Philanthropy must invest in the 2020 census immediately

It was just a week before the Women’s March, and we faced a problem at the Action Network.

The map on our distributed events tool, the organizing home for the marches worldwide, was in danger of hitting the daily limit of map loads on our Google API, which would cause problems when people searched for their event. We knew this limit existed, of course, but it hadn’t even occurred to us that we would reach it — we hadn’t come close before.

Our team worked with staff at Google to quickly re-engineer the backend to handle the increased traffic, and it’s a good thing we did. As the day for the marches approached, we blew past that original limit by 20 percent, then 50 percent, eventually doubling the traffic as millions of people searched for marches around the world, each organized independently by hundreds of grassroots activists and first-time organizers. As we watched the numbers grow, we were telling everyone who would listen that the marches were going to be far, far bigger than anyone thought.

It was an early indication of what we’ve all seen this year: Incredible grassroots energy being channeled into new activism. New activists are using the Action Network toolset to organize, bolstering existing progressive groups and creating brand new ones – including Action Network partners like the Women’s March and Indivisible – and translating that energy into lasting power for the progressive movement.

Five years in the making, the Action Network is built on a not-for-profit, user-driven development model. Groups including United We Dream, AFL-CIO, Student PIRGs and Daily Kos use Action Network for mass emailing, petitions, event campaigns and fundraising.

We developed these tools as a not-for-profit so we could focus on one mission: to build progressive power. We developed the tools in collaborative partnership with our partners, giving the movement a direct say in how the technology develops.

Key to our philosophy is creating tools that are open enough to allow for independent action, but structured enough to turn that action into long-term power. That way, new activists and organizers can join in on their terms, while connecting them into a broader movement.

You can see this philosophy at work in the development of the Women’s March. Yordanos Eyoel, a spokesperson for the Women’s March described a key benefit of Action Network to The Hill:

“On Facebook you have individual events. There is really no connected network. I think [Facebook is] a great way to get a message out, but I think when you’re trying to facilitate a network approach, Action Network enables you to do that.”

The Action Network enabled the Women’s March organizers at the grassroots level to create and own their events, and, by capturing all of that data, it created a powerful base to build on. It also enabled them to collect detailed metrics for greater accountability down to the local level than ever before, allowing organizers to see which activists are most effective in their communities – and worth extra attention to develop.

The Women’s March organizers took that opportunity and have expanded their operation significantly, driving tens of thousands of activists to thousands of local Huddles. These small, local events have introduced thousands of new local organizers to the movement in communities around the country, creating opportunities for local grassroots activists to get together to strategize and plan follow up actions – all within the broader framework of the Women’s March organization.

Another recent example comes from the Standing Rock Sioux, who used the free version of Action Network to build a campaign in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. What began as a couple dozen local activists surged to a national movement around the #NoDAPL cause, and today the Standing Rock Sioux have raised over $2 million in sustaining funding and are now a full Action Network partner.

The Women’s March, Indivisible, the Standing Rock Sioux and the dozens of other organizations that have sprung up from the progressive grassroots in the last few months alone hint at the broader, sustained resistance to the Trump agenda that will be needed over the next four years. They also serve as proof of concept for Action Network’s not-for-profit, user-driven development model. 

This is our moment to harness the energy and enthusiasm within our movement to build long-lasting progressive power to win in 2018 and beyond.

Imagine the possibilities if we can empower progressive organizations by putting the Action Network tools into the hands of thousands of new activists nationwide and creating new coalitions to achieve unprecedented scale and impact.
To do that, we’re excited to announce that Action Network is partnering with NCRP to give members access to the Action Network toolset. Through this new partnership, NCRP members will have the opportunity to harness their supporters and point them to direct actions, collaborate with each other seamlessly and expand their digital organizing reach to create positive change.

If you’re a member interested in taking advantage of this partnership, click here. To learn more about Action Network, click here.

Brian Young is executive director of the Action Network. Follow @TheActionNet and @NCRP on Twitter.

Photo by John Duffy. Used under Creative Commons license.

Recent national events have raised fundamental questions about who we are as Americans. The answers to these questions may threaten the health, safety and well-being of many of our neighbors, friends and colleagues, and ultimately each and every one of us. For foundations, how we respond in this moment will say everything about who we are as organizations.

