Yeah, I know.

From our introduction, when he mentioned that he’d made it over to the Brown v. Board of Education site already (it was 9AM), I knew that we were really going to get along well.

The whole day was a complete reinvigoration for me, and my brain is overflowing with ideas and challenges to myself and new applications and affirmation of some things I’ve been mulling for quite a while. But there’s one particular point he made that I almost can’t stop thinking about, and that has kind of totally revolutionized how I talk about advocacy and systems change with nonprofit social service organizations.

It was a really, really great day.

One of my colleagues asked him about the starfish story, and his noted aversion to it. In reply, he talked about how, obviously, some of his work at the DC Central Kitchen involves throwing back the starfish–feeding people who are hungry, employing people who need jobs, meeting people’s urgent needs.

So where’s the social change work? Where’s the advocacy? Where’s the radical revisioning of the possibilities of tomorrow?

Answer: it’s 51% of his work. Not usually more, because, after all, people are hungry and need jobs–if the symptoms we’re addressing through our direct service work aren’t serious and worthy, then we need to be in different mission work.

But not less, either, because if the daily activities of maintaining the organization and addressing those presenting problems (but not their roots) take over, we’re (in his words) “feeding the machine”, instead of solving real systemic challenges.

So what does that mean, then, for a social worker in direct practice, or for an Executive Director of a large nonprofit organization–or anyone in between?

It means weaving consciousness-raising and systems change into your interactions with clients, so that, even as you’re handing out what they need, you’re helping them to question the conditions and structues that perpetuate their crises.

It means surrounding oneself with like-minded and totally committed colleagues, so that the organization can flourish without constantly consuming your energies.

It means, though, more than anything, checking ourselves.

We can’t ever pretend that we have the luxury of only railing against the system that causes hurt, when we have a calling to help heal those wounds, too. And we can’t ever pretend that putting on Band-Aids is enough, because then we’re, unintentionally or not, working to guarantee ourselves future work. Which is unconscionable.

I’d never pretend that finding that 49 and 51 (it’s not a balance, of course, and it can’t be) is easy. Nor would Robert, who spent hours with my fellow Kansans, helping us to think through where our nonprofit sector needs to go, and what it needs to be, to make justice rain down on our prairies.

But that sweet spot is my new mantra, and it explains the way that I see my work and, indeed, my life:

49% meeting people where they are, salving the pains caused by structures that trap people in poverty and racism and violence and desperation.

And 51% trying to tear down those same structures, bringing everything that I know about radical relationships and strategic alliances and the transformative process of helping people find their own power.

If we can get it right, I fully believe, someday I’ll become a baker. Or a farmer.

And Robert can go back to nightclubs, if he wants.

Because our work here will be done.

These are bleak times for many of us committed to progressive social change and a vision of social justice that includes an end to poverty, full protection of civil rights for citizens and for immigrants, real power for working people, universal health care, and a sustainable environment. The ongoing economic hardship that has plagued our country for all of my twins’ young lives, and a much more constrained understanding of the social contract among policymakers in our state and federal governments, can lead to despair and retrenchment.

Or

We can focus on building long-term movements for social change, the kind that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, are our only hope for bringing about the world as we wish it anyway. What the almost three years since the 2008 elections have taught us, or perhaps reminded us, is that there are no shortcuts, and that we can never, ever, ever stop organizing.

And that’s why, for me, it’s the perfect time for this Foundation Review article outlining how foundations can (and should!) support movement building. It begins with the obvious acknowledgement that philanthropy does not a movement make, and that successful movements must, by definition, be driven by those animating them with their own passions and pains (so foundations have to relinquish control over the ultimate (and even many of the interim) goals, as well as the timeline).

But it analyzes powerful movements from history to define their core elements, and then suggests activities in which foundations can invest in order to infuse social movements with essential resources. My own study of the civil rights movement (I finally accomplished my goal of reading all of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) shows the many points when donations, from individuals and from philanthropic and religious institutions, facilitated the next steps that, combined, built one of the greatest movements for social justice our world has known. The article also illustrates the role that foundations can play in very long-term movement building with a brief history of the conservative movement and the foundations that decided in the 1960s to systematically invest in building capacity–investments that began to pay real dividends with the election of Ronald Reagan and, certainly, is very much in play still today.

