A Master Class in Developing Effective Grassroots Engagement
Sam Daley-Harris founded the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS in 1980 and began coaching Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) three months before they were launched in 2007. In 2013 CCL’s volunteers in the US and Canada had more than 1,500 letters to the editor and op-eds published and had 709 meetings with members of Congress, Parliament, or their staff. In 1987 RESULTS volunteers in the US were able to get editorial writers from 28 US newspapers on conference calls with Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus 19 years before he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Daley-Harris asks: what prevents US NGOs today from achieving true breakthroughs with their grassroots advocates? Drawing on his experiences with RESULTS and CCL as well as the 20th anniversary edition of his book “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break between People and Government,” Daley-Harris will offer advice about the kinds of support structures and curricula that allowed “ordinary citizens” to become confident advocates for their issues. We’ll discuss the challenge of maintaining morale and celebrating advances in advocacy capacity during challenging periods in an advocacy effort.
Moderator:
- Mickey Edwards, Vice President of the Aspen Institute and Director of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership
Sam Daley-Harris’ Biography:
Sam Daley-Harris, an advocate, organizer, and author, founded the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS in 1980, founded the Microcredit Summit Campaign in 1995 and founded the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation (CCET) in 2012. CCET helps organizations train their members to create champions in Congress and the media for their cause. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus said: “….no other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that microcredit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women than RESULTS and the Microcredit Summit Campaign.” Ashoka founder Bill Drayton called Daley-Harris, “…one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades.”
Mickey Edwards’ Biography:
Mickey Edwards is Vice President of the Aspen Institute and serves as Director of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership. Edwards was a Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma from 1977 to 1992, serving as a member of the House Republican Leadership and as a member of the Appropriations and Budget Committees. After leaving the Congress, he taught for 11 years at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Practice, and for five years as a lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Maryland Law School and at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School.
Edwards is the author or co-author of four books, including “Reclaiming Conservatism,” published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. His latest book, “The Parties Versus the People,” was published by Yale University Press. He has been a regular political commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and a weekly political columnist for The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, as well as other major newspapers. His articles have appeared in magazines ranging from The Atlantic to The Public Interest. Edwards is a frequent public speaker and has been a guest on many of the nation’s leading radio and television news and opinion broadcasts. He received a B.A. in journalism from the University of Oklahoma and a J.D. from Oklahoma City University School of Law.
Drawing on his experiences with RESULTS and CCL as well as the 20th anniversary edition of his book “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break between People and Government,” Sam Daley-Harris will offer advice about the kinds of support structures and curricula that allowed “ordinary citizens” to become confident advocates for their issues. We’ll discuss the challenge of maintaining morale and celebrating advances in advocacy capacity during challenging periods in an advocacy effort.