How Advocates Redefine What is Possible
And why pessimists are, at best, only half right
FEB 14, 2023
This week started off with a bang and it’s so amazing hearing back from friends and other connections about their desire to make positive changes to their communities. Some of the people who have reached out include:
A father looking to slow cars on his street in the East Bay
A person in San Francisco who wants to grow from being a passive supporter of transit to getting more politically engaged & directly lobby their city Supervisor
A lawyer in Los Angeles who wants to fund someone else’s training in SoCal (let me know if you want to be that someone!)
One thing they all have in common is that they want to redefine what is possible. If, as Toni Cade Bambara says, “the role of the artist is make the revolution irresistible,” then the role of the advocate is to make that revolution possible.
Others might say things like “we can’t close that intersection and make a car-free plaza” or “it’s too expensive to build that bike lane” or “we can’t pick a fight with ____, we’ll lose potential allies!” and they might feel comfortable, safe, defeated, or angry with their pessimism. They might even feel haughty or wise in how “correct” their assessment of present reality is and condescend to you about your wanting more. At best they are half right.
Being a successful advocate requires having a realistic understanding of the half they are right about…and knowing the rest of the story. They are (potentially) right about the current situation, but they are dead wrong about the future. They know the costs, but they aren’t seeing the benefits and the path forward.
So “we can’t close that intersection and make a car-free plaza” might be true at that moment, but it’s only a freeze frame of a broader story. The full story is “we can’t close that intersection and make a car-free plaza YET, but after we ________, we can.” or “it’s too expensive to build that bike lane, but we can find the money by ______ and it will be more than worth it because _______” or “we can’t pick a fight with ____, we’ll lose potential allies BUT we’ll gain others and gain _____ (plus they are already picking on us, so we’re just fighting back).” Successful advocates understand that the pessimists may be right about the state of reality at that moment. But advocates use that bit of knowledge as a one of their many many tools to build a new, better reality.
Another world is possible, and you can make it happen.
Click here to Schedule a free half-hour initial consult.
How I’m walking the talk these days:
To help defend & expand funding for street improvements like bike lanes, better sidewalks, and crosswalks in Oakland I’ve been petitioning around BART train stations. To help get the word deeper into the community, I recently made a flyer in Spanish about the proposal, went to Fruitvale and had a LOT of great conversations with people there about street safety. Since I was doing it in a specific area, I added the City Councilmember’s office phone number to the flyer to make it easier for people to take action. While I captured fewer email addresses since more people said they would call rather than scan the QR code, it was great expanding the conversation (plus, I got to dust off my Spanish!). You can sign and share the petition here.
Unsure how to expand your coalition of allies, want to talk through ideas for bridging that gap, or are you nervous about starting conversation with strangers? I get it– it’s an important part of success but it can be very intimidating. Book a training session and I can help you build those skills!