Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen's Guide to Transformational Advocacy
Sam Daley-Harris
348 pages, Rivertowns Books, 2024
We want a healthy democracy, but in its current state, citizen advocacy in America can’t get us there. In 2018, 79 percent of grassroots advocacy professionals said that “a form email is their primary grassroots advocacy tactic,” while only three percent of Congressional staff told the CMF that a form email has “a lot of influence” on their offices’ decisions. That’s a big gap between what organizations do and what Congressional staff say is effective: 94 percent of Congressional staff said in-person issue visits from constituents would have some or a lot of influence.
We are moving in the wrong direction: a 2023 Independent Sector report found that only 31 percent of nonprofits reported engaging in advocacy or lobbying over the last five years, less than half the percentage doing so in 2000. As Independent Sector CEO Akila Watkins put it, “With a retreat from policy advocacy or from nonpartisan voter engagement, the nonprofit sector leaves an enormous amount of power on the table. That’s power that can drive change for the communities we serve. We need more nonprofit leaders stepping into deeper civic engagement and public policy advocacy.”
The completely revised and updated 2024 edition of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy is a blueprint for empowering nonprofits and citizens to step into this widening advocacy gap. The book makes the important distinction between transactional advocacy—sign the petition, transaction complete—and transformational advocacy, the much less prevalent, but more potent form of activism where volunteers are trained, encouraged, and then succeed at doing things as advocates that they never thought they could do.—Sam Daley-Harris
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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 (CCL), 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.” 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.” 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 single-handedly 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. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy with a large population of people who think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience. What’s really radical is being willing to look right at the magnitude and difficulty of the problems we face and still insist that we can solve those problems.
Isn’t that what these groups are doing? They’re looking right at the magnitude and difficulty of the problems we face—problems like disease and poverty, racism and inequality, pollution and climate change—and insisting that we can solve those problems. They might not be solved yet, but a 66 percent reduction in global child deaths is a powerful start.
What is common to these stories—the 40 years of RESULTS’ advocacy contributing powerfully to a nearly 66 percent reduction in global child deaths, Mike Robinson’s first-ever meetings with elected officials leading to a briefing of a committee chair and his staff, and CCL’s yearly tally of 1,350 meetings with Congressional offices and 4,100 media hits—is that they all reflect the work of organizations that are committed to transformational advocacy. They came from organizations that are willing to make big asks of their volunteers and deliver something powerful in return. They came from groups that see the stress and loneliness that can come from being activists, from being entrepreneurs of democracy, and they build and sustain chapters to reduce that stress and loneliness. They came from groups committed to training and encouraging volunteers to succeed in doing things they never thought they could do.
As a result, volunteers see themselves in a new light; they see themselves as community leaders. Look for that, and look for yourself, in the chapters that follow.