Because, you know, it’s almost the end of the year–THIS year, of all things–and I feel like we could all use some awesomeness.
You’re welcome.
- One of the organizations with which I have the distinct pleasure to work on advocacy is Harvesters, our regional food bank. They’re awesome in lots of ways–birthday parties to fight hunger, yes please!–but their public participation index is high on my list. They have developed concrete metrics by which they measure the extent to which their activities get people engaged in the cause of fighting hunger, in the firm belief that “you manage what you measure”. They do, and they do. And it’s awesome. They track volunteers responding to action alerts, people writing letters to the editor, pledge cards taken after public presentations, numbers of volunteer groups coming through, people sharing stories on their website. The bonus, of course, is that the process of collecting and sharing these data also encourages staff buy-in to the advocacy work, since they know that there will be monitoring and accountability. And celebration, because you have to applaud when you reach milestones like these!
- Recently, the League of Women Voters in our community set up a meeting at Operation Breakthrough, a fantastic organization (another advocacy TA grantee with which I get to work!) that provides early childhood education to children and support to low-income families (mostly single parents, many of whom are homeless and/or on TANF and/or involved with the child welfare system). The League wanted to talk with moms about the issues that matter most to them, what they wish they knew about the political process, and what they want public officials to understand about their lives. And, then, the League offered to pay the membership dues for any Operation Breakthrough mom who wanted to join, and they offered to help with transportation to meetings, hold events onsite at OB, and provide childcare to facilitate the participation of any Operation Breakthrough parent in a League event. Yeah, talk about understanding that the personal is political and that the women’s movement needs to embrace solidarity across class divides. And walking your walk. Awesomeness, and nothing more than I’d expect from an organization with a long history of being on the right side.
- An organization combating homelessness locally, and providing support to those experiencing it, took clients with them to lobby state legislators for increased funding for affordable housing initiatives. On the bus on the way to Jefferson City, reStart, Inc. staff gave clients copies of legislative bios, pulled from the state webpage, as sort of background information (and a way to kill the 2.5-hour drive). During one of the first visits, the Executive Director watched as a client smoothly shook hands with a state legislator with whom the organization has never had a great relationship, made some small talk, asked about his two children, and transitioned seamlessly into discussing the toll that being without permanent housing takes on child well-being. The legislator was animated, personable, and responsive. Because the client was authentic, warm, and very skilled. The Executive Director told this story recently with a bit of a chuckle. Because, she said, it just makes sense. If our clients are used to navigating systems to get their needs met every day, why do we think they’d be anything but excellent at making connections and getting what they want as lobbyists? Why, indeed. Awesome.
What is awesome in your world, today, or throughout this year?
What awesomeness can you share, as we face 2014?
Walking in their shoes, going to the ‘genba’
Photo credit Seite-3, via Flickr, Creative Commons license
One of the questions that I frequently ask clients of the social service organizations with which I’m working on advocacy is: “What do you wish that policymakers understood about your life?”
I ask something similar of staff, about what they think that policymakers need to understand about the challenges facing their clients, in order to craft effective policy responses.
And, most of the time, I get somewhat vague answers.
Because what clients want, and what staff want for them, is just for those with power over the systems that affect their lives to know what their lives are really like.
Even if they can’t imagine how that would really happen.
They usually say something about wishing that members of Congress just had to live in their shoes for a few days, to see what it’s like to find childcare that fits the work schedule of a single mom on an odd shift, or to live in a nursing home just because you can’t find affordable housing with services to meet your mental health needs, or to ride the bus in the snow home from the grocery store with 2 kids in strollers and a 2-bag limit (really).
Remember the mental health center client who made the connection to her time as a production supervisor, and how she never could have overseen the factory operations if she wasn’t spending time on the floor?
In Creating Room to Read, I learned a new phrase for this: ‘going to the genba‘ (sometimes seen as ‘gemba’–sources are contradictory). It’s a concept from manufacturing, fittingly enough, and it means ‘the real place’–the idea that problems are visible, when we connect at the place where they happen. It captures this idea, translated in policy terms, that policymakers need to really see and live the situations in which social problems exist, if we are to have our best chance of solving them (131).
And, yet, that kind of authentic interaction is elusive, especially when we’re talking about powerful political actors and some of the most marginalized populations in our society.
Even when we bring policymakers to our organizations to talk with clients, the conversations are stilted, even scripted, and there’s certainly no true parallel to the grinding pressures of living in deprivation day in and day out, without an escape hatch.
At best, there are a few new insights, and some greater mutual understanding, and maybe some concrete ideas about ways that policies need to be changed, for them to really work on the ground.
At worst, clients feel ‘on display’, as though policymakers are using them to pretend that they are ‘close to the people’, before they go back to their comfortable lives.
So, I’m thinking, maybe we’re thinking about the wrong feet walking in the wrong shoes.
Maybe the people who need to get to the source of the problem aren’t the policymakers coming to glean wisdom from clients, in their world, but the other way around.
Maybe what we need is to help clients build the kind of power that would give them greater access to policymaking worlds, a chance to walk in those shoes for awhile, and the opportunity to see the ‘factory floor’ of policymaking and where the processes are breaking down there.
If these ‘gemba walks’ are about actually seeing the process, asking questions, and understanding the work, maybe the work that needs to be observed is that of crafting the constraints that either hinder or facilitate people’s success, not the more obvious truth: being poor, or mentally ill, or without health insurance is…hard.
Maybe instead of asking what policymakers need to understand about the lives of our clients, we should be asking what clients need to understand about policymaking, in order to shape it.
To fit their own shoes.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged clients, policy, power, social change