Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen's Guide to Transformational Advocacy, 2024 Edition

By Sam Daley-Harris

Almost everyone shies away from advocacy as a way to make a difference. We donate to climate change organizations, but we don't meet with a member of Congress or write a letter to the editor. We donate to groups working to end gun violence, anti-hunger organizations, groups dedicated to racial justice, and many others, but we don't become advoca

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rivertowns Books
• Release date: Jan 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781953943248

Sam Daley-Harris

Sam Daley-Harris founded RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund in 1980, cofounded the Microcredit Summit Campaign in 1995 with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus and FINCA Founder John Hatch, and founded Civic Courage in 2012. He began coaching Citizens' Climate Lobby months before its launch in 2007 and continued that coaching over the next seven years. Ashoka founder Bill Drayton has called Sam "one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades." Sam Harris married Shannon Daley in 1995, and they both hyphenated their last names. Sam and Shannon live in Princeton, New Jersey. Their son Micah specializes in analytics and player development with the Arizona Diamondbacks, and their daughter Sophie is completing a masters of social work degree at Bryn Mawr College.

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Copyright © 1994, 2004, 2013, and 2024 by Sam Daley-Harris. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Earlier versions of this book were originally published by Camino Books, Inc., under the title Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.

Printed in the United States of America · January 2024 · I

Hardcover edition ISBN-13: 978-1-953943-34-7

Ebook edition ISBN-13: 978-1-953943-24-8

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Contents

Preface: Why This Book? And Why Now?

PART ONE: The Possibility of Transformational Advocacy

1 Transformational Advocacy: A Key Missing Ingredient

2 It Felt Like a Turning Point: Reaching Across the Political Divide

3 I Would Be Advocating for the Children I Worked With: Engaging Young People

4 I Felt I Was Part of Something Revolutionary: Engaging People with Lived Experience of Poverty

5 This Is Exactly What We Need to Be Doing: Engaging the Disengaged

PART TWO: The Birth of RESULTS—Finding Our Voices Through Transformational Advocacy

6 It Was an Exhilarating Exercise in Getting Our Democracy Back: From Hopelessness to Action

7 This Was My Run to Democracy: A Crash Course in Working with the Media

8 I Was Impressed That Something Concrete and Massive Could Actually Be Done: Everyone a Spokesperson

PART THREE: Transformational Advocacy in Action

9 Getting High on Life: The Global Primary Health Care Initiative

10 You Can Stop the Editorials Now: Saving the International Fund for Agricultural Development

11 And I Have Never Been the Same Since: The Universal Child Immunization Act

12 It’s Refreshing to See People as Possibilities Rather Than as Obstacles: The Self-Sufficiency for the Poor Act

13 To My Great Surprise, He Said Yes: The Global Poverty Reduction Act

14 And Then a Miracle Happened: The World Summit for Children Candlelight Vigils

15 We Were Elated: Building Champions to Restore Child Survival Funding

16 I Was Sure at That Moment I Had Made a Difference: Transformational Advocacy Around the World

17 This Is Sacred and Profound Work: Climate Activists Embrace Transformational Advocacy

PART FOUR: A Handbook for Applying Transformational Advocacy to a Cause You Care About

18 Generating Transformational Advocacy: 18 Commitments That Bring It to Life

19 Building Relationships with Elected Officials

20 Working with the Media

21 Learning to Be a Spokesperson

A Final Word

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

Index

About the Author

To the volunteers who inspire me

by their commitment to transformational advocacy,

and to the organizations and staff

with the courage to deliver it

Preface:

Why This Book? And Why Now?

WHEN I WROTE the first edition of this book in 1994, RESULTS, the nonprofit citizens’ lobby I founded, was 14 years old and we had amassed an impressive (if largely unknown) record of success. Our mission was to create the political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty and to break through the thought I don’t make a difference. We did this primarily by lobbying governments and the media to support funding for cost-effective programs that had demonstrated real-world results.

We had no fancy offices on K Street in the nation’s capital. In fact, we had no paid lobbyists on staff. What we did have was a lean, passionate staff who supported and trained thousands of ordinary people around the world to become grassroots citizen spokespeople on our issues using a replicable set of methodologies that were consistently delivering legislative successes. In this book, I will lay out a unique form of advocacy, advocacy that I will describe in the pages that follow as transformational advocacy .

