Change! A Collective Responsibility

CHANGE MANTRA: Developing a Proposal for Change!

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
                                                                                                                                       ...Jim Rohn

                                                                                                                     

What do we mean by developing a proposal for change?

As the economy got worse, Pratt City was feeling the pinch. There were shuttered storefronts on Main Street, and factories were laying off workers. More and more homeless people were visible, sleeping in the park and under the bridge. With winter coming, the plight of the homeless was looming larger and larger in the consciousness of members of the Pratt City Community Coalition. Most local officials and politicians were ignoring the situation. A few were threatening to give the homeless one-way bus tickets to Sun Belt cities. No one really knew what to do about the issue, and many preferred not to think about it.

The Coalition wasn't sure what to do, either, but its members didn't propose sitting on their hands while people froze to death under the bridge, or were packed onto buses for Phoenix. They knew that an advocacy effort for the homeless had a better chance of success if they had specific solutions to recommend, so they decided to develop a plan to confront homelessness in Pratt City.

The Coalition formed a core planning committee made up of representatives of agencies that worked with the homeless population. The committee then added to itself, by recruiting other concerned community members (including a woman who had run a homeless shelter in another city), some key local officials, and people who were themselves homeless. After studying the situation from a number of different angles - some members of the committee looked at the research, some inventoried local resources, others talked to officials and organizations in similar towns who had dealt with the problem, still others interviewed members of the homeless population - the committee came up with a multi-pronged approach to addressing both the current issue and the long-term causes of homelessness in Pratt City, and presented it to the public through the media and a presentation at a Town Council meeting.

With the help of the officials on the committee, the proposal received wide support from both the community and town government. As a result, no one froze to death that winter, and Pratt City was on its way to the plan's goal of "No one forgotten and alone, no one without a safe and adequate place to live."

This Chapter is about encouraging citizens to participate in advocacy, and about providing education - for both advocates and the targets of advocacy - about the issues at hand. One way to do both is to involve the community in creating a proposal for changing a troublesome situation or addressing the root causes of an issue of concern. In this section, we'll discuss just what that means; why, by whom, and when such a proposal might be developed; and how to go about it. Later in the section, we'll return to Pratt City, and show just how the committee developed its homeless proposal.
What do we mean by developing a proposal for change?

When you're advocating for change - whether that means addressing an issue with a community intervention, establishing a new policy, stopping something negative from happening, or changing the way the community thinks and acts - it's not enough to point out what's wrong or could be improved: you have an obligation, when it's possible, to present better alternatives. That's what a proposal for change is: your suggestions (or demands) for change, and for how that change can be brought about.

Your proposal might be in the form of a long-term plan, an intervention, a policy change - whatever is necessary to bring about the result you're concerned with. In an advocacy context, it almost always makes sense to have something specific to advocate for, rather than just to demand action from policy makers or the community.

By developing your proposal before anyone else does, you can set the boundaries of the discussion on the issue or problem - its definition, its context, and its range of reasonable resolutions. Moreover, a proposal for change is more likely to be successful if it comes from people who actually know the field and the issue - including members of the target population - than from policy makers who don't have as much familiarity with them, and who may be more interested in the political than in the practical and human implications of their solution.

Developing such a proposal spans a range of possibilities. You may believe you already know what needs to be proposed, and simply have to set it down in a logical and usable form. You may have the information to determine how to effect the needed change, but may still have to analyze it to decide what actually needs to be done. Or you may have to start from scratch, because neither you nor anyone else fully understands the situation.

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