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.
In a Washington Post column in early July titled, “ It’s time to ask: Can America still produce great leaders? ” Garrett M. Graff asks, “So, what does good leadership look like in practice? How do we find good leaders, and how are they trained and shaped?. … And, desperately, how can we please make more of them?” While Graff’s focus is on leaders in politics, government and business, my focus is on citizen leaders and the organizations that train and shape them. But we ask similar questions.
Recently I spoke with activists who got their start in transformational advocacy in Chicago and Nashville. Since so many of us find it hard to get started, I wanted to know how they began.
Fred LeMay was a commercial insurance underwriter and saw how changes in the climate were affecting the insurance and reinsurance markets. “I was reading climate articles,” he said, “and getting concerned for my kids and grandkids and the future of the planet. I thought maybe I should try to be more active.” LeMay co-leads the Middle Tennessee chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
Cindy Levin was a mechanical engineer and corporate type. “When I quit my job to provide full-time care for my kids, I lost my social network and my purpose,” she told me. “I did have this purpose to be a mom, but it was also isolating. Activism was a way to be relevant in the wider world.” Levin is now an author, speaker and activist who coaches others on how to develop relationships with their elected representatives. She received much of her training from RESULTS, the grassroots anti-poverty lobby I founded in 1980.
These volunteer activists and thousands of others benefited from the brilliance of another activist, Dorsey Lawson, who died recently at age 95. A giant in the early days of RESULTS, Lawson and the team of volunteers she built around her in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1980s were our research and development department.
They developed the laser talk — a short statement about a problem, examples of solutions and a call to take specific action — that advocates use in meetings with members of Congress, the media and others they want to mobilize.
Lawson and her fourth grade English as a Second Language class devised the process for teaching the laser talk — delivering the talk, then asking leading questions and having the group shout out the answers to see what they remember, and then asking the questions again and having them just think the answers to themselves. Learning and using laser talks is a key strategy in the work of effective grassroots advocacy organizations such as RESULTS and Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
RESULTS’ pioneering work around building a relationship with a member of Congress who opposes a global poverty bill you are advocating for and bringing them on board as a supporter also came from Lawson and her team of volunteers, starting more than 40 years ago with their Rep. Carlos Moorhead (R-Calif.).
The commitment to encouraging breakthroughs, to encouraging volunteer activists to move out of their comfort zone, was given voice by Lawson too.
While I was on one of my 21-city trips to start RESULTS groups in 1984, Lawson — writing in her role as assistant executive director — described one volunteer’s splitting headache and another’s feeling of nausea while completing op-eds they’d been invited to write.
“If you’re scared to do this kind of stuff, know that we are too,” Lawson wrote. “I felt flushed and feverish driving off to a reception for forty people with Rep. Matthew Martinez (D-CA). If you don’t have any discomfort, look at what would be a stretch for you. RESULTS is people breaking through the thought, ‘I don’t make a difference,’ to emerge as community leaders. Those who have pressed themselves to new heights of participation know the joy of this. What’s next for you?”
As always, she signed the letter, “Love, Dorsey.”
Lawson knew that joy followed the discomfort. She knew that it mattered to make big asks of volunteers — it mattered to the issue they cared about, and it mattered to the volunteers themselves.
When Lawson’s group developed the laser talk in 1984, UNICEF reported that 40,000 children around the world were dying every day from malnutrition and preventable disease, things like measles coupled with malnutrition. RESULTS volunteers have lobbied on these issues every year for the last four decades. Over that period, the latest figures show a 66 percent decline in global child deaths, a greater than 90 percent decline in deaths from dehydration and an 80 percent decline in child deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Graff asked, “How do we find good leaders … how are they trained and … how can we please make more of them?” The innovations that Lawson and her team developed are one answer to Graff’s question. The difference she made with her life lives on in tens of millions of children’s lives saved and thousands of activists’ lives changed and will contribute to building more leaders well into the future.
An Independent Voter's Perspective on Current Political Divides
In the column, "Is Donald Trump Right?", Fulcrum Executive Editor, Hugo Balta, wrote:
For millions of Americans, President Trump’s second term isn’t a threat to democracy—it’s the fulfillment of a promise they believe was long overdue.
Is Donald Trump right?
Should the presidency serve as a force for disruption or a safeguard of preservation?
Balta invited readers to share their thoughts at newsroom@fulcrum.us.
David Levine from Portland, Oregon, shared these thoughts...
I am an independent voter who voted for Kamala Harris in the last election.
I pay very close attention to the events going on, and I try and avoid taking other people's opinions as fact, so the following writing should be looked at with that in mind:
Is Trump right? On some things, absolutely.
As to DEI, there is a strong feeling that you cannot fight racism with more racism or sexism with more sexism. Standards have to be the same across the board, and the idea that only white people can be racist is one that I think a lot of us find delusional on its face. The question is not whether we want equality in the workplace, but whether these systems are the mechanism to achieve it, despite their claims to virtue, and many of us feel they are not.
I think if the Democrats want to take back immigration as an issue then every single illegal alien no matter how they are discovered needs to be processed and sanctuary cities need to end, every single illegal alien needs to be found at that point Democrats could argue for an amnesty for those who have shown they have been Good actors for a period of time but the dynamic of simply ignoring those who break the law by coming here illegally is I think a losing issue for the Democrats, they need to bend the knee and make a deal.
I think you have to quit calling the man Hitler or a fascist because an actual fascist would simply shoot the protesters, the journalists, and anyone else who challenges him. And while he definitely has authoritarian tendencies, the Democrats are overplaying their hand using those words, and it makes them look foolish.
Most of us understand that the tariffs are a game of economic chicken, and whether it is successful or not depends on who blinks before the midterms. Still, the Democrats' continuous attacks on the man make them look disloyal to the country, not to Trump.
Referring to any group of people as marginalized is to many of us the same as referring to them as lesser, and it seems racist and insulting.
We invite you to read the opinions of other Fulrum Readers:
Trump's Policies: A Threat to Farmers and American Values
The Trump Era: A Bitter Pill for American Renewal
Federal Hill's Warning: A Baltimorean's Reflection on Leadership
Also, check out "Is Donald Trump Right?" and consider accepting Hugo's invitation to share your thoughts at newsroom@fulcrum.us.
The Fulcrum will select a range of submissions to share with readers as part of our ongoing civic dialogue.
We offer this platform for discussion and debate.