ADVOCACY IN ACTION
Sam Daley-Harris on ‘Reclaiming Our Democracy’
Creating Champions for a Cause
Sam Daley-Harris knows quite a
bit about using advocacy to effect social change. He is the founder of the
anti-poverty nonprofit RESULTS, the
organization’s Microcredit Summit
Campaign, and the Center for Citizen
Empowerment and Transformation—as
well as a longtime Bread for the World
member. Daley-Harris is also the author
of Reclaiming Our Democracy, in which he
offers ordinary citizens strategies to become powerful advocates. He recently
released the 20th-anniversary edition of
his book, which issues a challenge to organizations to provide a deeper level of
empowerment to their members.
“There needs to be an understanding on how to coach volunteers to
go deeper with their advocacy,” he
says. “I spent the first 31 years of my
life like most people—hopeless about
solving big problems. I got involved
in [California anti-hunger nonprofit]
the Hunger Project in 1977 and met
my member of Congress, the late Bill
Lehman (D-Fla.) about a year later.
He’s the one who told me about Bread
and urged me to join.”
Daley-Harris says he “cut his teeth”
at Bread for the World, where he was
introduced to advocacy work, then went
on to found RESULTS in 1980, and
wrote the first edition of Reclaiming Our
Democracy in 1993, based on what he’d
learned about grassroots activism. The
updated version of the book still focuses
on strengthening advocacy efforts but
includes new information on using current technologies and social media in
advocacy work. Daley-Harris says that
although social media has expanded
advocacy efforts in many ways, it’s still
important for nonprofits to offer their
volunteers a way to engage that goes beyond a mouse click. Namely, organizations must offer their activists “a deep
curriculum and rich support”—in other
words, prepare advocates with useful information and offer them help in engaging with their elected officials.
He says the Bread model of not just
asking advocates to sign an online petition or send a form email, but encouraging them to contact members of Congress through personal letters, phone
calls, and in-person meetings—as well
as writing letters to the editors of local
papers—is key to “creating champions in
Congress and in the media.”
“If someone is in an organization that
does significant online ‘mouse-click advocacy,’ I’m not saying to stop that,” he
says. “I’m just saying that if you have a
million members, or half a million members, or 100,000 members, or 50,000
members, there’s a small percentage of
your members who want to go much
deeper than that. And if you allow them
to do that, major change is possible.
“[Those are the things] that get to the
root of changing a member of Congress’
position and really dealing with things
like climate change and global poverty,
which are systemic issues.”
Letters to the editor, in particular,
Daley-Harris says, are a tool that many
organizations are no longer emphasizing, even though they are still incredibly
effective. “Are newspapers struggling?
Yes. Are they cutting back on the number of their editorial writers? Yes,” he
says. “But when I wake up in the morning, the first thing that I do, I wake up
and I read my emails, I read Google
news, and I read the New York Times online. I think we all still go to the newspaper—we just might not go to the front
yard to pick it up.” (See Bread’s guide
to writing a successful letter to the editor at www.bread.org/help/community/
media/letter.html)
Finally, Daley-Harris says, he
learned from his time at RESULTS
and his early work with Bread that
advocates are capable of, and want to
do, a tremendous amount of work for
worthy causes. Too many organizations
are afraid of giving their grassroots too
much to do, but there will always be a
core group who wants to do more, not
less. “People really want to make a bigger difference,” he says.
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