Mom-Advocate Life: Andrea Riley

In advocacy as well as motherhood, sometimes things don't go according to plan.  When illness or unexpected surprises pop up, you just have to gather up your dignity and roll with it! 

Andrea Riley is a Shot@Life Champion from Lincoln, Nebraska. As a dedicated activist for vaccines to prevent global child deaths, she knows the value of building great relationships with aides in district offices. For many of us, it can be common to drop by casually with a delivery or a message for a local staffer since local district offices can be a lot less formal than Washington D.C. But when Congressman Jeff Fortenberry unexpectedly dropped in on her 2016 meeting...well, read on with Andrea's story!

"As a mother you pick up so much from your kids; however, sometimes you just seem to pick up their germs more than anything. It was October, I was working and my 11-month-old daughter was in child care, and we had been catching every bug imaginable. I had made an appointment at my U.S. Representative's office to talk to them about keeping kids healthy worldwide through global vaccination, but had to cancel and reschedule twice due to illness - the irony was not lost on me. Fortunately, the germs we managed to catch were not life-threatening and we had great medical care. Others around the world are not so lucky, which is why I am a Shot@Life Champion and advocate for funds to provide life-saving vaccines for children in developing countries where they are most needed.  

"I had rescheduled my appointment with an aide at the local office of my Representative for a Friday afternoon.  It was casual Friday where I worked - which was only a block from my Representative's office - and I still wasn't feeling great, so I went to work and the meeting in my casual clothes and a Shot@Life lapel pin. I had a friend join me and luckily she was dressed like a professional. I just didn't have enough energy that day to look fancy. I'd met with this aide before and didn't think she would mind. I really wanted the meeting before World Polio Day (held every year at the end of October), so it would have to do. We walked over to the office and checked in.  As we were waiting for the aide, much to my surprise and horror, our Congressman walks in. Here I am wearing what I call my "Husker pajamas" and I see, for the first time, my member of Congress in the flesh. We had no idea he was even in town!  He sees me and my friend and was immediately embarrassed. 

"Yes, you read that right, he was embarrassed. The first thing he said was, 'If I would have known I'd be seeing constituents I'd be wearing better shoes! I'm so sorry, I'm caught off-guard and I've got my old shoes on!' I didn't find his shoes to be bad at all! I just couldn't believe that he was embarrassed for being underdressed when I was the one who was mortified! I was relieved he didn't seem to notice my completely unprofessional attire and took the opportunity to tell him briefly about what I was there for and then I asked him for a picture. He politely agreed, but instructed his aide to take it horizontally because he didn't want his shoes in the shot.  :)"

Andrea Riley and her colleague Elizabeth Esseks meet with
Congressman Jeff Fortenberry in his district office

Andrea knew that this experience was just one of many she would continue to have with this particular office. Of course, we always want to make a good impression, but a chance encounter like this can help to remind everyone how human we are whether we hold an elected position or not. If find yourself in an odd situation, just hold your head up high and speak out for the people you represent!

"Don't Waste My Time!": Keeping Volunteers Engaged

The poster you see in the picture hangs in my local Starbucks and it earns a grunt of annoyance from me every time I see it. I feel like the person who designed it has never done volunteer organizing at all! I swear to you that most volunteers have thought that quote to themselves at one point or another. Truly, I think it myself every time I attend a poorly-run meeting.

Volunteers are wonderful people. They give freely of their time to make the world a better place whether they are citizen lobbyists or soup kitchen servers. Parents who volunteer are doubly special because they take time away from swiftly-growing children for causes they believe in. Therefore, as organizers, we need to value the precious hours they give us by providing enriching and rewarding experiences! Without that, volunteers will drift away looking for the next thing that will give meaning to the work.

Here are my four best ideas for about volunteers engaged in your group:

1. Empower Your Volunteers
Don't think of your volunteers merely as minions carrying out tasks. Nobody likes to feel ordered around! Cultivate leaders by giving them full ownership of their responsibilities. Help them to see their part in your shared vision and decide the best way they can accomplish the goal themselves. In this way, teammates can share their creativity and personal strengths with one another.

This is remarkably similar to the parenting technique where you give kids the responsibility for picking up their rooms by a certain time, but don't micro-manage how it gets done. They can sing while they do it, they can clean alphabetically, they can clean by color...it's up to them!

2. Find new activities and goals for your group

Girl Scouts make a poster for their U.S. Representative

Doing the same thing over and over gets stale. Luckily, there are infinite ways to advocate! Breathe new life into your activism by involving different kinds of people or learning skills together. If the group seems tired of just writing letters to Congress together or burned out from prepping for congressional meetings, try teaching a girl scout group to take action with you by making posters! Or, take letter writing to the next level by writing a letter to the editor for print in your local newspaper. Take your whole group out to birddog a candidate at a town hall. Creative outreach events and fundraisers to attract new supporters are also great opportunities for all sorts of memorable interactions. 

