Politics and Policy Archive
Welcome to Politics and Policy where you will find the latest thoughts
and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the important political and public
policy questions facing us as Jews and as Americans.
To access the Politics and Policy Archive, click here.
"The
Future of Social Change," a seminar of CLALs Jewish Public Forum held May
20-21, 2002 in New York City, brought together a dozen leaders in social advocacy,
philanthropy and the arts. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based
on participants contributions to the seminar. To view other essays from
"The Future of Social Change" seminar, click here.
This
seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On
the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more
information about the project, click here.
Madeline
Lee
participated in "The Future of Social Change" seminar. She is the Executive
Director of the New York Foundation, one of the countrys oldest foundations,
considered a model of responsive and innovative philanthropy. The Foundation grants more than $5 million
annually to projects in the New York City area. Ms. Lees prior experience includes
directing the National Womens Agenda project, and founding and directing an
alternative school in Manhattan. She holds a
Master of Arts degree from Harvards Graduate School of Education and is a Phi Beta
Kappa graduate of Radcliffe College. She is a
frequent speaker on grantmaking and fundraising issues, women's issues, and urban
problems. Ms. Lee has received numerous
awards, most recently the Woman of Valor Award from the Jewish Fund for Justice. She is a member of the Society for the Advancement
of Judaism in New York.Her contribution to the JPF Seminar follows below.
Fixing Democracy, Empowering
the Grass Roots
By Madeline Lee
I believe that democracy is broken. I believe it is broken because there is no clear
line from the people who have a problem to their representatives, to the people who make
decisions, to the policies that result from the decisions that are made. And once policies are made, there is no further
political effort to see how they are affecting the people they are meant to help
how the policies are making change.
The engagement
of people at the grass roots will require a new understanding of how such groups could
utilize the media to advance their interests. It
will also demand that such groups learn to advocate on their own behalf. This will be a major challenge for
philanthropists, for people concerned about the non-profit world and the health of
democracy, and for public officials.
The best way to illustrate these challenges is
to tell a success story. In this story a
small grass roots organization used modern tools of media, legislation, litigation,
research, and policy review to win
victories, and managed not to be corrupted or diverted from its mission by the modern
tools. I know this story because the New York Foundation
provided some of the funding.
To set the stage: the welfare debate
heated up in this country or heated up again in 1994. Unlike its earlier iterations, this time the
debate was carried out largely by white males, largely in the media, and largely using
stereotypes. In that same year a small group of welfare recipients calling themselves
Community Voices Heard was formed. Community
Voices Heard (CVH) was a small project within the Hunger Action Network of New York State,
a large statewide advocacy organization. Its
original goal was simply to train people who were on welfare to speak to the media -- and
to power, if you will -- about what living on welfare was like, what was
wrong, and what might make their lives better. But
CVH very quickly left the large policy organization: the first important lesson from this
story. They left what is a truly fine organization because they felt their views were not
reflected by the mostly white, and mostly male, and mostly policy-oriented staff. (This
is in no way to criticize the sponsoring organization.)
But in our complicated non-profit landscape, where advocacy is now a
separate activity from direct service or from direct organizing, policy analysts and
advocates not infrequently end up taking positions at odds with those of the people
affected by a policy.
While they began by training ordinary
women to speak about the situations they found themselves in, CVH rather quickly became a
kind of a media darling. Reporters would
seek the organization out because its members were real people from whom they could get
good sound bites. But CVH realized it
didnt want to become a kind of trained welfare pet. They moved creatively and almost
uniquely for such organizations -- to use some of the tools they had been taught about how to change the
debate, affect the media and, therefore, the way the issues were being framed. They did a study.
They did research -- not a normal thing for this group of former welfare
recipients, and definitely outside their core area of competency.
