Tag Archives: social change

Voter Registration: It doesn’t have to be like this

Posted on July 7, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

This week and next, Classroom to Capitol will focus on electoral trends, issues, and strategies that, together, can set the foundation for successful enactment and implementation of the progressive policies about which social workers so deeply care. We know that it does matter who is elected, that our clients’ voices will be heard differently by different elected officials, and that participation in electoral processes, in itself, holds potential to change clients’ lives. Primaries are less than a month away in many states, and it will be November before we know it. Ya es hora!

Suffragettes gathering--Thank you, sisters.


Today’s post is about one of my favorite topics: the onerous voter registration rules in the United States, and how we can and should change them. I could go on and on about this, so, to discipline myself, this is a post in three parts: first, what’s wrong with the status quo; second, what a truly just voter registration policy would look like (that’s the short part); and, third, interim steps that would make a big difference in voter registration and participation. If you’re so inclined, there’s a special treat for the first 5 readers who each register 5 unregistered voters; just leave a comment about how you accomplished it and any barriers you encountered (difficulty figuring out the rules, trouble navigating the forms, etc…).

The Broken Status Quo:
In November 2008, approximately three million people were turned away or forced to vote provisionally due to a registration problem. Only 70-75% of US eligible voters are registered. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld restrictive voter registration schemes that will make it harder for low-income individuals (who often do not have primary identification documents or the money to request them) to comply with new rules. Young people, those without private automobiles, and people of color are among the least likely to be registered to vote, although voter turnout among registered voters in those populations is comparable to other populations.

The Ideal:
Automatic registration of all eligible voters–every citizen automatically ‘opted-in’ on his/her 18th birthday (I’d like to see the repeal of bans on suffrage for convicted felons, too; voting is more of an obligation and duty, than a privilege, as it’s understood in our society, and we need a policy that acknowledges that). There are minor technical challenges to overcome in making this happen, but they are minor. In the age of the REAL ID Act and rising intelligence, I’m hard-pressed to think of any real obstacle besides the obvious political one: we want to make it hard for people to vote.

What We Can Do To Get There:

  • Same-day voter registration: It’s not as good as universal registration, but allowing people to show up and register on Election Day would give organizations more time to mobilize potential voters, send a message to voters that they are welcome at any point in the process, and reduce the uncertainty and confusion that surrounds current registration rules and barriers. It may require additional training for poll workers, to be able to verify voters’ eligibility, but it’s totally doable. Iraq allows people to fix their registration status and vote the same day, for crying out loud.
  • Pre-registration for young people: State Representative Milack Talia (Democrat from Kansas) filed legislation last session to pre-register young people (ages 14 and up) to vote; their pre-registrations would automatically be added to the voter registration rolls when they turn 18. The goal is to increase registration and turnout by increasing the time that organizations and individuals have to reach out to this population and streamlining the process. I think it’s another good interim step.
  • Election Day holiday: Even with same-day registration (or universal registration, for that matter), if low-income folks don’t have a day off to get to the polls, they won’t get there. We need to make Election Day a holiday (the way that it is in most of the world), and we need expanded advance voting options nationwide to reduce the lines and make sure that even essential workers who won’t have the day off can vote at their convenience.
  • Halt and repeal of repressive rules: I know how hard it is to get people to register to vote. I’ve stood outside in very, very hot weather for hours, begging people to complete a NONPARTISAN voter registration form and been cursed at and spat on. Seriously. So don’t tell me that there are so many people clamoring to vote illegally that we have to go to the extremes of requiring multiple forms of identification, cracking down on nonprofit groups trying to register people, and enacting other voter suppression tactics. It’s just not true, and it’s just not fair.

    We can’t expect to succeed in winning the policy debate if we don’t have rules that allow our folks to influence it at the polls. We need easy access to our democracy, for all citizens in this country, and then we’ll see that the best ideas and the best candidates for our nation’s future can rise to the top. Let’s change the rules so that, at the latest, the 2012 elections are our most open and vibrant yet.

    You know that I have to end this one with, Sí se Puede.

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    Philanthrocapitalism, Part I

    Posted on June 28, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    I’m a social justice gal. That means I don’t really do “charity”. I have one of those, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for today. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime. Until the waters are polluted and the fish all die. Help him to organize with his peers, and he’ll demand all the justice, and fish, they deserve” posters. Yes, the print has to be small.