The California Endowment (TCE) is just over halfway into our 10-year, $1-billion Building Healthy Communities initiative, a holistic attempt to improve health status by harnessing the latent power and potential of residents to rebuild California’s social compact and reweave the fraying fabric of low-income communities.

The initiative aims for community transformation through building power (social, political and economic), implementing proven health protective policy, and changing the narrative about what produces health (beyond health insurance and individual behavior). The efforts and outcomes to date offer insight into how to continue the march toward health and justice for all, even in this moment.

Over the past seven years, California has seen unprecedented expansion of opportunities for boys and men of color, the undocumented, formerly incarcerated and other highly stigmatized populations. We have seen millions enroll in health insurance – including undocumented children – school discipline radically transformed, school funding become more equitable, people with low-level felonies get a second chance through reclassification, over 100 local health-protective policy changes in some of our most under resourced communities and so many other health-protective policies in areas like climate change and immigrant rights.

However, many of these wins are highly dependent on an enabling federal environment. We are now readying ourselves and our partners to help protect and defend these gains – not by shifting course, but by doubling down on what works.

Moments like these are fraught with opportunity. That’s why we created our “Fight4All Initiative.” TCE has laid out four interlocking strategies that will guide investments over the course of the initiative’s three-year duration.

1. Defend federal-level gains

Protecting access to health care is foundational. However, assaults on health care are part of a larger federal level effort to erode our already threadbare American Social Compact. Access to supplemental nutrition programs, children’s health insurance and other programs designed to offer a foothold to struggling American households under assault.

Additionally, there are wins in other policy domains that support health that will need defending: wage and overtime laws, immigration and criminal justice reforms, subsidized housing programs, local control in education.

These gains help confer a measure of dignity to some of the most marginalized populations across the country. And human dignity should not be negotiable.

Foundations must move quickly to support organizations that are standing squarely with historically marginalized populations. For health care foundations, this means reaching beyond investments in health care access defense efforts. We must also support efforts that span issues and contribute to building a coalition strong enough to advocate on the multiple and converging fronts undermining the health and safety of most U.S. residents.

2. Protect vulnerable populations 

The rhetoric of the presidential campaign stoked racial anxiety and posed direct threats to the well-being of certain populations. California is home to large concentrations of many of these targeted populations. To guard against harm, communities are putting in place rapid response strategies and networks. These efforts not only save lives, they are a tremendous organizing opportunity.

Our commitment is to direct funds to these efforts, and when possible, directly to organizations led by the people most vulnerable to attack. And as is the case at any time, but heightened at this time, we must not pit populations against each other or deem some sub-groups, such as those with criminal convictions, as undeserving of protection. We cannot fight bigotry while employing its underlying logic.

3. Strengthen state-based strategic advocacy

Neither California nor any other state can go it alone. Each state needs a civic engagement strategy that articulates to a national strategy. These strategies require building a shared sense of solidarity across many different populations that are feeling dispossessed of the American Dream, including low income whites.

We will deepen our statewide efforts to strengthen and network rural and urban populations with the goal of building stronger and broader coalitions across the state.

4. Grow the movement:

People across the country are coalescing around common vision and clarity of purpose. The common thread weaving so many different voices together is not simply identity or issued based. It is much deeper and more formidable; it is values-based. Intersectionality. Equity. Health. Safety. Inclusion. These are the rallying cries joining together transgender people fighting for basic access to restrooms with mothers fighting for health care with Black activists fighting for an end to mass incarceration with Native Americans fighting for the planet and their fundamental rights.

This moment in time is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build an even more powerful movement for change across cities, regions, states and the nation. The requires deep and long-term support for community organizing across many issue areas and geographies so that the roots of the movement are strong; so that key leaders and organizations have the resources and space they need to weave together their priorities and power in more meaningful ways. It also means building out a new narrative about what progress, fairness, safety and health look like in America. We must support efforts to build a values-driven, inclusive narrative that can serve as an umbrella for the many agendas coming together in this movement.

In closing, I offer a story from my experience, alongside my youngest daughter and wife, at Oakland’s Women’s March. We rushed to arrive on time, with our newly minted posters, only to stand motionless for what seemed like hours. Just as I was starting to get frustrated, I learned that there were so many people in front of us, there was not yet space for our steps. I was part of a line so long and so strong it spanned from the march’s starting to end point and then some. In this moment, I became filled with hope for the future of health and justice.

