Tag Archives: social change

We have to start by claiming our failures

Posted on March 18, 2012 by | Leave a comment

There is growing recognition, I think, of the importance of owning our failures—in advocacy and in life—so that we can learn from failings (ours, which is a sort of eternal life lesson, and, increasingly, those of others, too, through shared learning opportunities that have taken some of the ‘sting’ out of failure). We should celebrate the liberating power of being comfortable with failure, of even rushing to it, in pursuit of the victories that we know can and often do follow in its wake.

Certainly nonprofit advocates are not immune from this imperative to acknowledge, analyze, and even disseminate our failures; we can do more, certainly, through the deployment of systematic advocacy evaluation efforts, but I see a trend of reducing stigma around failure, and it’s one that I think will benefit us in the future.

But there’s an extension of this idea that is harder, I believe, for nonprofit advocates to embrace. It’s even more central to our advocacy success. And we’ve got to put it out there together, because it’s too much to ask any one organization, or even any one sector, to go out on a limb.

So here it is.

To fully transform our nonprofit social service organizations into effective advocacy forces, and to make the strongest case possible for the policy changes that those we serve so desperately need, we have to admit the truth:

Our services, our programs, our intense direct services, are failing.

Yes, I know; that sounds brutal.

And of course I don’t mean that there isn’t tremendous value in what nonprofit social service organizations do every day—feeding people who are hungry, mentoring kids at risk, helping people free themselves from addictions, training people for better-paying jobs. There obviously is.

That work meets people where they are, provides hope, helps people survive to fight the larger structures that create and perpetuate need. It is noble work, and it lifts my own soul and has the potential to transform individual lives.

But, measured against the scope and scale of the problems we face, it’s failing.

We’re working smarter, and working harder, and bringing more and more bright and talented individuals around to the ‘social sector’, and yet we haven’t moved the needle on very many of the most critical challenges that face our world. And the answer isn’t more services, or even more money for those services.

It’s changing the systems that create the problems in the first place. It’s addressing the root causes that make poverty and oppression and tragedy routine and predictable and crushingly continual. It’s removing the fuel instead of always putting out fires.
And it means that we have to acknowledge that, on its own, our services aren’t going to win the day. Which is a tough lift for nonprofit organizations that are, now more than ever (and not unrelated, obviously, to these structural issues) competing with each other for funding and trying to prove to donors that they have the answer. We absolutely should be measuring the impact of our services, because they’re certainly not all created equal. And goals of program accountability are not at all incompatible with this larger need to give up the charade of adequacy—we have to stop pretending that we can ever program our way to justice.

We have to stop for ourselves, because there’s no easier way to drive oneself crazy within a social service system. We have to stop for our clients, because how disempowering is it to think that you must be the only one whose problems aren’t being eradicated by this excellent case management or fantastic after-school program.

And we have to stop for our public policies, because we can’t be our best advocates if we’re simultaneously trying to convince policymakers that we’ve got everything taken care of.

I think we can start small, really. What if, in our annual reports where we highlight our programmatic successes, we included a column dedicated to the policy changes that would make next year’s annual report radically different? What if we added language about “ending homelessness” or “eliminating racism” to our mission statements, the way some organizations have done? What if we added “but our services can’t solve all these problems” to our agency brochures, or added an appeal to advocacy in every volunteer orientation?

It won’t be easy, but we can win.

We just have to first acknowledge that we’re losing.

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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

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Mission-driven, Committed to Clients…and we VOTE

Posted on February 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment


Which one is a nonprofit employee?

My day with Robert Egger last fall prompted some new thinking, and reading, about nonprofit civic engagement. Where I have long helped nonprofit organizations to unleash the civic participation potential of those they serve, through client-based voter registration and Get-Out-the-Vote activities, I realize now that I had largely overlooked the employees of nonprofit organizations as a powerful electoral force themselves.

Not anymore.

One of Robert Egger’s new projects, as he described it, is to mobilize nonprofit employees for advocacy and social change, independent of the organizations they serve, as those organizations are often difficult, especially in the short term, to pivot to this transformational work. And we face urgent challenges, not necessarily amenable to a long revisioning of the nonprofit sector.

