Stay ConnectedWhat can we learn about making social and political change from talking to professional change-makers? This work takes a combination of persistence, shrewdness, and luck. On the Battles We Pick podcast, skilled advocates and organizers talk about how they deal with the various challenges they confront.
Theme music by generous permission of recording artist Stephen.
Copyright: © 2024 The Battles We Pick
This episode's guest is a journalist rather than an advocate, the author of one of the best books focused on advocacy work. Political reporter Sasha Issenberg's The Engagement tells the story of the 25-year fight for same-sex marriage, documenting the various efforts, strategies, course-adjustments, and outcomes from the perspectives of proponents and opponents alike.
Sasha says he was drawn to the subject particularly because of the way same-sex marriage burst onto the agenda quite suddenly in the early-1990s—then coming to the fore as a hot-button topic in national politics. It was fascinating to hear Sasha talk about the complexity of a struggle playing out in Washington as well as state capitals, while also alternating between the judicial and political arenas. Sasha said when he started this project, he assumed proponents would have "this big national plan, but there wasn't one." He said it was a fight where both sides were simultaneously on offense and defense on different fronts.
Sasha recounted a key messaging shift by marriage proponents going from a fairly dry and clinical argument for legal protections and eventually opting for an emotionally resonant case for recognizing two people's commitment to each other. In our discussion of the differences between litigation and political battles, Sasha stressed the higher stakes of losing in court and being stuck with a negative legal precedent.
One thing that enriches Issenberg's account in The Engagement is the way personalities play into advocacy and strategy. Sasha begins the book by focusing on a Hawaiian LGBTQ activist who decided it would be dramatic to hold a mass wedding to celebrate gay pride. Bill Woods' impulsive gadfly style won him few fans or allies among methodical litigators, but he played a crucial role as an originator—though he's often left out of other accounts of the struggle. As Issenberg told me, "We would not have had the Obergefell Supreme Court decision in 2015 if it hadn't been for Woods starting this ball in motion in 1990."
The podcast ends with the same question as Issenberg's book: the rights of trans people that were left aside by the marriage equality struggle. Sasha predicted that the fight for trans rights will gain momentum as the public takes the cue from science that gender is an innate part of identity just as sexual orientation is.
Election law attorney Yael Bromberg is principal of her own firm and litigation practice. With a specialty in student voting rights, she serves as outside counsel to the Andrew Goodman Foundation—which works on college campuses around the country to promote student voting and is legacy of one of the activists murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. Yael teaches election law at Rutgers University Law School and works with the Harvard Kennedy School’s William Trotter Collaborative on a multi-campus voting rights course drawing students from three historically black colleges and universities.
The episode features a great discussion of the Republicans' voter fraud myth and how their voting suppression efforts resemble the multi-headed Hydra monster from Greek mythology. Yael said we have to confront that monster with the full range of tools—a mixture of legal and political tactics—and she gave examples from her work. I especially liked Yael’s idea of redefining public confidence in elections as a matter of maximum participation and the most inclusive electorate possible.
Yael also talked about her scholarship to highlight student voters as a protected class under the Constitution’s 26th Amendment, which recently led to the introduction of the Youth Voting Rights Act by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Nikema Williams.
To mark the podcast being ten-episodes old, I invited close colleague and good friend Kathleen Sullivan of Fine Gauge Strategies to listen back to some of the most interesting points made by those first ten guests. Similar to the way she and I delve into our interviews for evaluation projects, I wanted to have Kathleen highlight the insights she gleaned from the guests—as well as draw connections to trends and perspectives in the evaluation field.
We revisited Angela Bruce-Raeburn's account of how, after George Floyd's murder, international development practitioners and organizers were newly willing to discuss the way racism skewed their work. As Kathleen noted, such sudden openings pose the challenge of being ready to take make the most of them, especially with the uncertainty of how wide or long-lasting the opening will be.
We also listened to two pairs of clips. Adotei Akwei and Gawain Kripke compared and contrasted the inside game of working with policymaker allies versus building movements and constituencies for more ambitious change. And we heard the perspectives of Richard Healey and Elisa Massimino on why it's important to keep sight of long-range overarching aims for social change, to properly orient current efforts.
