Sam Daley-Harris is the author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy (Rivertowns Books 2024) 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.
When I scroll through political news, I keep hearing the Rolling Stones’ hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” You hear it too, right? We’re not alone.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans polled by Pew Research Center last year said they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics. More than half reported feeling angry, and nearly 80 percent rarely or never feel excited when thinking about politics. Perhaps most distressing, more than half of those polled said they rarely or never feel hopeful about politics.
It seems almost no one is satisfied with the state of American political life.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I believe that all of us – nonprofit leaders, policymakers, activists, slackers and everyone in between – can transform our relationship to politics so that we feel satisfaction and even excitement and joy. But how?
First we have to step away from the steady stream of online petitions we are asked to sign and the email form letters we are encouraged to send — tasks that have little, if any, impact on Congress. Then we need to lean into transformational advocacy.
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“What’s that?” you ask.
Transformational advocacy occurs when seasoned activists and rank beginners are trained, encouraged and succeed in doing things as advocates they never thought they could do. Actions like having a letter to the editor published on an issue you care about and, as a result, experiencing a burst of confidence in yourself and in our democracy.
Transformational advocacy is where citizen activist Aaron Carillo experienced his burst of confidence. Aaron grew up with a lived experience of poverty and in the summer before his sophomore year in college he did an internship in Vietnam.
“Yes, I’m below the poverty line in the U.S.,” Aaron said, “but [in Vietnam] I am working with students half my age who are working and getting paid a dollar a day.”
Aaron had a particularly discouraging meeting with his member of Congress and could easily have given up, but with support from the lawmaker’s aide, the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS and the others in his campus chapter, Aaron stuck with it.
“This isn’t the last time the congressman will be seeing me,” Aaron said after the disappointing meeting. “I guess that ‘voices of everyday people’ slogan was sinking in. After that, the aide made sure to get us into every meeting and let us know when town halls would be held back home.”
After racking up a few successes Aaron realized: “RESULTS had allowed me to … show other people that they need to be at the table. If there’s no seat there, I’ve learned how to pull a seat up to the table.”
Doesn’t everyone want to know they have a seat at the table and know how to pull one up if necessary? In this series I will discuss why most organizations leave their members singing, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” and what it will take to deliver transformational advocacy instead. At its heart, it’s about citizens awakening to their power.