In 2012, I launched Civic Courage because I felt called to share the principles and methods originated by RESULTS with other grassroots advocacy groups. In the years since, I have been thrilled to see RESULTS’ principles and methodologies successfully implemented by groups like Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Catholic Relief Services, and the Foundation for Climate Restoration. But I have also been disheartened by the reluctance shown by so many other advocacy groups when offered the opportunity to inspire their members to move from just being names on a mailing list to becoming the motivated, empowered volunteer advocates that healthy democracies so desperately require.

The book you are holding has been radically revised, updated, and expanded to meet this moment. My motivation for sharing its message has also evolved. That is because the challenges our democracies face have worsened, as has the depth of our discouragement.

As I was completing this preface, I read an article by Alabama Media Group political commentator Kyle Whitmire about yet another spate of gun violence. Under the title What reason have we given our children to love America? Whitmire expressed the powerlessness and futility felt by most Americans when it comes to our ability to change government policy:

I don’t think I ever really wanted to hurt anybody before, but when my son told me where his hiding place was in his classroom, for a second, I wanted to hurt everybody.

Such is the feeling when you realize the world doesn’t care about the safety of your child.

Such is the futility of that anger when you know there’s nothing you can do personally and nothing anyone else will do collectively.¹

This is the powerlessness I seek to address in this book—not by focusing on how deep the cynicism runs or how damaging it is to our well-being — but by answering these two questions: What can we do to be real changemakers, and how can we do it?

This book will lay out a proven, replicable way to make a difference and heal our democracy in the process. It’s not the only solution needed, but it is one fundamental missing piece: citizens awakening to their power.

I want this book to be a beacon of hope and possibility for people who feel brokenhearted and overwhelmed by the headlines they read. I intend this book to be a road map for individuals and organizations that want to make a difference on the issues that are precious to them. And I want this book to be a wake-up call—a clear challenge—to the very large, well-funded national nonprofit organizations that I believe are guilty of anemic advocacy that dis-empowers the average citizen.

In this edition, I revisit the story of RESULTS’ founding and its first decades of advocacy so that those unfamiliar with our work can learn about what we do and how we do it. And I share this narrative to challenge much of the conventional wisdom about advocacy and the false assumptions about what ordinary citizens are capable of in a democracy. I am sure that we are not only capable of so much more as active citizens, but we are, in fact, hungry for it.

Sam Daley-Harris

October 2023

PART ONE

The Possibility of

Transformational Advocacy

1

Transformational Advocacy

A Key Missing Ingredient

IN HIS FINAL PIECE for the Washington Post , economics columnist Robert Samuelson shared the following with his readers: "I have written, by my crude calculation, about 2 million words, most of them columns for The Washington Post, Newsweek and the National Journal. . . . So far as I can tell, nothing that I have written has ever had the slightest effect on what actually happened." ²

Good grief! If a national columnist feels that way at the end of a distinguished 51-year career, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Plenty. This book will introduce you to a boatload of activists who know that what they write and say has had a major impact on what actually happens.

You’ll meet volunteers with the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS who began campaigning on child survival issues in 1984. Over the last 40 years, RESULTS has played a lead advocacy role in reducing global child deaths caused by malnutrition and preventable disease from 40,000 deaths a day in the early 1980s to 13,800 per day in 2021 (data from UNICEF). That’s a nearly 66 percent decline in global child deaths, now saving almost 10 million young lives a year.

Want evidence that their efforts played a key role? In 1986, RESULTS volunteers generated 90 editorials in newspapers across the United States calling for a tripling of the child survival fund to advance child vaccinations around the world. They had been trained to reach out to an editorial writer and generate a newspaper editorial which takes a volunteer light years beyond signing a petition. At the end of that campaign, UNICEF Executive Director Jim Grant said in a handwritten note to RESULTS, I thank you in my mind at least weekly, if not more often, for what you and your colleagues are accomplishing, but I thought I should do it at least once this year in writing.

Twenty-seven years later, former UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Kul Gautam, who would later join and then chair the RESULTS board, was quoted in a New York Times interview saying, To a great extent it was because of the receptivity created by RESULTS that the U.S. funding for child survival increased so dramatically. And that led many other countries to come on board.³

In the chapters that follow, you’ll see the depth of the RESULTS volunteers’ work, and you’ll come to understand the doubts they harbored when they started. Finding an organization that can help you overcome your doubts and fears about being a changemaker is critically important.