I’m still committed to harnessing the resources–financial, reputational, human–of nonprofit social service agencies, to build a strong and sustainable movement for social justice.

And I think that that’s compatible with efforts to help nonprofit employees integrate their work lives with their whole selves, to become part of something larger than their own work contexts, and to, collectively, create the “army” of social change advocates that we need…today.

A big piece of that, I think, that can be immediate and tangible and, if we are careful with messaging and organizing, a first step towards the kind of engagement we want to see, is leveraging nonprofit employees as electoral agents.

We start from a strong position here: there’s evidence that nonprofit employees vote more regularly than the rest of the public. That means that, if we can organize so that they are voting from the values of the missions that their work supports, and from the knowledge that they accumulate every day that they’re working for the public good–in the arts, education, health, and, especially for our interests, social services, then we will see a much larger and more active “pro-justice” electorate, the kind we need in order to elect public officials who will be our partners in reshaping the policy landscape.

So what will it take to help our employees claim and exercise their civic power? To do so as individuals, in their own capacities, and yet motivated by the same mission that drives them every day (and, OK, some evenings and weekends) in their work?

What we have to do, I believe, between now and November, to lay the foundation for this “nonprofit employee voter brigade”, includes:

  • Talk with our employees about elections, and about electoral issues–of course we have an obligation to be nonpartisan, and that’s not just the legal thing to do, but it’s the smart thing, too; our employees need safe spaces in which to talk about the connection between their politics (the issues they care about) and Politics (the election cycle that we sometimes want to avoid)
  • Remove barriers to electoral participation–this means giving people time off work to vote, and providing registration materials at work, and answering people’s questions about the electoral process
  • Transform our organizations into forces for social change, because working in a climate that focuses on root causes and encourages people to ask “why?” over and over again will push people to think about the kinds of structural challenges we face together
  • Empower and recognize individuals, because people who are empowered to see that they can make a difference, especially when they unite with others, will be able to transfer those lessons, and that inspiration, to the electoral context, too
  • Help non-citizen employees become citizens, by providing tutoring on the civics exam, free legal advice, and even scholarships for the naturalization fee

For many nonprofit employees, our jobs are callings. We live our missions every day at work, and we bring them home with us at night, too.

And we can take them into the voting booth.

And we should.

Because when we do, we will be a force with which to be reckoned.

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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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What about the next day?

Posted on February 9, 2012 by | 2 Comments

My oldest son’s favorite Bible story is the Good Samaritan, even though he covers his ears during the part where the robbers attack the traveler. We probably read it at least once a month, and we’ve even acted it out before, with props, in the living room.

But it wasn’t until the day that I spent with Robert Egger last fall that I started to wonder–if everyone knew that that stretch of highway was so dangerous, why didn’t anyone do anything about it?

I’m sure there’s some explanation, you know, about how hard it was to find good police officers back in ancient times, or about how the terrain around Jerico was difficult to police anyway.

But this post isn’t really about the Good Samaritan, anyway, but about the many ways in which we still glorify Good Samaritans today, without asking that critical question–what are we doing to reduce the highway robberies in the first place?

Robert asked that question as part of a conversation about the starfish story–his point, I think, was that the story of the Good Samaritan ends with the Samaritan leaving the money with the innkeeper. It doesn’t say what happened the next day, even though there’s a pretty good chance that some other unlucky traveler met the same fate, on the same road, this time without someone to come along to the rescue.

But it’s really what didn’t happen before that violent encounter, and what should happen next, that matter the most in that story. There will never be enough Good Samaritans to go around and, besides, shouldn’t they be able to spend their money on something other than medicine and lodging for those routinely robbed?

Because we often know what the problems are, just as everyone seemed to in this story. We know that our health care system means that people without insurance will need Good Samaritans to pay for life-saving treatment. We know that our fractured “child welfare” system depends on Good Samaritans to rescue the children who fall through the cracks. We know that the inadequacy of our public education system requires Good Samaritans to swoop in with scholarships and private donations. We know that the poverty and lack of opportunity that plague many communities in our country create conditions where only Good Samaritans can save families from the dismal reality of their surroundings.

I’m not in the Samaritan-bashing business.

