"Heroes of the People": My apologies to those who escaped without a photo. You still have a nickname.
One of the walls in my office at HOME Line was covered with photos. I called it my “Heroes of the People” wall.
Each photo was a picture of a person I greatly admire. A caption was affixed to each with the person’s name as well a nickname I had dubbed them with.
The photos were of interns I had the fortune of working with in the quest for increased tenants’ rights.
I often tell people that most of the work I get credited with accomplishing at HOME Line was actually done by interns I supervised. I have a feeling people don’t believe it when I say it. But the Renters Credit was saved, in large part I believe, by a dedicated crew of HOME Line Public Policy Interns. The same is true for the passage of the Minnesota Tenant Bill of Rights.
While I could say something great about each of them, they are not the targets of this blog post. I would like to provide some advice to my colleagues in the advocacy community. If you want to accomplish more … if you want to catch your targets off guard … if you want to be known as a super-creative person, surround yourself with great interns. Then, value and use their advice. Let them work their magic.
My professionally-paid colleagues are great and effective folk. But they are saddled with far too much work because there is so much injustice to beat back.
The weight and volume of this work easily turns the best of us into reactive advocates, putting out fires created by our opposition. That same weight and volume can also turn us into control freaks: “I need to do this. I need to do that. I need to try to get ahead of things.” I’m not guessing here; I used to be one of those reactive control freaks.
For reasons that are far too complicated to explain here, I’ll just note that that changed in me several years ago. A catalyst involved some great advice my mom gave me.
One day, overworked and quite ill, I was certain I absolutely had to go to work or the world was going to fall apart. I don’t think she was trying to be profound when she said:
Michael, you are not that important.
It was best advice I have ever been given.
A switch was flipped and over the next several months I changed my approach to work. I became less focused on details and more attuned to themes. I started paying more attention to the great organizing done by two of my colleagues — Mike Davey and Stephanie Weir. I saw how their subtle guidance of homeless organizers didn’t focus on what needed doing but instead what the end goals were. They worked to change to the environment they were working in so more things — better options — were possible.
What does all this have to do with the use of interns in the fight for social justice? Let me use an example to make this clear.
Last legislative session the Renters Credit was under attack. A majority of both the Minnesota House and Senate favored cutting this property tax rebate by between 27% and 47%. However, I was certain advocates could save the Renters Credit. We just had to make a strong core of legislators and the Governor feel like heroes for saving the credit.
At HOME Line I would often call what I dubbed “five minute huddles.” I would call together my team of interns for a quick meeting. We would gather to report on political obstacles and individual tasks to surmount them. We would talk about what was working, what adjustments that needed to be made, and new things we should try out. I would then remind the interns of the end goals – what legislators we needed to influence or what community we needed to reach out to – and share a few acceptable ways I could think of approaching things. I would then leave and let the interns brainstorm other options and come up with a plan.
Almost always the interns would come back to me with an absolutely amazing idea. Sure, they would come up with some things any advocate would think of in a few minutes. But, unencumbered by what’s acceptable lobbying, they would put an interesting spin on how our message should be delivered.
Lora "No Pretense" Pederson
In what I consider an unparalleled moment of creativity, I remember when Lora Pederson cornered me to share an idea that she and Peter Koziol had just come up with:
“What if we recognize cool legislators as superheroes?” she asked. ”I’d like to draw comic book covers dedicated to each of the legislators who speak up for the Renters Credit. We’ll call the comic book series Guardians of the Renters Credit.”
I remember Lora so wanting to try this out. But she was not certain if I would approve of her dedicating almost all her advocacy time to drawing comic book covers.
My jaw dropped. ”Lora, I love this idea. You absolutely need to spend almost all your time doing this. You are going to make legislators feel like heroes!”
Okay, let me get to the punchline. I doubt that paid advocates (who spend much of their time at the Capitol) would have ever come up with this idea. And, I know that they wouldn’t let themselves or their staff devote hours to such a project. But I think the Guardians of the Renters Credit was key this past legislative session. Not only did it make our legislative allies feel great about supporting us and what they believed. It also clearly communicated how the Renters Credit was an important tax credit (see sample covers below).
And, it was easy to understand by regular folks — like renters — which is key to organizing. This is something that us paid advocates often forget.
For advocates, the questions are: Are we willing to cede some control? Are we willing to devote time to mentoring public policy interns in much the same way an organizer might mentor an emerging community leader? Are we willing to devote resources — if not our time, someone else’s — to recruiting, training, and guiding new leaders?
Not everyone should. Not everyone wants to. But I would submit that every significant legislative campaign should have a decent-sized team of public policy interns who are given a great degree of freedom to think up how to shake things up. And then, once us advocates have signed off on the gems in what they come up with, we should let them work their magic.
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[...] deeply involved in public policy advocacy. While I rarely visited the Capitol, my amazing “Heroes of the People” (interns) played a huge role in preserving the Renters’ Credit for low-income [...]