    So while I monitor philanthropy, because I know that most nonprofits and the jobs of many social workers depend on it, and, while I celebrate advances in philanthropy in the spirit of “something is better than nothing“, and while I’ve certainly interacted with philanthropists as a grantee, I tend to look askance at any thought that reforming philanthropy is the way to change the world. And really rich people kind of freak me out.

    So, that’s why I was really surprised to find myself pulling out tons of sticky notes when I read the book with the rather dubious title of Philanthrocapitalism. But there I was, on page 10, totally agreeing with, “if philanthrocapitalists are to be a legitimate part of the solution to the world’s problems, a new “social contract” is needed to spell out what it means to be a good billionaire, in terms of how much is given and in what way, how much tax is paid, whether the money has been made in a legitimate way, and what the rich can expect from everyone else in return.”

    That obviously raises a lot of questions:

  • What to do about foundations based on money that was not raised in an entirely ‘legitimate’ way (there’s a difference, obviously, in the business philosophy of Rockefeller v. Google)? How do I deal with the reality that it’s hard to be as outraged about how the eBay guy made his billions as Carnegie’s violent repression of the Homestead Strike? And what about holding foundations accountable for their investments today, and the impact those investments may have on the perpetuation of social injustice?
  • How to set tax rates that will compel giving to the public good (one way or another!), because, as generous as some of these billionaires are, does anyone really need $100 million houses? And, connected to below, just because giving to Carnegie Hall may be better than buying another yacht, we shouldn’t settle for that choice–we know how to set tax rates so that really rich people will have to give money away voluntarily or see it taken on Tax Day.
  • How to reform our nonprofit code so that only institutions that truly serve the ‘public good’ warrant deductions? The U.K. is addressing this one with a 2006 Charities Act that may disqualify some of its prestigious schools from tax-privileged status, but we’ve got to ask ourselves whether someone giving to his or her own already well-endowed alma mater or prestigious cultural institution deserves the same tax benefit as someone providing clean drinking water or solving malaria (or funding a local arts institution or providing college scholarships to low-income students).
  • How to harness the entrepreneurial, can-do spirit of some of these philanthropists without riding roughshod over the grassroots leaders and nonprofit professionals whose lives have been wrapped up in these problems for years? For that matter, does every billionaire really need his (or her, but they’re mostly his) own foundation? I’m all for a race to see who can save the world faster, but is some of that overlap overkill?
  • How to bridge the gap that persists, on the ground if not in the minds of these philanthropists, between social enterprise and traditional nonprofit work? How to bring the best that the social entrepreneurs offer–a sharp focus on outcomes and transparency and flexibility and accountability–to the world of social change work, which sometimes is fuzzy and stop-and-go and even obscure, without diluting the former or denigrating the latter?
  • How to build a strong commitment to social justice among these kinds of ‘influencers’ in society, even before they become philanthropists, since that’s what would really begin to change the way that business gets done and governments function? I know, today that sounds crazy, but it’s not without precedent. Changing the rules of that game could go a long way.
  • Instead of turning to philanthropy because innovation is easier there than in government, or because there is a perception of greater accountability or better results, why don’t we pour resources into reforming those aspects of government service provision and social problem solving that we feel aren’t living up to their potential? Why can’t we learn from more of the innovations happening outside of government and seek to institutionalize them so that they’re more broadly available?

    I don’t have any of the answers to these questions. It’s a testament to the rather amazing work that a lot of money is doing around the world that I’m much more willing to listen.

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    Trending in Action: “Ideas for Change in America”

    Posted on February 5, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    According to the folks at Change.org, “Ideas for Change in America is a crowd-sourcing competition that empowers citizens to identify and build momentum around the most innovative ideas for addressing challenges our country faces. The 10 most popular ideas will be presented at an event in Washington, DC to relevant members of the Obama Administration, and Change.org will subsequently mobilize its full community to support a series of grassroots campaigns to turn each idea into reality.”

    Here’s a list of the ideas submitted so far for 2010. The 2009 list, unfortunately, hasn’t really been touched, but we know that building movements take awhile, right? And I guess there’s something valuable to be gained by bringing new campaigns on while still laboring on those other priorities? Or maybe the political landscape has shifted such that some of those other issues (health care, immigration, civil liberties) don’t seem as ripe today as they did in the honeymoon phase of the Obama Administration?

