Advocacy in the Age of Obama

Read the full article here, or read the Arkansas piece of the article below.

Culture Shock: Arkansas,   

Public Policy Panel

Little Rock, Arkansas

The Arkansas Public Policy Panel has a budget of $700,000, approximately 40 percent of which is derived from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Mid South Delta Initiative (MSDI). It also receives substantial support from AmeriCorps. VISTA provides seven of the organization’s 16-member staff. For a budget of this size in Arkansas, the Panel is a substantial organization.

The Panel’s 501(c)(3) work includes place-based organizing primarily in the largely rural, low-income communities of southern and eastern Arkansas and statewide organizing on a few key issues. The “other side of the organization” is the (c)(4) coalition the Arkansas Citizens First Congress, which is made up of 40 organizations.

But the heart of the Panel’s work is its place-based organizing. “We help local communities come together, develop a vision of what they want to do in that community, create a strategic plan, and then implement an action plan to do it,” says Executive Director Bill Kopsky. “Our focus is on building sustainable community infrastructure in those places, because we view that as key to building leadership and long-term social-change capacity across the state.”

When asked for an example, Kopsky tells this story:

We helped organize the Gould Citizens Advisory Council [GCAC] five years ago. Gould is a small town with 1,200 residents. At that time, it was in bankruptcy, had a failing water system, owed back taxes to the IRS, lacked a police force, and some weeks even went without basic trash service. City officials were pretty unresponsive to resident concerns, so GCAC put together a platform for city office to support. They recruited several of their own members—most of whom never imagined themselves in elected office—to run. They held a candidate forum, where all of the candidates had an opportunity to make their case and respond to residents’ questions. Then they chose a slate of candidates who committed to support their agenda, and they worked hard to promote those candidates.

Long story short, they won five of seven seats, and now some of the serious problems in Gould are being addressed. Not everything is solved, but the improvements are dramatic. Most importantly, they saw that they can get involved and improve their community.

The Panel is one of MSDI’s newest grantees, but it is coming in just as the Kellogg initiative, which is scheduled to end in December 2010, winds down. “Everyone is waiting to see what Kellogg will do with the momentum,” Kopsky says.

We’ve made serious progress with their investments. but it’s not sustainable yet. They engaged a lot of grassroots and nonprofit people in an Arkansas design team that worked really hard to develop plans, but it’s unclear what will become of their work. Local action by the design team members prompted the Kellogg Foundation to make an endowment gift of over a million dollars to the Arkansas Community Foundation, but it’s still unclear how that gift aligns with the other work Kellogg has done in the region.

Kellogg started the MSDI program with the goal of transforming the quality of life for low-income residents of the Delta. I don’t think an objective assessment of really what they accomplished in their 10 to 15 years would say that they’ve done that yet. Transformation like that takes a long time, and it takes sustained engagement, the right strategy, and the right mix of partners to implement the strategy. If they’re done and they just leave, it could actually do more harm than good. It could be yet another initiative that’s come into the region, raised expectations, and then failed to deliver. And there’s only so many times that can happen before folks just get sick of seeing anybody from outside. The best thing that we got out of that process was the relationships and the networks that were built among the grassroots people that they engaged. There were a lot of problems with the way they implemented their Delta strategy, but they did create forward momentum. The question is, what comes next?

Kopsky believes that funders and national advocacy groups are confused about how to effectively approach Arkansas, whose nonprofits are relatively small.

One of the things that we get in Arkansas all the time is, “You guys are too small for us to invest in you. We want to give a $2 million grant and not a $200,000 grant because we don’t have the capacity to service 100 $200,000 grants; we want to give 10 $2 million grants.” Well, that’s a fine sentiment, but it really limits who you can invest in.