You’ll also meet volunteers from Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), ordinary people just like you and me, who between January 2017 (the month Donald Trump took office) and January 2024 (the month this book was published) had more than 10,000 meetings with members of Congress or their staff and generated nearly 30,000 pieces in the media. They’ve been generating these kinds of results for years. Back when CCL had only 46 US chapters (they have ten times that number now) climate scientist Jim Hansen wrote, If you want to join the fight to save the planet, to save creation for your grandchildren, there’s no more effective step you could take than becoming an active member of this group.⁴

In 2021, the first full year of Covid, Citizens’ Climate Lobby volunteers had 1,350 meetings with Congressional offices, had 4,100 media pieces published or aired, and, in the lead-up to the Inflation Reduction Act, generated 200,000 messages to the president and Congress in support of the climate sections that were signed into law in 2022. You’ll learn about CCL’s deep advocacy work and how their members’ initial doubts and fears aren’t different from your own.

These activists and others you’ll meet are engaged in what I refer to as transformational advocacy. I make the distinction between the most common form of advocacy, transactional advocacy—sign the petition, transaction complete—and the much less prevalent, but more potent, transformational advocacy. With transformational advocacy, volunteers are trained, encouraged, and then succeed at doing things they never thought they could do as advocates—accomplishments like meeting with members of Congress and bringing them on board and enlisting editors to write about their issue—and, as a result, see themselves in a new light, they see themselves as community leaders. This book is a celebration of transformational advocacy. *

To be clear, we’re not questioning the critically important volunteer work done by parent / teacher / student associations and classroom volunteers or those serving their churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques to enhance the well-being of their communities. Those activities are pivotal, as are the throngs of volunteers planting trees and leading community clean-up efforts, serving in food pantries and domestic violence shelters, coaching youth sports leagues, providing addiction recovery, mental health support, and LGBTQIA care, and engaging in racial healing efforts, election activities, and a myriad of other essential community service projects.

These hands-on volunteer activities are indispensable to thriving communities. This book can teach these volunteers how to amplify their effectiveness by becoming advocates who bring their commitment, concerns, and first-hand experience to policy makers. By engaging with local school boards, city and county councils, or state and federal legislatures, these volunteers can become even more powerful agents of change.

But let’s be honest—almost everyone shies away from advocacy as a way to make a difference. We donate to climate change organizations, but we don’t meet with a member of Congress or write a letter to the editor. We donate to groups working to end gun violence, anti-hunger organizations, groups dedicated to racial justice, and many others, but we don’t become advocates on those issues beyond signing an online petition or going to an occasional rally. Why? Because most of us see advocacy as too hard or too frustrating, too complicated or too partisan, too dirty or too time-consuming, too ineffective or too costly.

But what if that’s all wrong? What if deep engagement dissolves discouragement and can actually bring joy? What if you can become an advocate for a cause you care about and feel fulfilled, not frustrated? And what if engaging as an advocate is essential to protecting our democracy?

Addressing Threats to Our Democracy

This book is not focused on critically important concerns about voter suppression or flawed systems of Congressional reapportionment. It’s not focused on the antiquated process of how the Electoral College determines the US president, or on tragically broken campaign finance laws. While those are profoundly important, this book is focused instead on a broken citizenry, on our reluctance and seeming inability to engage in fixing those problems. This book is focused on repairing our civic paralysis and on delivering transformational advocacy.

We will provide a powerful way to make a difference and heal our democracy in the process. It’s not the only solution needed, but it’s one essential, missing piece: citizens awakening to their power.

Here’s why that matters. If we pay attention to the threats to democracy, but only as observers, not as actors, then we’re doomed to failure. In poll after poll, voters in the 2022 midterm elections expressed concern over threats to our democracy. But most of us behave as if voting is our only tool, as if only Congress can do something, not us. Even so, fewer than half of us voted in 2022. It won’t work to watch the threats to democracy from the viewing stands; we have to find a way to get onto the field and into the game—and bring others with us!

You might think that massive goals like getting money out of politics, ending poverty, reversing climate change, or ending gun violence are reserved for heroes or the foolhardy. But humans thrive on working toward a big vision. If that’s true, what are some of the barriers to engaging in our democracy? Many think they’re too busy; others are just cynical. But in a country that binges on TV shows and spends hours a day on social media, I say most people do have enough time. We just don’t have time for things we don’t think will make a difference.

In my decades of leading and coaching successful advocacy organizations, I’ve learned that people tend to come up with excuses to mask their real reason for avoiding commitment to a cause: they fear humiliation and failure. It’s easier to look the other way than to admit you feel powerless. I’ll show you that belief is wrong—that you can have an impact.

You might be thinking that some people are born advocates, born ready to go. Some might be, but I’ve never met them. Listen to how Marshall Saunders, the founder of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, had to overcome his own fear of failure before he could launch CCL.

During one of his Inconvenient Truth climate presentations in 2007, this one at a retirement home in Rancho Bernardo, California, one of the attendees asked what’s on all our minds. What should we do? she wondered.

