness of the lives we deserve to live, and really unfair to those who walk these journeys with us–our partners, and our allies–in our public and private worlds.

    Here’s to sharing.

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    The WHY: Tapping into intrinsic motivations

    Posted on January 11, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    A section of Cognitive Surplus is dedicated to the concept of motive: why do people give of themselves in some pretty extraordinary ways, and how can understanding those motivations help us to increase the kind of behavior we desire (and on which our future depends)?

    He identifies two aspects of motive that should be part of every community organizer’s way of seeing the world and, indeed, part of how every nonprofit organization views its volunteers, clients, donors, and patrons.

    He’s talking about intrinsic motivation (that which comes from within, then, not responses to external incentives), and he divides it into two elements:

    autonomy (control over what we do and how we do it)
    competence (desire to be good at what we do)

    And, reading that analysis, and a terrific example of how groups of Josh Groban fans have illustrated those principles with their charitable giving, I was struck by how often we create institutions, and interventions, that destroy those two powerful impulses.

    How often do we really give our grassroots leaders, volunteers, or clients autonomy, even over the decisions that govern their own lives? How often are they designing strategy, choosing tactics, planning their own treatments?

    How often do we give people an opportunity to develop skills in areas that are new to them? How willing are we to let someone learn something new, especially when we consider ourselves experts? How good are we at designing campaigns that create roles in which people can accumulate and be celebrated for their acquired competence, even in relatively small ways?

    Conversely, how often do we expect people to “sign up” for our preconceived formulation of what their contribution should be, and then express disappointment/surprise/disgust when they are less than enthusiastic? How often do we witness what Shirky warns against–the dangers of creating what look like opportunities for autonomy but are really attempts to fit people into our mold? How frequently do we forget that “amateur” reflects an authentic love, and that love is something we definitely don’t want sucked out of our causes? How often do we cringe when a grassroots leader, or a volunteer, or a client performs a task less expertly than we would, even after expending considerably more effort, and miss noticing the transformation that occurs from giving people room in which to be autonomous, and to develop a sense of competence that can only come with freedom to try?

    Let’s start this year with a resolve to spend less time asking “why won’t people ____________?” and more time asking ourselves if we’re doing enough to tap into the powerful reasons why people do things at all. And let’s see what happens then.

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