Efforts to protect children around the world from malnutrition and preventable disease are saving nearly 10 million young lives a year compared to the early 1980s. (Good luck finding that in the news.) When volunteers in the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS began their advocacy in 1984, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that 40,000 children were dying each day from things like measles or diarrheal dehydration coupled with malnutrition. This year, the United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation reported 13,125 daily deaths, a 66 percent drop. (A drop that Messrs. Trump, Musk, and Rubio seem determined to reverse.)
Much of this progress was fueled by what I call transformational advocacy, where you work to change an issue, and you are changed in the process. But transformational advocacy requires risk, moving out of your comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory guided by training, support, and empathy for children and families you’ll never meet. Because this advocacy began in the early 1980s, RESULTS is losing many of the people who helped launch it—advocates whose shoulders today’s successes stand on.
One such advocate was Nancy Taylor of Chicago, who passed away recently.
"I was born to an Irish, Catholic, Democratic family," Nancy told me in 1993 when I was working on the first edition of Reclaiming Our Democracy. "We considered all three conditions to be genetically coded. In Chicago, all politics were local and of the ward healer variety...'you campaign for our candidates, and we'll get your kid a summer job'….It wasn't pretty or inspiring, but it was the way things seemed to work. I carried this cynical view of politics and individual participation to college, where I met a truly inspiring American history teacher.”
There it is, the cynicism we all share, and the inspiration too many of us miss out on later.
But after college, that inspiration “faded into a dim memory,” Nancy recalled, “Resignation dulled my senses about the power of possibility.”
I met Nancy in 1983 when I arrived in Chicago on a Greyhound Bus on one of my 21-city trips to start RESULTS chapters.
She described RESULTS’ action steps as “challenging but stunning in their simplicity.” You learned an issue, practiced talking about solutions, and then acted—contacting a legislator or editorial writer to push for change.
“But when it came time to take action,” she said, “the panic began.”
There’s no breakthrough without fear. Panic or not, Nancy decided to pitch an editorial to the Chicago Tribune on this newly discovered opportunity to save millions of children’s lives through what UNICEF Executive Director Jim Grant called a “child survival revolution” that included oral rehydration therapy and vaccinations.
"I can't remember what pushed me past my fear and helped me dial the telephone," Nancy recalled, "but I found myself talking to an editorial writer at the Tribune, who encouraged me to submit an op-ed. He explained that this would be the best way to get something printed. Now the heat was really on…I took the plunge and wrote with as much clarity and passion as I could muster.”
To be sure, none of this happens without training, the support of your local chapter, and the pull of a larger vision.
"After mailing the op-ed,” Nancy continued, “I experienced another bout of panic, but calmed myself thinking that it would probably never be printed, and I could maintain my anonymity. When nothing had appeared in the paper within two weeks, my panic subsided, and my life returned to its normal, safe rhythm.
"My calm was shattered early one morning, however, when my husband thrust the editorial page in my face. There it was—my words and my name. As I read what seemed like foreign phrases, I felt a head rush, like an unfiltered cigarette and a stiff martini being ingested simultaneously. I had my first adult experience with getting 'high on life.'
"….People I hadn't heard from in years called me to say they had read the op-ed and wanted to know what I was up to…..
“I told them that individuals aren't powerless if you can convert your good ideas into positive actions. The most valuable thing for me about this experience,” Nancy concluded, “was that I felt alive and full of energy. The creative juices were flowing…I felt more alive than I had since I was five years old and thought I could sing and dance. And the best part of this high was that it wasn't at anyone's expense, it harmed no one, and it might do some good."
Indeed, it did. Nancy and throngs of activists spanning more than four decades have done a world of good, using their voices to help save some 10 million young lives a year. With that first campaign in 1984, activists like Nancy Taylor showed thousands who would follow that you can safely move through your fear, a lesson the world needs now more than ever.
Sam Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
