Maine Children's Alliance : MeKids.org

Barriers To Grassroots Organizing

As exciting as mobilizing for Start ME Right continues to be, it might be helpful to identify barriers and pitfalls, and how we have attempted to overcome them.

1. COMMUNICATION:
In a rural state such as ours, figuring out an efficient, cost effective way of communicating with organizers throughout the state is crucial, but very frustrating. In the long term, our goal is to get people on-line, or to assure them access to e-mail through a university, library or school. The barrier to this is largely technophobia, not access to equipment (although certainly there are many people who would love to learn, but need help getting the funds to but computers). In the short term, however, we have tried to overcome the communication barriers in these ways:

Delegate. In Maine, we have divided much of our organizing by county. Each county has key people in each of the coalition priority areas (child care and parenting support and education) who are responsible for getting information to anyone in that county who might be supporters of the coalition goals. We identified the coalition members by reaching out to existing child advocacy groups, individuals, or provider agencies, and inviting them to send people to the statewide coalition.
Keep it simple. There is lots of great philosophical stuff written about why we should support early childhood legislation and MANY ideas about how to do it. We are trying to give coalition members one-page, bulleted information on each bill and/or issue. We are compiling all of these handouts in to one organizers packet, so members can give any or all of the pieces to anyone who needs them, but allows us not to give out so much information that they are overwhelmed they think they can't help.
Choose one action. If we think people are discouraged because the task of organizing a whole state, or county, or city is too overwhelming, we need to ask them to take on ONE THING. We don't want to lose people because they are overwhelmed.

2. RESOURCES:
It takes people-power, supplies, a copier and postage to do regular mailings, either on a statewide level, or locally. We have approached people who are attached to organizations with the ability to donate these resources in-kind, and they are either in the coalition, or allow members of the coalition locally or statewide access to their copier and postage. Cultivating local resources will be very important as time gets shorter and legislative information needs to get out quickly.

3. PUBLIC-PHOBIA:
It is amazing that so many passionate people who are doing incredible things in their community--and have for years--think they cannot stand up in front of a group and tell people about their work! Start ME Right is as much about bringing people who already agree with our principles together to share experiences, as it is getting people to commit to this a new way of thinking about communities.

Some of the coalition supporters know their communities well, have great credibility, but still feel they would rather ask one of us from the state coalition to come to talk to groups, because they think they can't. We have tried to deal with this by developing talking points that will help people bring up important points about the coalition and the bills we are supporting, while not worrying that they haven't "explained it correctly".

4. NAY-SAYERS:
Remarkably, there haven't been many, but we've had so much fun, the main way to counter them is to keep doing the work, and they wake up one day and say, "gee, how come we aren't a part of this?" Mainly, these folks fall in to 2 categories: those who think what we are doing is "too political for their 501(c)3 status, and those who think it is too much work, and they are overwhelmed. We have talked to quite a few people about whether this is "lobbying" or "advocacy", and basically either they move off this or not. Sometimes this is really a smoke screen, and maybe its better for them to support the coalition in the context of what they think they can do in their agency, which is fine. For those who see it as just too much more work, we can all really sympathize, and we just encourage them to get our information, let people they are in contact with know we exist, and hope they come to the hearings the week of February 22^nd, or work sessions in March to observe.

Is Start ME Right too political? Just keep feeding them information about the status of children in their community, county, state, and country. That's what this coalition is all about! And it is not just for this session — this is long term, and the gains will be incremental.

Prepared by: Lucky Hollander
Youth Alternatives, Inc. and the
Cumberland County Child Abuse & Neglect Council
P.O. Box 912, Portland, ME 04104
(207) 874-1120
FAX 874-1181
lhollander@youthalternatives.org

Updated: Jun 3rd, 2008 - 13:09:25

A Strong and Powerful Voice to Improve the Lives of All Maine's Children, Youth and Families

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