A Five Ingredient Recipe For a Successful Nonprofit-Hosted Advocacy Workshop

By Nina Foushee, Communications and Policy Manager at Oakland Natives Give Back

As an organization that focuses on improving attendance among students in Oakland Unified School District, Oakland Natives Give Back is committed to understanding the underlying issues that result in students not being able to attend school.

Poverty-reduction advocacy intersects with absenteeism-reduction advocacy because most barriers to regular school attendance (cost of transportation, hunger, dirty or unwearable clothing, school-aged children needing to provide income for the household, inability to access the health care necessary to be well enough for school) are connected to conditions of family poverty. When housing costs are taken into account, California’s poverty rate is 20.6%, which is the highest in the nation.

On Inauguration Day, the Alameda County Community Food Bank hosted a poverty-reduction advocacy workshop that I attended as a representative of Oakland Natives Give Back.

In this post, I break down how that workshop provided a model of successful nonprofit-hosted advocacy workshops.

Excellent advocacy workshops include:

1. A concise and compelling elevator speech about the organization that is hosting the workshop.

• An elevator speech from the hosting organization provides a model for attendees from other organizations. Elevator speeches must include the problem the organization wishes to address, the goal of the organization, the argument or belief that drives the organizations toward that goal, and a path to achieve the goal.
• For the food bank, the goal is ending hunger in Alameda county, the argument (core appeal) is that food is a universal human right, and the organization’s path to achieving the goal is involving a broad coalition of stakeholders in is advocacy and direct service provision.

2. A non-partisan, issue-oriented description of how the hosting organization will respond to the new federal administration.

• Many nonprofits and community groups are looking to start or expand their advocacy efforts in the wake of the recent presidential transition. The leaders of the ACCFB workshop mentioned their blog post titled “Our Post-Election Commitment to Fight for What We Believe.” Organizations can produce comparable documents to present an overview of their continued policy or advocacy commitments under a Trump administration. Such documents demonstrate an organization’s knowledge of how federal policy can impact nonprofit-related issue areas.

3. An overview of the general principles of successful advocacy work

This can take many forms, including a powerpoint or handout presented by one staff member from the hosting organization or a panel discussion with a range of advocacy experts.

At the ACCFB workshop, a panel comprised of elected officials and members of the food bank’s advocacy team answered audience questions about the basics of successful advocacy.

Panel members affirmed that:

• Online petitions are useful and helpful
• The best advocates build coalitions of individuals, organizations, and politicians who may work on different issues but can come together around a piece of legislation if coalition builders know how to frame the issue.
• Calling is the most impactful way to communicate with legislators, although in-person visits with prepared talking points and one-pagers to drop off are also helpful.
• The best initial step before initiating contact with a legislator is to research what their values are by reading about their life history as well as the boards and committees on which they’ve served.

Some additional pieces of advice worth adding are:

• Advocates need to focus on quantifying the benefits or harm of a given policy that they are supporting or opposing, and using those numbers as the basis of a succinct one-pager to give to legislators.
• Advocates should supplement numerical data with powerful personal stories of how a given policy has or will impact individuals.
• When pursuing federal policy change, advocates should find out what buzzwords and metaphors drive an administration — in the George Bush Jr. administration, one such word was “freedom” — and make sure the language they use to frame a policy matches the values of the particular administration.

4. One small, one medium, and one large “ask” for people looking to get involved with the hosting organization’s advocacy.

• One of the ACCFB’s current advocacy priorities for 2017 is to increase the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) above poverty level in the 2017–2018 budget. The ACCFB’s small ask was for attendees to make a phone call: all attendees of the ACCFB workshop were given a script that they could use to call Governor Brown’s office and show support for an increase in the SSI.
• The medium ask was for attendees to join the food bank’s advocacy mailing list, which sends out action alerts (usually time-sensitive requests for signing petitions or calling legislators) once or twice per month.
• The large(r) ask was to consider joining the ACCFB’s community advocacy group, which meets once per month.

5. An informal opportunity for attendees to meet and learn from the hosts and one another.

At the end of the ACCFB workshop, people mingled around a snack table, asked each other questions, and took pictures of one another holding food bank signs with messages like “Food is a universal human right.”

This networking time can be as simple as providing basic refreshments and making sure that you (the hosting organization) have the workshop room reserved for an additional thirty minutes after the formal part of the workshop is done.

Thank you to the Alameda County Community Food Bank, which did an excellent job of hosting the Inauguration Day Advocacy workshop that inspired this blog post.

At Oakland Natives Give Back, we are in the process of developing a 2017 advocacy agenda focused on policies and initiatives that address the underlying causes of chronic absenteeism and truancy among students in Oakland Unified School District. Given the connection between school absence and family poverty, Oakland Natives Give Back will keep poverty-reduction at the forefront of our advocacy efforts.

For more information about Oakland Natives Give Back, please visit: www.oaklandnatives.org