Bringing these ideas to our progressive work requires some shifting on the part of foundations, to be sure, so that they see themselves as movement strategists, more than as funders, with a commitment to changing the terms of the debate so that, ultimately, the kinds of policies we support are seen as “natural”, because we’ve framed them that way. If progressive foundations are to build the kind of world they seek, they’ll need movements to create it. And those movements will happen much more surely if they can hire the people they need, purchase the media to communicate, and conduct activities in pursuit of their vision.

And that means, yes, multi-year grants and general operating support and transparent, mutual relationships with those receiving investments. It means not expecting grantees to demonstrate their unique “niche”, but encouraging collaboration and even “duplication”, as reflecting convergence of focus and enhanced overall capacity. This report uses the term “advocacy infrastructure” to talk about these long-term investments that cross organizational and issue boundaries.

But putting all of this on foundations is unwise and unfair. Community organizers, direct service practitioners engaged in social change, and all of us who care about building movements need to think beyond single-issue campaigns, too, and develop relationships with philanthropists so that we can help them to see the future through our same vision.

We need to have clear strategies related to each of the components of successful movement building: base-building, research and framing, strategic power assessment, organizational management, engagement and networking, and leadership and vision development. We can’t expect foundations to invest in these activities if we continue to zero in on tactics immediately and populate our grant applications with detailed descriptions of what we’ll do, with little attention to the who, and, most importantly, the why.

One of my favorite parts of this discussion was the inclusion of direct service providers as a key avenue to base building. That thinking builds on foundations’ existing relationships with social service agencies and could leverage those considerable resources for real power building. It’s also significant that their discussion of leadership development transcends the intense “academies” that are fairly popular with foundations (and, absolutely, potentially very impactful), because they have a pretty high initial “cost” of entry, and we need leadership capacity development at all levels of engagement.

Of course, my interest in advocacy evaluation made me hone in on the discussion of outcomes and assessment, especially because it’s very true that our nascent field of policy and advocacy evaluation misses many of the elements of movement building that would need to be included in a more comprehensive evaluation. There’s a table at the end with the stages of movement building, the five core elements, and benchmarks for each that I’ve printed out to refer to for my evaluation practice; it’s only a beginning, but it’s a good place to start. This piece is critical not only because it will add to the field of knowledge about what works and increase our understanding about social movements, but also because speaking philanthropic language about accountability and measures can help us to bridge these gaps.

As the authors say, “Foundations do not make history. They fund it.”

And then I’ll have even more books on my nightstand, to retrace the victories and the roles that activists and the philanthropists who invested in them played in creating the victories that we can’t imagine living without.

Here’s to a brighter future and the movements that will bring it.

We’ve got long-term work to do.

Oh, to spend an entire day pondering the question: What shifts in practice, organizational structure, relationships, and ways of thinking would need to occur for social change work to become a standard part of existing models of nonprofit service delivery?

That was the task of the attendees at the Building Movement Project convening, where partners engaged in the work of transforming social service organizations into successful engines for social change reflected on the past few years of work and discussed how to turn this nascent field into, well, a movement.

The reflection on that convening was shared in a recent Building Movement Project communication, and there are some key points that, to me, suggest some of the ways that those of us committed to this evolution might move forward.

One of the challenges here is to orient our social service organizations towards root causes of social problems, a focus on structural barriers that would, almost automatically, make even our direct service provision more “radical”. This, of course, isn’t easy, because it requires not only reaching some consensus on those roots of the problems, but also disentangling them, at least to some extent, or, more ideally, reaching beyond our organizational silos to work on multiple system levels simultaneously.

For the most part, these participants found relatively little resistance among constituents/clients and direct service practitioners to this idea of integrating social change work into services, which quite honestly runs contrary to some of my own experiences (and, so, gives me new hopes!); being close to the experienced problems motivated people to make this leap, but finding tangible ways to embed social change activities into organizational structure (especially given limited resources) is predictably more difficult.

Related to this, the convening found support for focusing resources on those nonprofit organizations ideologically committed to systems change and ready to take these steps, rather than trying to convince others to “come along.” There’s growing energy around these ideas, and some momentum happening, and so donors and intermediaries and others in a position to shepherd some of these entities can afford to prioritize investment in those already started down this road. My hope, of course, is that this provides more pressure for organizations that are still reluctant (“That’s not our job.” “We just focus on quality services.”) to figure out ways to play so that they’re not left behind.