    Some thoughts:

  • Crowdsourcing suggests that a crowd will come up with the best possible ideas only when that crowd displays considerable diversity, so that you’re actually bringing ideas from across a spectrum, not from an amalgamation of a relatively homogenous group. Unfortunately, the people who spend time at Change.org (and the organizations that are the partners for the contest), while I tend to agree with most of their orientation (!), are mainly fairly tech-savvy, younger, left-leaning people (hence the idea to “end the oligarchy”), which may ultimately mean that some good ideas that could be drawn from other parts of society are lost.
  • There is a certain ‘trendiness’ here: for example, one of the ideas that was originally sent to me was to require television of Supreme Court cases. I, for one, would really like to watch the Supreme Court, and it would be a cool teaching tool, but there are also some concerns about how such publicity might change the tenor of deliberation. What’s more interesting to me, really, than the pro and con of this issue is what it reflects: our current emphasis on transparency.
  • Finally, I’ve been watching with interest the whole mobilization process that organizations are using to elevate their suggestions. In the end, the ideas that emerge victorious may be not necessarily those that resonate most with some amorphous public but those surrounded by constituencies that know how to use these media to rally people to their cause. In that sense, it’s not unlike the fundraising challenges that have used social media recently, and not immune to the controversies surrounding them.

    But what I’d really like to know is what ideas YOU have to make this a better country. What kinds of policy changes? What kinds of structural reforms? You can submit your ideas here. And can an effort like this play a role in the process of building momentum around these issues? If you think so, then go vote!

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    There’s no future in charity

    Posted on November 30, 2009 by melindaklewis| 2 Comments

    Thanks to Michelle Davis of Nonprofit Connect, I was able to attend the keynote address at the Philanthropy Midwest Conference on November 19, 2009. She invited me because Robert Egger, author of Begging for Change and force behind the V3 Campaign, was the speaker. Michelle and I have been talking over the past few months about how we can work together to infuse more energy around advocacy and social change within the region’s nonprofit sector, and she knew that Robert would have inspirational and insightful things to say about our endeavors.

    His goal is to make it impossible for anyone to get elected in the U.S. without having a plan for the nonprofit sector, and without seeing our work and our contributions. He knows that, to make this possible, nonprofit leaders have to “uncross our fingers and get to work”, and part of his strategy to make that happen is to light a fire under influential sectors leaders. He was very energetic (and, when I say someone’s energetic, that’s saying A LOT) and, while I didn’t agree with everything he said, I loved every minute of the morning.

    Some highlights, with my very favorite thing I’ve heard in a long time, last:

  • Nonprofits are in the “extra” business, but the era of extra is over–if we’re always waiting for what’s left, there won’t be anything left in this economy, so we have to be at the table when the initial resources are divided.
  • The Baby Boomer generation offers tremendous promise to the social change movement, but we have to be organized to take advantage of it–12,000 people turn 60 every day (!), and the Baby Boomers represent “80 million of the richest, freest, best-educated people in the history of the world”, many of whom will be looking for a way to contribute.
  • The title of this post comes from his contention that we must stop forcing people to choose between .com or .org–we need social enterprises that offer people options about how they will make a difference. The United Kingdom has a “Minister of the Third Sector” now to promote this, and Egger used the example of extraordinary voluntarism in the U.S. (more than 80 million people here volunteer), and how it is facilitated by incentives within our tax structure, to illustrate how policy changes can bring about new alignments within social service work.
  • He emphasized the economic contributions of the nonprofit sector and, while I don’t disagree with any of his data, I’m not convinced it’s our best lead argument. He had a gripping quote: “The nonprofit sector, as a nation, could have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but we don’t even have a stake in local budget processes,” but I don’t necessarily believe that size=strength in the political arena, nor that we are going to get the seat at the metaphorical table we deserve by making a purely ‘economic impact’ argument.
  • I do agree wholeheartedly with his exhortation that the nonprofit sector find something other than “low administrative costs” by which to define our collective value. This seems to be morphing into a real drumbeat, and I expect that the next decade will see considerable transformation.
  • He bemoaned the infighting among nonprofits, likened it to the British control of India with only 3000 officers, and said that the only divide that should matter any more is “dumb/smart”, not “left/right”. I agree to an extent–there is way too much territoriality in social work, too–but I would argue that ideology DOES matter. There are “nonprofit” organizations whose conception of the social good is anathema to mine, and I don’t see any common cause with them just because we share a tax status designation. We need to work across sectors with those who seek social justice and break down those artificial divides.
  • Now, then, for my favorite quote. Robert Egger is the founder of the DC Central Kitchen, an organization that uses food from area restaurants to teach culinary skills to people who are homeless and/or unemployed and to provide food for those experiencing hunger. He said that his real transformation as a nonprofit leader came when he realized the moral dilemma inherent in concluding that “our answer is feeding working moms leftover food?”