As I’ve said before, the life-changing work that we do in direct service meets real needs and soothes our own souls.

But we need to ask ourselves the question: What happens the next day?

Who’s going to make that stretch of highway safer?

Let’s write that story together.

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The Power of One

Posted on January 30, 2012 by | Leave a comment

One fairly influential individual

There are a lot of sort of pop psychology, bumper sticker motivationals out there about the difference that one individual can make…they all sort of run together for me, but you know what I mean, right?

Probably the best known is attributed to Helen Keller, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

Beautiful, right? And capable of making me feel guilty when I’m, say, on my way to the fabric store instead of a rally.

The belief in the power of the individual is very much rooted in our culture, but much less frequently seen in how we build capacity for advocacy and social change.

Bet you never thought about that while stopped behind someone at a red light, hunh?

See, when it comes to how we invest in building power to make a difference, we tend to focus almost exclusively on networks of people, on the connections that bind us together, and on how we create structures that leverage those relationships for power.

Sure, it’s obvious that no social movements are the sole work of any individual, even those that are commonly associated with one. But isn’t it also just as true that single individuals do, perhaps not as often as we would wish, change the course of history in amazing ways?

So why is the organization, or the community, most often our focal unit, when we think about what we need to develop in order to reach our goals? Why do we sometimes sort of gloss over the individuals who populate those entities, as though they are somehow replaceable, even when history so clearly teaches us otherwise?

I’ve been particularly thinking about this over the past couple of weeks because of the work that I do with The Sunflower Foundation and its Advocacy Fellows initiative. The initiative is somewhat distinct, particularly in the philanthropic world, because it revolves around advocacy, specifically, rather than a more diffuse sense of nonprofit leadership, and yet, unlike many other advocacy capacity-building efforts, individual advocates are clearly the emphasis.

The theory of change animating the Advocacy Fellowship is this: “the Sunflower Foundation believes that increasing the number of nonprofit health leaders who advocate on behalf of their constituents informs public policy and leads to real solutions for those in need. By becoming involved in advocacy, nonprofit leaders are advancing their causes, building public trust, and helping the people they serve.”

Notably missing, then, is discussion about the organizations in which these individuals work (indeed, they fairly frequently move organizations during the Fellowship or quickly following it) or about the sector as a whole. Instead, the idea is to find promising people, who happen to be working in nonprofit health organizations, and to work intensively with them to develop the knowledge, skills, and, yes, relationships they need to be effective advocates themselves. They are the ones held accountable for moving their work forward, and they are seen as the keys to advancing a vision of a healthy Kansas.

We’re still very much in the early stages of evaluation, but the indications at this point are, really, that the model works–that, no, their organizations do not necessarily greatly increase their advocacy capacity, but they as individuals do, and that that makes a difference. They are quoted more frequently in media accounts of related policy debates, they engage in those debates more often and with more influence, they are more respected by a larger circle of potential targets and allies, and they are increasingly sophisticated and outspoken in their advocacy.

It’s a bit of a gamble, this business of investing in individuals. We feel safer, sometimes, with organizations, because of the law of averages, but those same “averaging” tendencies can dilute and stall the radical message we want to convey: that, in the end, justice hinges on you (and me).

Here’s to sparking movements, one soul at a time.

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Root Causes: Keep Asking “Why?”

Posted on January 9, 2012 by | Leave a comment

It’s organizational transformation week on Classroom to Capitol! I can’t think of a better way to start the new year than sharing some of my thinking about how to help nonprofit social service organizations fully integrate social change activities into their work with the community of readers here.

I’ve been working with several nonprofit organizations and individual leaders to assess their organizations’ capacities for transformative social change, in pursuit of their visions of social justice, relying heavily on the work of the rock stars at Building Movement Project (if you haven’t already downloaded their free Process Guide, please make that a 2012 resolution!). The Guide approaches social change work from a foundation of quality social services and helps nonprofit organizations engage in cycles of learning and strategy development and action and reflection, as they walk a continuum from status quo-reinforcing to truly revolutionary power-building.

This process begins (and ends–it’s a cycle!) with exploration of the root causes implicated in the social problems that our social programs are designed to address. Too often, our organizations’ activities are aimed at the symptoms of those problems, rather than the structural realities that perpetuate them, despite all of our best intentions. It’s not that we don’t care about the root causes, or even always that those examinations are too controversial for us to contemplate (although that can be a factor).