3. Celebrate the results of your work together
It's incredibly important that we specifically tell volunteers how their efforts have helped change the world or helped an individual person. RESULTS founder Sam Daley-Harris wrote in an op-ed in the South Florida Sun Sentinel about our need to know our time is well spent. He was lecturing at a university about advocacy to tackle huge world problems like climate change or global health when a student asked him: “What if we don’t have time to get involved in big issues?” Sam wrote, "I told her that if she was holding down two or three jobs just to put food on the table, I’d agree with the 'not enough time' excuse. But in a country that binges on TV shows and spends hours on Facebook, I say most people do have enough time. We just don’t have time for things we don’t think will make a difference. We’re not willing to play Don Quixote, dreaming the impossible dream, if we think we’ll wake up only to find it was a nightmare."

The Shot@Life logo is especially
easy for cupcakes!

So, find a way to help your group see the impact of their efforts! It can be as small as surprise logo cupcakes and bubbly at a meeting while discussing a legislative win and what it means for people in poverty. (Since my RESULTS team is 50% middle and high schoolers, bubbly for that group is sparkling apple cider) But when we finally got the Education for All global education bill passed after 10 years, we held a celebratory brunch to recap all our efforts and think about the ways it will transform lives. Heck, yeah, that deserved a brunch! 

4. Appreciate and recognize effort
Sometimes it's a simple "Way to go!" given in private. Other times, public recognition on social media or a heartfelt, hand-written note are better ways to show your appreciation for volunteer efforts big and small. Teresa Rugg is the Advocacy Teams Training Consultant for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. She knows that being cognizant of where volunteers are in their own life journeys and what gifts they can share in the moment is so important. She shared, “We are always careful that we celebrate all of the actions that the teammates can bring, whether they brought the salad or took down names at an event. Every single contribution is important to the team. Someone opened up their home. Someone shared a story in a lobby visit that no one else could tell. This attitude is omnipresent when I’m training teams.” 

How are you keeping your team engaged? I'd love to learn from you!

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A Failure of Imagination

"Nobody really thinks about it until it affects them personally."

A failure of imagination kept the
Apollo 1 crew from reaching the moon.
(I took this pic with a home telescope.
Cool, huh?)

That statement was given by an unhappy Trump voter in Brownsville, TX to a New York Times reporter regarding plans for parts of her retirement community in the River Bend Resort and Golf Club to be wedged in a gap between the US/Mexico border and an actual border wall. Despite living right on the border, she never imagined that the president's oft-touted plan plan to erect a border to keep out immigrants could negatively impact her own personal comfort.

I don't know why, but that simple quote really hit me the wrong way when I read it. I feel that saying "You never truly understand until it affects you personally" would be very accurate, but to never THINK about a major election platform of your preferred candidate until it affects you personally is - as the famous testimony about the Apollo 1 command capsule fire said - "a failure of imagination."

I spend a lot of time every single day thinking about issues that don't affect me personally. But I don't need to have a catastrophe to happen to me or any of my loved ones in order to act to protect people I don't know. Empathy and compassion propel me to advocate and vote to protect others. And, yes, I even vote against things that would financially benefit me and my family if it will help others who don't have enough for basic needs like food and shelter. 

I am blessed to have enough, but that's no excuse for me to close my eyes to the needs of others. If that's not sufficient to sway some voters, it's just common sense for them to use their imaginations to consider an unexpected time when they might not have enough. Today, because of our precarious health system many Americans can have their financial securities totally undone in a moment when a health crisis like a cancer diagnosis or a car crash suddenly disrupts a life.

I don't really know a sure fire way to reach people and increase their empathy, but I know ways to increase my own. I think these these suggestions are helping me and would help others as well...

Read
Newspapers, novels, non-fiction, scientific journals...all of them offer windows to the lives of people who have troubles different from your own. If you want some suggestions, check out my Anti-Poverty Mom's 2019 Gift Picks list which was all made up of books to increase understanding and empathy.



Diversify your Twitter network

I saw a suggestion on social media (sorry I can't find the original post anymore!) that was helpful to me. It was essentially saying that if white people wanted to better understand the experience of African-Americans, that they should try following a handful of black people on Twitter and see how that changes the tone of the feed. But the most valuable part was the suggestion that the white people do so WITHOUT COMMENT. I tried it and found something really startling: it was as if caucasian Twitter followers could not help themselves from butting in with comments like "Well, actually..." and other things that would negate the feelings and observations of non-white tweeters. It made me wonder how much I'd done that to others in my life without realizing it. I think an infusion of lots of different kind of diversity into our personal social media feeds could be a good way to break out of our bubbles and add insight...but are we able to do it without comment? Can we just listen and learn without stirring up trouble?

Talk...REALLY talk...to people who are not like you
If you find enough connections to people different from yourself, issues that never touched you before are bound to start affecting you personally. It's startling to realize how many people in the U.S. have been personally touched by gun violence whether it be from mass shootings, suicide, accidental gunfire at home, etc, etc. Maybe this is the hardest one because it's the one that falls outside of natural comfort zones for most people...including me. 

I'd love to hear about other people's suggestions in the comments. Like I said, I don't have all the answers on this one at all. I will leave you with a quote from Senator Cory Booker from a democratic presidential debate. He was talking about needing to take action on gun violence, but I think it applies to a lot of issues. 

“This is a crisis of empathy in our nation. We can’t wait for it to personally affect us. People can’t wait for this hell to be visited upon their communities.” 

- Cory Booker

Booker isn't necessarily my favorite candidate right at the moment, but I do like his ideas about courageous empathy. We all have the power to shape ourselves into more empathetic and thoughtful citizens before we head into the voting booths again.