Marshall had been an activist with RESULTS for 13 years and knew how deeply that experience had empowered him, and yet listen to his answer—all of it.

What’s needed is the methodology of RESULTS, Marshall replied. What’s needed is thousands of ordinary people organized, lobbying their members of Congress with one voice, one message, and lobbying in a relentless, unstoppable, yet friendly and respectful way.

Why don’t you do that? she exclaimed.

I haven’t done that, Marshall replied, because nobody would come to a meeting like that.

I’ll help you, the woman replied.

Feeling trapped, Marshall ignored his doubts and said, Okay, let’s do it.

He started inviting people to an introductory meeting but felt discouraged by the initial response. After repeated calls to his new helper, her husband finally answered and said his wife’s bursitis had kicked up and she wouldn’t be able to help. Marshall was tempted to cancel the meeting, but he kept inviting people anyway.

To my great surprise, 29 people showed up, and all 29 said yes to joining me, he later recalled.

Remember, Marshall initially thought, No one would come to a meeting like that. Essentially, he was saying, This will never work. Do you ever feel like that? That you’d like to work on an issue you care about, but you don’t think it will make much of a difference?

Marshall had a new friend shouting, I’ll help you. Reclaiming Our Democracy is that shout: We’ll help you.

Identifying Organizations That Empower

The central thesis of this book is that you can be a deep advocate and experience its power and joy. But we’ll also focus on the how, because saying Just do it! can lead to more frustration. In a 2023 New York Times column, David Brooks wrote, If you want healthy politics, encourage people to have confidence in their ability to make a difference—don’t undermine that confidence.⁵ All too often, however, the organizations we join end up undermining our confidence and minimizing our power. That’s because, despite their best intentions, most organizations don’t know what to do with their advocates. They don’t know how to bring them in; they don’t know how to dissolve their sense of powerlessness; and they certainly don’t know how to sustain them. They feed us a steady stream of petitions to sign and checks to write rather than investing in our training and development as engaged citizen advocates. They tell us our money matters to the organization and to the issue, but not our actual voices.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Organizations that commit to supporting transformational advocacy become powerful agents of change precisely because they focus on and invest in the transformation of their volunteers into powerful citizen lobbyists.

Here are three ways to know if an organization promotes transformational advocacy.

o Recruitment and building community . If the organization is constantly bringing in new people, forming chapters, and sustaining their engagement with inspiring monthly whole-of-organization webinars, then it is confronting its members’ sense of powerlessness and discovering ways to overcome it.

o Training for action. The organization is committed to providing training to their volunteers and equipping them to build relationships with and make key asks of elected officials. The organization is out to solve big problems and is constantly enhancing its members’ effectiveness.

o Encouraging breakthroughs. The organization encourages its members to move out of their comfort zone, to step out of the way they see themselves and beyond what they think they’re capable of. That’s right: confidence grows and transformation happens when you’re encouraged and supported in doing things you thought you couldn’t do, and when you surprise yourself by making them happen.

The problem is that the number of organizations which are sustainably supporting transformational advocacy is painfully small. A decade of consulting with organizations about transformational advocacy has taught me why this is. Several years ago, the head of organizing for a very large nonprofit organization told me, We can’t let our volunteers write letters to the editor or op-eds, because they’ll get it wrong and misrepresent the organization. I wish I could say this attitude was unique to this leader and this organization. Unfortunately, it’s the dominant point of view. That’s how most nonprofit organizations operate when it comes to advocacy. Protecting their brand is more important than empowering their volunteers. The fear that volunteers will screw things up feeds our civic dysfunction and the fraying of our democracy.

Reclaiming our democracy depends on staff being willing to make big asks of volunteers and offer something powerful in return. Elections are important, but so too are the days, weeks, and months afterward. Just as there can be significant amounts of energy put into door knocking and calls to voters, there needs to be a similar energy between elections. As one friend said, It’s like we hire someone to do a job and then leave them with zero supervision. We are the supervision when it comes to Congress, but it takes courage to come off the sidelines and reclaim our voice.

Here’s the most important thing I’ve realized since the last edition of this book. The main reason organizations fail to deliver transformational advocacy among their members and fail to start and sustain effective chapters that produce powerful citizens is the staff’s fear of making big asks of volunteers.

There, I’ve said it: the staff’s fear of making big asks of volunteers. You see, most organizations don’t believe that their members or staff are up to really big things as advocates.