In conversation a few years ago, a funder in New York, who doesn’t understand the Arkansas context, offered us a $100,000 grant for one year and wanted us to use it to transform the economy of the Delta. To his credit, what was in his head was that he could get us the $100,000. He knew that his board would never in a million years sign off on a small state like Arkansas and that they wouldn’t see the strategic advantage of it. He could give us $100,000 without his board’s approval, but it would have to be to accomplish something that was audacious. We just told him we couldn’t even come close to accomplishing what he was suggesting, and we had to walk away. And when they do invest, they expect these dramatic transformations to happen in two or three years on very modest budgets and very narrowly focused strategies. It never works, and people act as if it’s a great mystery what’s needed, but it’s not a mystery at all.

In 1988 the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation commissioned a report from Grassroots Leadership on what makes social change so hard in Arkansas. Arkansas has a ton of assets that should make social-change efforts easier than many other places. . . . Grassroots Leadership titled their report Building Constituency, and the basic premise is that Arkansas does have all of this incredible potential to make progress and even influence the country—but it lacks the community infrastructure and capacity to seize those opportunities. What will transform Arkansas, and most of the South, is building that community infrastructure of grassroots democracy organizations: building constituency.

But no one wants to read a 30-year-old report with someone else’s ideas. They want something new and dramatic. We either get ignored or experimented on, and it’s frustrating. The key to progress in Arkansas—and what we focus on—is building the capacity of grassroots organizations to influence what happens in their own communities and connecting them to work together in diverse coalitions to influence what happens in the state.

Kopsky also believes that national advocacy groups are unsure about how to work with Arkansas.

National people are always interested in affecting the way our Blue Dog Democratic delegation is going to vote on health care, employee free choice, climate change, and other key legislation. They show up three months before a vote and expect to have an impact, and they’re usually frustrated before they leave.

What moves policy in Arkansas is long-term relationship building, authentic local voices, and infrastructure for those relationships and voices to coalesce and mobilize. I think that’s what a lot of national groups haven’t yet understood about the South. People say, “Who cares about a city of 1,200 people like Gould?” But what they don’t understand is that the people of Gould, while developing their city, also developed a relationship with their state legislator and with the Citizens First Congress coalition they encouraged him to support. . . . The capacity of our coalition partners, like GCAC, has the biggest impact on how much we can influence state policy makers. The local organizing informs the state coalition and supplies the bulk of its power, and the state policy coalition informs local activists and adds strength to their local organizing.

Kopsky asserts that too many want to find shortcuts to this process and aren’t willing to stick around for the long haul to address the systemic problems that plague Arkansas communities.

A lot of progress can be made in the South, but it’s going to be a little bit slower, and it’s going to be with a different strategy than your typical mass mobilizations, and it’s going to center on building relationships, constituencies, and authentic infrastructure in communities so that they can then speak for themselves. Some communities in Arkansas still have basic voting-rights problems or entrenched poverty or bad water supplies or low-performing and hostile schools, and many of them haven’t had positive experiences trying to make change in their communities. So organizing to address those core local problems and connecting them to larger state and regional movements has to be the strategy. Then you can move any policy the base wants to support.

Most of the Panel’s non-Kellogg money comes from a small group of small foundations that knows the South well. None of these small-foundation grants are likely expandable.

When asked about how the organization would handle the drop-off of funds connected with the Kellogg initiative ending, Kopsky says:

We know we need to significantly increase our grassroots fundraising. Actually, two weeks ago, something happened that was amazing. A local contributor who has been giving us very generously about $5,000 a year called and asked if we had staff holes that we couldn’t currently fill, and I said yes. And they said, “Well, if we gave you $40,000 for two years—so $80,000 total—would that help?”

So we have the offer of this gift on the table, and we’re trying to figure out how we can leverage it. Because ultimately, our long-term goal is to have 30 to 40 percent of our budget coming from grassroots donations, but it’s going to take some time.

Predictably, the Panel’s prospects in this regard follow a different trajectory from that in many other parts of the country. “The Arkansas economy doesn’t experience the growth that other states experience during good times, and recessions tend to get here late,” Kopsky notes. “So our economy really hasn’t been as deeply affected as other areas yet. Our state budget’s not in terrible shape like many other states. The economy is certainly hurting here, and the numbers are starting to get much worse. We start hurting here later than other places, but unfortunately, we’re also likely to experience the recovery more slowly as well.”