They also trained themselves in much
more savvy media presentation. This was not
just training in public speaking and they went beyond having just a single spokesperson. For example, they learned that they should not
answer a question like Whats it like to live on $250 a week? Instead, they learned that they needed to answer
the question they wanted to be asked. In this way, they could frame the debate in their
own terms. They learned how to keep the debate focused on their message: We want to
work. We want jobs, and we want to be paid for them.
Anyone following the debate about
welfare reform in New York at about this time would realize that almost imperceptibly this
piece of the debate changed. The debate was
originally framed in terms of welfare moms, welfare cheats, welfare queens, and the famous
(and fictional) woman using food stamps to buy an orange, getting change, and buying
vodka. Little by little, average people
began hearing about the Work Experience Program and began to ask different questions. How much were these people being paid? What were the working conditions on the job? What kind of training were they getting?
It was CVH, among other
organizations, which began to introduce some of those other elements into the debate.
In their survey, they asked over 500
welfare workers assigned to work off their benefits what it was really like to do this. This marked one of the first times we began
hearing about people working in parks in the winter without gloves, without coats, without
boots. The official policy was still saying: This is good for people, they need the
work experience, why should society pay them to do nothing? But the human story of it, the real story, was
finally beginning to be heard.
What interests me most about the
survey is that they also used it in the way I think polls and surveys should be used,
which is not to choose your mission, and not to frame your mission, but to reinforce your
mission, to make it possible to talk about your mission in a way that will speak to the
people youre trying to reach.
They also learned from the process of
surveying that if they pushed people beyond their initial answers to the questions and
asked them to elaborate further, they could have real conversations with them. In this way, they found out that many people have
far less conservative attitudes toward welfare than their first answers would suggest. Heres an example of a conversation:
Q: The city of New York is now
saying people should work for their welfare benefits. Do you think thats a good
idea?
A: Oh yes, I think its a
very good idea.
Q: Do you think its
important for people to get work experience?
A: Absolutely.
Q: Most people on welfare
dont have any work experience. Are we
doing a good thing by giving it to them?
A: Oh yes, I think so.
Q: What if I told you that the
people on welfare are being paid $1.80 an hour for what theyre doing?
A: Oh
that doesnt seem right.
Q: What if I told you that the
people on welfare are replacing people who previously got paid $10 an hour, or $12 an
hour? That the city is downsizing, laying off
union workers, and replacing them with temporary welfare workers?
A: I dont think thats
fair.
CVH began to realize that they were
actually having substantive conversations
with people. They used that work the
relationships built and the survey results -- to put on panels in churches and at
universities, and to go out into the community and begin recruiting more members and more
support. They developed a campaign.
There was also litigation, through
cooperating organizations, challenging key aspects of the citys administration of
welfare benefits. There were demonstrations. At the end of this, CVH and other organizations
they are not the only group responsible for this win succeeded in getting
the city of New York to pass a transitional jobs program, which will create 10,000 jobs
for people coming off welfare when the 5-year time limit on public assistance is reached.
Whether that will happen is an
ongoing drama and a different story. What
I want to point out here is that the story of CVHs work is theoretically the way a
responsive system of representative government is supposed to work. CVH effectively combined all the tools that are
available to a small grass roots organization.
What could be done to promote more of
this kind of work? The sad answer is find
more money. There is very little progressive
money that supports this kind of grass roots work. Philanthropy
in general is being sidetracked to meeting human needs as government funding at all levels
remains flat, or decreases. I believe that a better role for philanthropy would be to keep
the government and the systems that ought to be meeting human needs accountable by funding
grass roots efforts such as this one.
What are the characteristics that I
think are important and hopeful here?
First,
it was the people who were affected by the problem speaking for themselves. Second, they learned how to speak clearly in the
midst of our media frenzy, but not by framing their message as a sound bite. Third, they had real conversations, pushing people
beyond their initial responses to engage more deeply with the issues. Fourth, they built relationships through this
process. Finally, they moved beyond talking
to real action.
To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe"
seminar, click here.
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