    All of our work, essentially, that falls short of fundamental social change includes these moral questions. And the ideal response is not that we abandon such work for its moral ambiguity but, rather, that we challenge ourselves to surpass it and that, in so doing, we build a movement with the vision and power to provide a far different answer.

    Link to podcast of Robert Egger’s keynote

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    Review: We Make the Road by Walking

    Posted on August 19, 2009 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    I really needed this book. I spent so much time this summer thinking social media and Gen Y nonprofit leadership and emerging technologies that I was kind of all sucked into the tactics of social change, and I really needed a reason to step back and reflect on the why a little more, to think about how we help people to transform their own lives, and to remember why that matters so very much.

    This is a pretty unorthodox book that features, essentially, an extended conversation between two rather revolutionary men (they are both men, and there were many, many places where I wished for a feminist voice, although both (Paulo) Freire and (Myles) Horton make several references to non-sexist practice within their popular education) about their lives as popular educators, and organizers, and rethinkers about the whole concept of how people learn and change and realize their power.

    I read the book thinking like an organizer and wanting to think more about the role of popular education in social movements. I found myself also noting many places where something spoke to me as an instructor, though, making me doubly glad that I read this book in the lead-up to the fall semester. To hopefully make my insights about the book more useful to you all, I’ve divided my thoughts into two sections: one on teaching and one on social change work, although obviously they don’t divide like that at all in the lives of Freire and Horton, or, really, me either. If you want more background on Myles or Paulo, check out the Highlander Center and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One biographical note about Horton that may be of interest to social workers is his work with Jane Addams in Chicago, further proof of the connection between popular education and social work’s roots.

    The book has two central themes: the importance of freedom for all people, and the capacity and right of people to achieve that freedom through their own liberation struggle. For me, that carries a key message for both my macro social work practice (because it means that my organizing and advocacy must be directed at liberation and that I have an ethical responsibility to pursue processes for the work that place people as autonomous actors at the center) and for my teaching (because it means that authoritarian content-pushing is contrary to my aims to help create social workers who will be empowered in order to empower).

    As a teacher:

  • One of my ongoing challenges is to think about how to relate course material to students’ actual work and struggles, so that they seek the content out, rather than engage it only to satisfy my requests as an instructor. That obviously leaves me with a quandry, though, within the confines of the traditional academic relationship, because if they choose not to engage certain material, popular education would say that they’re making a choice that fits their lives and needs at that time, while the university would say that they deserve to feel consequences (grades) for that “failure”. As an educator within the higher education system, I have to find a way to resolve that paradox somehow.
  • Perhaps more than in other disciplines, social work educators seem to talk a lot about the use of self in the teaching process–how much should we strive to be ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ as we’re working with out students? I have always taken the stance that I cannot pretend to be what I’m not, and I most assuredly am not neutral, and so, therefore, my task is to create a learning environment where students trust that they don’t have to agree with me in order to ‘succeed’, and then to allow them to express their own value preferences co-equally. Freire put this into better words, saying that neutrality is really code for the existing system and that, then, “neutral is an immoral act.” Horton agrees but has a different strategy, explaining that he enthusiastically tells people his positions when they ask, because then he knows that it will have relevance for them–that they’re seeking to know so that they can digest them and fit them into their worldview, that then it’s not imposing.
  • I am committed to finding ways to use questions more skilfully in my teaching, to inject them into discussions in ways that introduce what I want to communicate to students without having to force-feed it. I can think of topics where I am more successful at this than others, and maybe I need to observe someone who’s really good at it to get a better sense of how to weave this together? Also, students respond more to questions and even presentations by their peers, so how can I enhance my techniques in facilitating those types of discussions, in ways that still move us along regarding key learning objectives? And how do I do all of that in a context where students get so nervous if it seems like the instructor isn’t going to “take charge” that their anxiety can become a barrier to any constructive learning? I need to have some kind of authority, so that we have a student/teacher relationship that fosters real learning, but that can so easily slip into authoritarianism, especially within the context of the institution. They want to see me as an expert (and, on some content, I am), and I want them to see themselves as experts so that they can integrate the new content with their own realities, and I’ll probably be 80 (like these guys were!) before I feel that I’ve got that balance figured out!