One of the most poignant pieces in the reflection, for me, is the observation that, while the current economic recession has focused attention on the structural inequities in our economic and political systems, a focus that increases the opportunities for fundamental transformation of those same systems, it has also heightened demand for immediate relief, such that organizations (and, then, social workers!) find themselves having to simultaneously lay this long-term foundation AND address dire crises. That’s not totally new, of course, and I’d argue that social workers are particularly well-positioned to pull off such a balance, with a simultaneous focus on person-in-environment and our profession’s long history of attention to both individual needs and societal reform. Still, for a practitioner confronted with long lines of people in need and an inherent desire to organize for a better tomorrow, it’s hard to figure out how to tackle both.

I REALLY hope that someone(s) pick up the list of ways to advance the field, at the end of the report. Some of the items are fairly predictable, albeit still important, but some are super exciting:

Once I finally opened it up, I found not only some still-relevant and very applicable (although my edition is somewhat outdated, technology-wise) fundraising strategies, especially for grassroots social change organizations, but also even more parallels between advocacy and fundraising than I had contemplated before. This has me thinking about how fundraisers are advocates for their causes, and how advocates should spend more time asking for money, and I want to hear from those who are fundraisers and those who are advocates (and those who consider themselves both!) about your reactions to these areas of overlap. In the weeks to come, I’ll sprinkle in some posts with some specific ideas about how some of the strategies suggested in Fundraising for Social Change might be applied in an advocacy context, but, here, I’m more interested in the big picture, a sort of “Venn Diagram” of how the worlds of asking for money and asking for policy change collide.

DREAM students sitting in at Senator McCain’s office. All are now facing deportation charges.

I’ve never been arrested.

Yes, I’ve been yelled at, cursed at, even kicked out of church once. I’ve gotten a few threatening letters, a couple of nasty phone calls.

But I’ve never stood far enough afield of “respectable” comportment, even in opposition to laws that I find indefensibly unjust, to warrant arrest.

Which makes me think…have I been doing something wrong?

For the past year or so, there has been a tension simmering in the immigrant rights movement, one known to most other great, worthy causes that inspire social movements around them, between prudence and passion, strategy and sacrifice, “staying at the table” v. “heightening the contradictions”.

And here, as so often throughout history, those tensions have played out along the lines of established, funded, well-respected organizations v. young people demanding social justice on their terms and on their timelines, willing to use their own lives as the fodder for the change they seek.

I’ve straddled both sides of this divide, to an extent, advising the DREAM Act youth who are staging sit-ins (and being arrested for them) as well as working to support the call-in campaigns and legislative strategies of the immigrant rights organizations. I’ve made contributions for bail funds for DREAMers in jail, and, last fall, I talked with chiefs of staff about prospects for bringing a stand-alone bill to the floor.

And what I see is that, while the mainstream organizations aren’t wrong (the young people are doing risky things for which they may pay a tremendous price, and there’s no guarantee that it will have any result (as we saw, in fact, when DREAM failed in the Senate, and many of those students are now likely to be deported), and it does make people in power really uncomfortable and, at least temporarily, less willing to negotiate), they’re a little bit missing the point, at least at first, when there was a lot of whispering about the wisdom of the insider approach as contrasted to the renegade actions.

I mean, social movements aren’t just about winning legislation. They’re also about changing people’s lives, forcing a new public consciousness, and giving people the amazing opportunity to act on their deepest values.

In the first place, the students point out (echoing what Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members had to remind the Southern Christian Leadership Conference adults in the 1960s), the closed-door negotiating sessions, with much reasonableness on both sides, aren’t exactly yielding the gains we know we deserve, so (as youth tend to argue), what have we got to lose?

As adults on the sidelines, we get worried (because these kids may get deported, and some of them have families, and how will they finish school?), and kind of skittish (because now we have to answer, not just to the haters who opposed us from the beginning, but also to those sympathetic to our cause as long as it’s not too loud or too combative). So did the African-American parents whose six-year-olds went to jail in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

Social change is often really scary, especially for those who have to forge it. We get nervous when people are honest about their anger, especially if they don’t direct it at the targets we choose or express in the way we’d like.

But the truth is:

in the search for justice, patience isn’t necessarily a virtue.

In the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, sounding much like the SNCC students whose side he often took in battles between the youth and the elders, reminds that “time is neutral”, that waiting never produces inevitable progress, and that “the time is always ripe to do what is right”.

Even if the Senate Majority Leader disagrees.