Drawing on those sets of observations as well as our recent attendance at the annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association, Kathleen and I discussed the recent rethinking of the role of professional advocates. Over the last several decades, the professionalization of the field has skewed the agenda toward established advocates' sense of the best opportunities for change. In the spirit of Julia Coffman's call to "stand up and step back," we talked about combining the skills and perspectives of professionals and affected communities—forging alliances on a social change agenda with the goals and priorities set by those most affected.
The podcast's tenth episode was a reunion with the former executive director of the group where I was an intern right after college. Richard Healey was executive director of not only the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy but also the Institute for Policy Studies as well as founding director more recently of the Grassroots Power Project. In fact, Richard's career as an organizer goes back six decades to his involvement in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
I was spurred to reconnect with Richard by his recent fascinating Stanford Social Innovation Review article on the lessons the progressive movement can learn from how the military does strategy. His central point is especially apt for a podcast called The Battles We Pick. Richard stresses the need to be clear not just about our battles, but crucially the larger wars those battles are part of. As the old saying goes, you can win the battles and still lose the war.
When it comes to incremental changers versus major transformation, Richard makes a persuasive case for "both / and." On the transformation side, he says progressives should think in terms of goals for decades in the future. "But then we back-cast and ask, if you want to achieve those in 40 years, then what are the big major steps that would have to have happened in ten years to be plausibly moving us toward the 40-year goals?" Richard pointed to Working Families Party leader Maurice Mitchell as a good spokesperson for this approach.
Clarence Edwards has worked on nearly every side of US foreign policy and politics—from presidential campaign finance to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to lobbying Congress for groups like the Friends Campaign on National Legislation and Bono’s ONE campaign for global treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS. Clarence even worked in the Washington embassy of one of America’s allies. As he says on the podcast, his career has been everything he’d hoped for as a Black kid in Baltimore reading World Book encyclopedias.
Clarence and I had a fascinating discussion of the thing that interests him most: how power works in Washington—and how that changed when Trump came on the scene. For anyone working to sustain an advocacy career over a period of decades, curiosity about power dynamics and gleaning the right lessons can be very helpful.
The episode concludes with a conversation about the challenge of getting climate legislation through Congress, particularly the difficulty of building much-needed bipartisan consensus. Despite the years of Republican resistance, Clarence doesn’t view bipartisanship on climate change as impossible. He says he’s seen too many things change that once seemed permanent.
In our conversation, Eileen Hershenov of the Anti-Defamation League kept coming back to the theme of advocacy's broadest challenge: to keep progressing and sustaining change over the long haul. As Eileen explained, the only way to sustain progressive organizing is by getting people involved in the effort. Having activists and leaders who are committed to seeking change is how we build progress upon progress.
Eileen and I trace our career roots back to our first jobs after college, when we were colleagues at New York Public Research Interest Group (NYPIRG). It's remarkable how many of us went on from NYPIRG to long careers as organizers and advocates. For Eileen's part, after law school she had senior positions with Wikipedia, Consumer Reports, George Soros' Open Society Foundation (where she helped Soros found Central European University), and the Anti-Defamation League, where she's been responsible for ADL's democracy initiatives.
Looking back at her time with Consumer Reports, Eileen talked about a fascinating effort to keep patients from picking up infections during their hospital stays. Turns out the answer was checklists and report cards. And because that campaign drew on the personal stories of people who had health problems -- or lost family members -- from hospital-acquired infections, we talked about the power of narrative as a double-edged sword.
The latter part of our conversation focused on the work Eileen has been doing at ADL to counter the homegrown threats to American democracy. She's been working with opinion researchers and scholars specializing in political violence, gaining deeper understanding of the Trump personality cult, Christian nationalism, and racism and antisemitism.
When Terry Woodbury was fresh out of his masters program at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late-1960s, an internship with a wealthy Kansas congregation—essentially an experiment in changing local racial relations—sent him on a career path as a community organizer. Terry shares his story of facilitating dialogue between Black and White community members in Hutchinson, Kansas. Terry is white and was given a mandate to lead the process of forging relationships with black neighbors whom the congregation's leaders knew they were disconnected from. In today's terms, he catalyzed difficult conversations that the community needed to have.