Instead, I think that one of our greatest obstacles to uncovering the root causes that demand our attention is that we…

don’t think enough like 3-year-olds.

Because, really, have you ever met an adult with the same “why, why, why?” stamina as a preschooler?

I didn’t think so.

The connection was made clear when I was reading The Little Engine That Could to my 3-year-old son.

Twenty-seven times in one day.

Every single time, he asked me (on the same exact page), “Why the black engines no help?”

And it occurred to me, maybe on time 18 (slow, I know), that what he really wants to know is WHY someone (or, in this case, something) would ignore the pleas of another in need. He can’t understand that, and, of course, none of us should be able to. And he wasn’t satisfied with any answer I gave, because they all fell short of really explaining “why”.

And that commitment to “why?” needs to underscore our organizational evolutions towards social justice orientations, too.

WHY do racial health disparities persist? WHY are people of color more likely to be uninsured? WHY are unemployment and underemployment rates higher for some demographics? WHY are educational attainment levels different for different populations? WHY are health outcomes tied to income and other social determinants? WHY? WHY? WHY?

It often takes peeling away many layers to see the linkages between social problems and to uncover the root social inequities that, tragically, are relatively few and achingly predictable.

How many “whys” do you have in you?

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Becoming the change we wish to see: Predictions for 2012

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Okay, so to be completely honest, there’s really nothing “predictive” about this list AT ALL.

It’s just my wish list put in more positive form; I figure that you have to dream it to do it…or something like that, right?

So, in the interest of being the change we wish to see (is there any radical who hasn’t been bumperstickerified?), here are the headlines that I’m hoping we’ll see at some point in 2012. At my house, we’re celebrating our first year in 7 years without either a new baby or a major house project, or both. So, as we’ve been saying for awhile, “let’s make this year our year.”

Together.

  • Kansas Legislature resoundingly rejects “Show-me-your-Papers” legislation (note the presumed adoption of our preferred messaging, too!)
  • Extension of Bush-era tax breaks for upper earners rejected, replaced with robust, transparent, and progressive tax foundation
  • U.S. Congress approves a “people’s budget”, with investments in education, health care, green technology, job creation, and critical infrastructure–broad coalition claims success in historic collaboration
  • The IRS reveals that the overwhelming majority of 501(c)3 organizations are now 501(h) ‘electing’, signaling their intention to take on significant advocacy roles
  • Poverty, unemployment rates fall–advocates credit national commitment to a new ‘war on poverty’
  • U.S. Supreme Court rules local funding of public schools unconstitutional ‘separate but equal’ and mandates full equalization of school finance formulas–states respond to public pressure by dramatically increasing per pupil expenditures

    While we’re on the subject of the courts, why not go for broke?

  • U.S. Supreme Court issues two landmark rulings on the same day: Affirming constitutionality of health care legislation and ending discrimination based on sexual orientation

    What about you? When you close your eyes and envision the future, one year from now, what do you see? What are you going to do differently, this year, to make those visions reality?

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    Yes, they can: Foundations and Movement-Building

    Posted on June 9, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    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.

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    Posted in My New Favorite Thing

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    Where do we stand? Social services and social change

    Posted on June 6, 2011 by | 5 Comments

    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:

  • Conduct rigorous assessments of the outcomes of integrating social change work into direct services (If we could show, as I really believe, that they strengthen each other!!)
  • Provide ongoing support to organizations engaged in social services as social change (Because this work is hard enough without feeling alone)
  • Engage funders explicitly, so that they understand the synergy organizations are seeking here, and what the possibilities are (if foundations, at some point in the future, would see social change work as integral to direct service provision!)
  • Map the field, so that we have a better sense of who’s really doing this work, and what it looks like (I’ve found in working with nonprofit organizations on advocacy that, when we have an inclusive definition of what “advocacy” is, many more organizations are doing it than think they are!)

    What do you see as the next steps for introducing a social change orientation to your own social service work? To your organization? What resources would most help you to make this shift?

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    Posted in Inspiration and Examples

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