By Valyrie Laedlein As reported in a Stanford Social Innovation Review blog post, the National Committee of Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) recently published a report demonstrating the huge impact that foundations can make by investing in advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement. How to build the capacity of community organizations to engage in advocacy was the topic of an inquiry that Community Resource Exchange was asked to undertake by The Atlantic Philanthropies.
Why did
We have seen first-hand what NCRP reports, and we recognize the potential that CBOs have to advance greater citizen engagement and promote policies and systems that are more responsive to the poor and more supportive of long-term and genuine social change. As we watch our client organizations - and our clients’ clients - struggle with the effects of the recession and the effects of decision-making in
We must build on our long-term relationships with CBOs to challenge them to identify what more we and they can do to address the causes of poverty as much as its effects, and to work for substantive social change. Our first step is to introduce the idea of greater civic activism with staff and board leaders of direct services organizations who have traditionally NOT been involved, and to help them to recognize that such work is mission critical and essential to community accountability. This first step is what we call changing mindset.
The next step is to support them in becoming informed, so that they can access and use information to make the connections between government policies and market forces – and their clients’ circumstances. We must also help them to identify models for advocacy that they can adopt or identify policy groups, coalitions and others with whom they can join forces to amplify their voice and their impact.
Finally, we need to support them as they move to the stage of acting like an advocate. Success means assuring that community-based service organizations incorporate advocacy into their work agenda and their annual plans, and report on their successes in their annual reports.
CRE has challenged itself to integrate advocacy into our ongoing work with client organizations, based on an emerging mindset of our own that any capacity building work that does not include building capacity to do advocacy is incomplete. This has led us to the question of how to introduce, prepare and equip CBOs for an expanded advocacy role. Our long-standing relationships with organizations who have been successful in advocacy work point to some of the organizational elements that need to be in place for any CBO to succeed in its efforts to affect policy, organize, and/or expand civic engagement. What CRE recognizes as “drivers” of performance suggest entry points for building advocacy capacity:
- Raising consciousness about contextual issues is a starting point: getting an organization’s stakeholders to view the community-based organizations in the larger context, recognizing that its mission includes impacting the context in which the organization and its clients operate. Opportunities for building capacity exist while doing work on community needs, planning, and board and staff development.
- Equipping the leadership to recognize their role, accept it, and make it a priority, comes next. This includes arming leadership with the skills, connections and confidence to define a strategy and implement it, and this is done frequently in an organizational context with few resources to allocate for such work. Capacity building activities include coaching, organizational planning and priority setting, work around role definition, and creating and supporting networks of leaders who share a common cause.
- Supporting leadership as it undertakes a change in culture is a third component of building advocacy capacity. At both Board and staff levels, stakeholders need to recognize the organization’s larger agenda, embrace it, and develop the ability to play a role. Very often such change in culture begins with the leader, but often involves team building, staff and board development work, and engaging the group in visioning and planning for a new area of work.
- Finally, building the technical capacity -- skills, knowledge of issues and external players, resources to support the work, and the internal systems and structures to manage and assess results of the advocacy work – is likely to be the final driver of success. Capacity building for this might involve work both in-house (within a community-based organization) and across organizations, as networks of advocates are formed around issues areas.
Progress in implementing an advocacy agenda requires a CBO to undertake both an organizational change effort and to develop new knowledge and technical capabilities. Capacity builders, such as CRE, must be in a position to catalyze advocacy work and address the client organization’s capacity needs, which is doable if we approach this work from a position of trust and common interest with our clients. Our shared goals of addressing poverty and achieving social justice lay the foundation for us to challenge our clients to integrate advocacy into their service agenda and thereby to become stronger and more effective community-based organizations.
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