To be clear, when I say make a big ask, I don’t mean Sell your house and donate the money to us or Quit your job and volunteer here full-time. Here’s an example of what I do mean. During a chapter launch workshop, one of the key asks we make of volunteers is to commit to a four-part new group training, once a week for four weeks. But when a staff member stands in front of 25 potential chapter members, they’re likely to worry, No one is going to commit to a four-part new group training. If I ask for too much, no one will join the chapter at all. So the staff make the invitation to the trainings so apologetically that people are left with the impression that it’s not really important, and few of the new chapter members turn up for the training. In the worst cases, the staff might avoid making the ask altogether.

Here’s an example of why starting with a powerful training matters. Mike Robinson is the volunteer leader of the Seattle chapter of the Foundation for Climate Restoration (F4CR), a group focused on removing the legacy carbon that is already in the atmosphere. In February 2022, I was helping Mike prepare to speak during F4CR’s first-ever monthly conference call. He was going to share about his chapter’s recent success. Even though his chapter was just a few months old, they’d already met with four state legislators, two state house members and two state senators. One of the state house members was chair of the Committee on Environment and Energy.

It turned out that the committee chair knew a lot about climate change, Mike told me. But when it came to carbon removal, he had just barely heard of it. He liked the idea of our doing a more in-depth briefing for him and his committee staff to talk about carbon removal and to push for some legislative actions!

I asked Mike if he had ever met with an elected official before.

No, this was the first time for me, Mike responded.

Had you ever written to an elected official before this?

No, I’d never written or called an elected official before, Mike replied. This was all new for me.

Put that in your talk, I told him. Let people know that you’d never done any of this before. If you don’t tell them that this was all new to you, the others on the call will think, ‘He’s an expert. I’m not an expert. He could do this. I couldn’t.’

Mike and his new chapter were able to engage in meaningful action and experience transformational advocacy right from the start. The four-part training that F4CR asks their new chapter members to commit to taught them how to get a meeting with an elected official and how to prepare for it. Making big asks of volunteers is key. But staff members can’t just ask for a lot, they have to deliver too. They can’t ask new chapter members to attend a four-part new group training and deliver a training that’s boring and inconsequential; their offering has to be as powerful as their ask.

Making big asks is part of moving out of your comfort zone. People have warned me against urging people to move out of their comfort zones. Who would want to do that? they’ve said. Won’t it scare people off?

It might, but that doesn’t alter the power that can come from making big asks, accepting the invitation, and moving out of your comfort zone.

Author and activist Brené Brown says it well: I’ve just never done anything that’s turned out to be valuable, [where I wasn’t] just scared shitless to do it. Everything I’ve ever done that’s ever really made a contribution, I have felt alone in doing it and afraid, but alive.

Isn’t that true for all of us?

Technically, you are alone when you’re hitting send on your letter to the editor, or you’re making a call to an editor, or it’s your turn to speak during a Congressional meeting. But there’s always a team member nearby cheering you on, giving you courage, and supporting you in these moments of vulnerability.

I believe it boils down to this: Who do you want to be in the world? Do you want to settle for a diminished version of yourself, the I could never do that view of yourself, or the most expansive vision of yourself?

Climate activist and futurist Alex Steffen says, These days, cynicism is obedience.⁶ He might call the diminished version of yourself your obedient self. The cynic sits on the sidelines and doesn’t work for change. But here’s an example of what an activist would do.

In 2019, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was preparing for a three-year funding replenishment. Between 2002 and 2019, the Global Fund and its partners had saved 38 million lives—but now, President Trump had called for a 29 percent cut in its funding.

Activists didn’t throw up their hands. Instead, they leapt into action. Ordinary citizens got hundreds of members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, to sign letters supporting the Global Fund that were sent to the top appropriators in Congress and to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They also persuaded members of Congress to cosponsor resolutions in support of the Global Fund. Did it make a difference?

You bet it did. At the end of 2019, two House Republicans and two House Democrats stood on a stage in Lyon, France, and committed the US Congress to a 16 percent increase in funding for the Global Fund, which was later signed into law. By 2022, 50 million lives had been saved by the Global Fund.

The cynics would have done nothing—in effect, being obedient to the former president’s call for a 29 percent cut. A cynic would not have leapt into action. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be someone whose cynicism leaves them on the sidelines, or do you want to be a changemaker?

When I say changemaker, I don’t mean that you singlehandedly change the world, but that you are powerful in your community, and perhaps beyond. You are powerful with your members of Congress. You are powerful with the local media. You are powerful with other community leaders—in fact, you’ve become a community leader yourself.

You still might be thinking, Who, me? Consider Alex Steffen’s full statement:

Optimism is a political act.