A little further into his career, Terry was tasked with assembling a community's bid for a highly competitive national recognition. That experience spurred him to an idea about the four key sectors of any community: local businesses, schools, government, and human services. He sees all those sources of leadership as integral to address the most serious local challenges. They comprise the public square, and he named his consulting business Public Square Communities. Indeed, Terry developed a specialty in helping local areas confronting near existential-level threats. He says that he's typically contacted by someone "worried about things going south."
This episode was a great chance to explore the differences and interrelationship between organizing and policy change advocacy. Where most of Terry's work delves deeply into local power structures and life conditions of community members who've been marginalized, policy advocacy is aimed at whatever changes can be achieved without the heavy lift of mass mobilization. Host David Shorr was connected to Terry because of a shared interest in the workings of the public square. But David's notion of the public square is focused on the deliberations and decisions in the government sector.
Which is why it was especially interesting to hear about a turn at advocacy that Terry took recently on rural water and irrigation issues. The title of the episode—"Twenty years left"—was the degree of threat that an area of Kansas faced due to the overuse of water by a small set of large farms. With all of the consensus-building and bridge-building work that Terry does, it is noteworthy that he ventured into advocacy in a situation where he faced powerful self-serving businesses who closed themselves off from changes to the status quo.
Sandra Ionno Butcher has been chief executive of the National Organisation for FASD for six and a half years—and active in efforts on behalf of the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder for nearly a decade—after spending the bulk of her career advocating for nuclear disarmament.
With Sandy having lived as an American in the United Kingdom for even longer, it was interesting to get her perspective on the United States' recent tumultuous politics / fascist threat. Sandy has had a long association with the Pugwash movement, a network of scientists founded by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to eliminate the threat of nuclear war that their generation of physicists had wrought. With the problem of nuclear weapons persisting to this day, and with only modest progress, we had a fascinating discussion of a core theme of this podcast: incremental change versus more sweeping transformation.
Sandy's latest career phase was also excellent fodder for reflection on advocacy work. Working on the challenges of FASD put her in a strange new policymaking context. It was fascinating to hear her talk about the basic advocacy skills that carried over to her new field of work.
Prior to launching his consulting firm Double Dogwood, Gawain Kripke spent the bulk of his career with Oxfam America, most of that time as policy director responsible for the organization’s advocacy efforts. That role put Gawain in many different advocacy contexts, including lobbying Congress for measures to help reduce global poverty.
As we discussed on the podcast, it also gave him an appreciation for the judgment and instincts of elected political leaders. He called on advocates to heed the recommendations of their legislative allies when picking which policy changes to pursue. As Gawain pointed out, it's the politicians—with their dependence on voters' support at the ballot box—who help keep advocacy grounded in the electorate as the ultimate authority for governance. He also cited his own experience knocking on doors as a successful Washington, DC Advisory Neighborhood Commission candidate, saying that all advocates should have the experience of engaging voters at their doorways.
Gawain raised a number of important questions about the challenges of seeking change and justice with our country’s political system being so badly broken right now. Are significant strides forward even possible under current circumstances? Should the recent gun safety legislation be counted as progress? Does bipartisan cooperation make sense any more, or does it all come down to electing Democrats to gain control of Congress and the White House? Give a listen for some very interesting thoughts on these major questions.
Adotei Akwei is a seasoned and accomplished advocate who has worked for the American Committee on Africa, Human Rights First, CARE USA, and spent over 25 years with Amnesty International USA. Currently he is Amnesty's Chief Membership Collaborations Officer. That role with the organization represents a shift—one he sought out—toward movement- / power-building after many years of inside-game advocacy on human rights in Africa.
The relationship between those two halves of the change-making profession is a core topic of the podcast, and we talked about the need to appreciate the differences between them as well as the ways they complement one another. Adotei talked about the minimum requirements that, for him, justify picking a policy change battle. And he highlighted some of the important forms of progress that go along with policy change "wins"—some of them just as significant, or even longer-lasting, than the substance of the policy outcome itself.
In discussing Adotei's organization and it's history, he explained the importance of Amnesty USA taking stock of the justice and equity issues both in our own country as well as within the organization itself. Because credibility and legitimacy are absolutely vital across the board from individual advocates to groups doing the work to international diplomacy, such a reckoning will be essential for further progress.
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