Today, the courageous immigrant students whose tenacity and moral witness are almost single-handedly keeping immigrant rights on the national agenda are teaching us new and needed lessons about the power of direct action, the meaning of civil disobedience, and the promise of unity. And I think that those who make their living, as I used to, from advocating alongside and on behalf of immigrant communities, are being challenged and stretched in wonderfully exciting ways, and, in many cases, are rising to those challenges, albeit with some reservations, out of acknowledgement and admiration for the movement youth are creating.

On February 1, 1960, four college students, steeped in nonviolence but not closely associated with any civil rights organization, decided, almost on a whim, to sit in at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s lunch counter.

They didn’t issue a press release, or prepare talking points, or form a coalition.

They just sat, and refused to move.

And now that lunch counter sits in the Smithsonian and the student movement their silent action sparked helped to right centuries-old wrongs.

And that’s part of what makes me a bit ashamed to have never seen the inside of a jail cell.

Where do you stand on the “inside v. outside game” divide? What are you willing to sacrifice for the causes in which you believe? How has that changed as you’ve aged? How can adults support youth movements, without co-opting or patronizing or pressuring them? And why does figuring out how to build movements with a place for more radical action matter, to our quest for justice?

The reasons I go, and the reasons I come back

Recently, I left a protest rally a little bit early, handing my sign to my new friend next to me, and saying goodbye to compatriots along the line. I gave a quick Spanish radio interview on my way to the parking lot, but cut it short, because I really had to leave.

I had promised my older son that, after a day of work and an evening of activism, I’d be home in time to read his Boxcar Children bedtime stories.

And I made it, just in time.

I’d never claim to be an expert on this whole “balance” thing. In fact, I tend to swing from one extreme to another.

When my oldest son was first born, I was still deeply immersed in the immigrant rights struggle, and I worked through my entire maternity leave and then spent much of the next months of his life in D.C. It wasn’t the kind of mother I wanted to be, so I quit.

And then, I retreated, into our private lives and my private concerns. And I felt better about how I was parenting, for a while, but, really, that wasn’t the kind of mother I wanted to be, either–so focused on my child and his needs that I gave him, and others, the message that he was my only concern.

And, so, I’m trying.

In the process, I’m learning a lot about how maintaining an ethic of responsibility to the common good makes me a better mom, and how my perspective as a mother makes me a better activist, too.

I know now that I can’t possibly protect my kids from the outside world, and that trying to do so brings only alienation and anxiety. I see this in other parents who spend so much energy looking for the best schools (or preschools, or enrichment programs), in the hopes that this will be the difference for their kids. I talk with moms at the park who don’t know that we just had an election, but express so much fear about what their kids’ lives will look like as they grow. As stated eloquently in The Soul of a Citizen, the dream of a private sanctuary is an illusion, and I don’t pretend to search for one anymore.

So becoming a “public” mom makes me a less nervous one. Soul of a Citizen describes this phenomenon as, “if we focus solely on our own experiences, we will hear nothing but the echoes of our obsessions” (p. 148).

And I also think it makes my kids (okay, at least Sam) respect me more. My children, after all, deserve a complete person as a mom, which makes me think about the meaning of the word integrity, as having to do with the wholeness and interconnectedness of the world, and how essential it is to being human. That’s a lot of what compels me to action, really, this recognition that caring about social justice is just a core part of what and who I am. Soul of a Citizen says this, “It is the determination to protect our sense of who we are that leads us to risk criticism, alienation, and serious loss” (p. 23).

And, certainly, trying to be this kind of mom does carry risk (sometimes Sam is inconsolably upset when I leave, or I feel guilty when I’m on the phone or checking email instead of snuggled up reading on the couch) and it does involve loss (I wish my kids always ate home-cooked, organic foods instead of the chocolate pudding I let the babysitter give them!).

But it’s who I am, and, more importantly, it’s who I hope fervently my children will become, too.

And, so, maintaining ties to a community of activists, and commitments to causes that matter for our world, is also about giving my kids a place to go with their own worries–so that injustice doesn’t become something that we ignore, and so that my silence doesn’t send a message of complacency or acceptance, which would be confusing at best, and demoralizing at worst, to children who I hope will grow up outraged at what they see around them.

There are certainly many days when I fail, when I’m half an activist and half a mom, and feel like a failure at everything.

But, the morning after we finished the mystery of what happened to the stolen jewels in New York, when I showed Sam the pictures of the protest and explained what it was about, wasn’t one of them.