Ensuring Success for the Long Run

The effective social justice advocates in our programs have found that sustaining themselves both as people and as advocates is not what they do instead of, or in spite of, their work. Rather, it is their work. Renewal, reflection, and sustenance are absolutely necessary to build emotional and intellectual reserves for the long-term nature of advocacy.

To sustain themselves, our alumni report that they:

• visit a special place - a garden, a memorial, the wilderness
• develop and rely upon a spiritual practice
• work up a good sweat to get “out of the head”
• turn to a formal or informal “board of directors” for support and advice
• take a month off and do something completely different (paint in Tahiti)
• spend some alone time to “fill up their bucket”

What do you do to sustain yourself or your advocacy work?

Our Leadership Fellows shared with us their practices and personal reminders that they use to sustain themselves. We share them with you. We invite you, as you read them, to hear them as proven, practical suggestions from the wider community of social justice advocates especially to you, to support you in the work that we all value.

It is easier to destroy a movement than to build one.

Advocacy requires many qualities - innovation, hope, stamina, drive, grit, determination, resolve, commitment. When an effort is clearly winning, it is easy to sustain these, as individuals and organizations. But when an issue suffers a setback or fades from public view, an organization's leadership faces its greatest challenges.

Leaders need to create strong organizations that motivate, energize, and support people engaged in the effort. Strong organizations must also buffer members against both external and internal tensions. In the early 1980s, Byron Kennard, an organizer and leader in the U.S. environmental movement, wrote of “ten ways to kill a movement.” Advocacy Institute Co-Founder Michael Pertschuk created a contemporary list based on his experiences with public health and tobacco control advocates. Pertschuk called his list “eight ways to lead a movement to oblivion”:

1. Fight! Fight! Fight! or Talk! Talk! Talk!, but never balance struggle efforts with negotiation.
2. Use your grassroots; then lose them.
3. Lose track of your goals.
4. Get drunk on your successes.
5. Let a tender bruised ego destroy your strategic judgment.
6. Undermine all efforts at open and honest debate.
7. Find a scapegoat and move on unenlightened.
8. Keep doing what you are doing no matter how much the world changes.

Any one of these behaviors can be damaging to advocates and movements. When looked at in the reverse, they stand as a powerful reminder of the care that must be given to sustain advocates. Sustenance is particularly important when an effort does not successfully reach a short-term objective and frustrated advocates are tempted to find faults and lay blame in each other. The negative behaviors are noted here so advocates can avoid them.

In any advocacy effort, positive models of behavior deserve to be followed. Kennard's “ten ways to kill a movement” are reframed here as ten positive, proactive steps that an organization, coalition, or movement and its leadership can take to build a movement.

1. Remember where you come from, that you are part of something larger. Celebrate your origins and roots.
2. Listen to the insights and experience of people who are affected by the issues and participate in the efforts. They are the real experts - amplify their voices. Keep professional experts “on tap, not on top.”
3. Keep balance in your work and personal life. Work hard, yes. Meet responsibilities, yes. Make an extra effort, yes. But also add humor and rest. Avoid pessimism and martyrdom.
4. Recognize human frailty and accept it. Set the example by not holding yourself - or others - to rigid or impossible standards that drain the organization's energy.
5. Motivate others by sharing responsibility, paying attention to others, and encouraging those who make the extra effort. Give praise when it is merited.
6. Model behavior, or set a good example, by fostering cooperation, sharing information with others, and encouraging others' leadership. Don't dominate. Leave space for others to share their knowledge and skills.
7. Insist on a calm approach to solving problems. Set real deadlines. Avoid a crisis mentality.
8. Share credit generously within the organization, sector, and among allies.
9. Be equally civil to those who share your views or tactics, and those who do not. Agree to disagree and do so without personalizing disagreements.
10. Recognize that there are incremental steps in the advocacy journey. Celebrate how far a group has come and what it means to the lives of people. New experiences - like meeting with a bureaucrat, politician, or editor - are as much a success as winning a favorable policy. They build confidence and empowerment that, in many ways, are the most profound and lasting changes. Savor them.

Information on this page came from Advocacy for Social Justice: A Global Action and Reflection Guide, now available in English and Spanish from Kumarian Press.