    As an organizer:

  • Horton talks in one passage about the abundance of “missionaries” of various stripes who have descended upon the Appalachian region. It occurred to me that some are probably “social work missionaries”, and it made me think (again) about my role as an organizer within a community that is obviously not my own. How can such relationships not be exploitative? What are the most ethical options for those facing potential work as an “outsider” in vulnerable communities?
  • One of the maxims of organizing (and, I think, all good social work) is to ‘start where the people are’. Sometimes, though, organizers are so careful about this that they forget the equally important piece–not staying where you start. That might mean challenging racism within a neighborhood group or (as in Freire’s case) sexism among Latin American peasant communities, or it might just mean continuing to look for opportunities to introduce new ideas, resources, and connections to people in ways that resonate with how they see their needs and their world. You can’t leap ahead so much that there’s a disconnect between there experience and where you want them to go–it has to be seamless. Done right, this isn’t paternalistic–failing to do it, actually, may constitute malpractice.
  • Horton shared an AWESOME story, maybe the best I’ve ever heard, about how, after Highlander had started citizenship schools to help African Americans register to vote, he ran into a woman in Mississippi who asked him what he did. He told her he was a teacher, and she said that she was too, that she taught at a Citizenship School, and she asked him if he knew what those were. He asked her to tell him about them, and she explained all about it. He told her it was a wonderful idea and asked if anyone else knew about them. She said, “No, but they will.” He was overjoyed that she had taken such ownership in the idea and was clearning adapting it to work for her context. But the story got me thinking–how comfortable are we as social workers with those with whom we work really taking ownership of our work with them? Are we ready to really pull back so that people can feel (and even portray) it as their own?
  • Horton calls progressives and intellectuals out on the idea of reform; the people, he says, know that ‘reforms don’t reform’, that what we need is radical change. What holds us back from true structural revolution? And could it be that, precisely because we’re not pushing for enough, we’re not getting enough? That is, if we asked for everything, would we be surprised at what we could do together?
  • When I teach organizing and advocacy practice, I talk a lot about why the way in which we organize matters so much–that if we do so in a way that educates and empowers people, then we’ll win even if we fall short of solving whatever problem we laid out as the objective. Horton talks about this too and also acknowledges that it is relatively rare to see the two things (transformational popular education and effective organizing) brought together, that more often there’s too much emphasis on one pole, at the expense of the other–either education that fails to move to action, or organizing that involves manipulative mobilization rather than real human liberation.
  • Freire put into words something that I have often witnessed but never really articulated: the importance of giving people the right to express their suffering. Really, that was a lot of my work in immigrant rights–creating a political space in which undocumented immigrants, among others, could call their suffering unjust and denounce it, and be heard.
  • I’ll likely return to this, because I’m doing a lot of reading about social movements right now, but I loved a section where Horton was talking about seeing people in the civil rights movement, willing to die for the cause, who, “I had known five years before, and they were frivolous, actually frivolous. A movement can change people.” I think that’s amazingly powerful, and it gave me a lot of hope for what the next few decades might hold.

    And, as a mom:
    At one point, Freire talks about, as a child, being stunned by the realization that some kids have enough to eat and some kids don’t. I had that experience with my oldest son last week. We bought school supplies for Crosslines, and he asked why some kids don’t have enough school supplies. I explained that their parents don’t have enough money to buy them, and I could tell he couldn’t comprehend that. So we talked at length about how some parents might be sick and unable to work, and the government doesn’t give them enough money to provide everything their families need; some work at jobs that don’t pay them enough; and some can’t find jobs. The best part of the conversation was that those explanations obviously didn’t satisfy them, which makes sense, because they are so obviously unsatisfying. “But why, Mommy?” he kept asking. And finally, I just answered, “I know, sweetheart. It’s not fair. And you and Daddy and Mommy and lots of other people need to keep working to make it more fair, so that every Mommy and Daddy can buy their kids what they need to succeed in school.” I think most kids have that basic sense of fair and unfair, and I see one of my roles as a mom as helping my kids to never lose their dismay and outrage over that which is unfair.

    The book ends where I will, with this quote: “Go to the people. Learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But the best of leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will all say we have done it ourselves.” Lao Tzu, 604 B.C. It has taken us a long time to move towards really understanding this, but we’re getting there. I feel recharged, recommitted, and re-inspired.

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