When we stand together, we are the most powerful force the country has ever seen. Our collective vision of a new, inclusive social compact for the 21^st Century, one that reflects our highest values as a nation, may actually be in reach.

Anthony Iton, M.D., J.D., MPH, is senior vice president of healthy communities at The California Endowment.

Photo provided by The California Endowment. 

Updated 10/25/2017 to fix error in Richard Kirsch’s bio.

Editor’s note: This is the first of several blog posts highlighting health advocacy efforts in the first 100 days of the new presidential administration. NCRP will share additional health advocacy resources during the next several months in response to this urgent issue. 

“The Affordable Care Act overall has likely saved hundreds of thousands of black lives, and it has certainly produced one of the most significant advances in racial equity on record: By the end of 2014, in just one year’s time, it had entirely erased the disparity in health coverage between white and black kids.”  – Kai Wright, The Nation

Any grantmaker that wants to end poverty, advance racial equity, or promote the wellbeing of children, the elderly, disabled or other underserved groups has a stake in what happens to federal health programs this year.

Legislative attacks on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicare would take coverage away from tens of millions of Americans, cut $1 trillion from state funds for Medicaid, replace Medicare with a limited voucher for private insurance and raise the cost of health coverage for almost everyone. These attacks would leave families across the country with no or unaffordable health coverage, wreck state budgets, undermine urban and rural hospitals and jeopardize millions of health care workers.

Foundations can play a critical role in preventing this from happening

Just as winning passage of the ACA required a powerful, aggressive grassroots campaign based in states and communities throughout the country, turning back the new attack on health security will require that same effort. And more.

Thanks to the leadership of a handful of grantmakers in 2010, most notably Atlantic Philanthropies, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and its partners built a national organizing infrastructure rooted in local communities. Those organizations continued to work on ACA implementation. And on four days’ notice, that infrastructure was quickly reassembled after the 2016 election. Within 10 days, 36 events were held in 19 states, garnering extensive press coverage, under the banner “Don’t Take Away Our Care.” The events were organized in conjunction with Moveon.org, whose members organized an additional 44 events. In the past month HCAN’s local partners have continued to organize thousands of constituents to turn out to voice their concerns around the country.

We are now preparing for a multi-year fight on many fronts to keep the promise of health security for all Americans. The first year of the fight is crucial. But the fight will not be over in one year and may become even more protracted if we don’t marshal the widespread community support for these health care programs.

The factors that made HCAN so successful, which are still relevant and needed today, are:

• Its state member groups are almost all multi-issue organizations. These organizations have rich histories of engaging inclusive coalitions and constituencies at the state and local level. These multi-issue organizations can dramatically expand the base, adding to organizations primarily focused on health care.
• It organizes diverse constituencies in urban, suburban and rural communities; in majority White communities and in majority or substantial African American, Latino, Asian and Native American communities, providing them the capacity to mobilize the most impacted people.
• Its state partner groups have substantial experience in running strategic issue campaigns. They have relationships with state and local press and elected officials. They understand power relationships. And they are well coordinated with national efforts.

Both public and private foundations can contribute to these coordinated local, state and national efforts. Strategies include public education, community organizing, narrative building, media advocacy and, in some cases, lobbying, all of which are permissible 501c3 activities. Foundations that can fund 501c4 activities have an important contribution to make as well. In particular, grantmakers can help by:

1. Immediately, and for the next two-to-three years, fund the capacity of local organizations and their affected constituents to participate, particularly grassroots and multi-issue groups that don’t already participate in the traditional health care advocacy infrastructure.

2. Support a major social media campaign that will generate widespread social media activities and identify people who will lose their health coverage, including connecting them to organizers on the ground.

3. Help amplify state activities in the national media so that we create an echo chamber at the state and national level around a shared narrative that influences the policy debate in helpful ways.

Government programs to provide secure, affordable health coverage affect virtually everyone, from birth to death. People care deeply about their health coverage and pay much more attention to public policy on health care than almost any other issue. If we stop the onslaught against health coverage, we can protect the health and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Americans.

This is a contest that will not be won in Washington; it will be fought in communities around the country. Working with national and state allies, our collective advocacy and grassroots engagement will be as essential to defending Americans’ health care as it was in securing the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Richard Kirsch was the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now. He is the Director of Our Story – The Hub for American Narratives. He wrote Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States. For more information, Mr. Kirsch can be reached at rkirsch[at]ourstoryhub.org.

Photo provided by Richard Kirsch.