A Model for Change: Legislative Advocacy to Improving Access for the Uninsured and Underinsured in New York State 1

Advocates can successfully improve access to health care for people without health insurance. This article demonstrates the success of what began as a local advocacy effort to improve access to health care on Long Island, which later grew to become a major statewide advocacy movement. It explores the process taken by local coalition members to successfully fight for monumental public health legislation—first locally then statewide—to improve access to hospital care for the medically indigent. Using New York State as a model, it includes several approaches that could facilitate the enactment of legislation in other states. The experiences of New York advocates suggest that with focused collaborative efforts it is feasible to promote significant changes to public health laws to benefit the uninsured and underinsured.     

Developing the field of youth organizing and advocacy: what foundations can do

For more than a decade, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund has seeded many San Francisco Bay Area youth organizing and advocacy programs. Now that the field is maturing, argues the fund's vice president of programs, foundations have a critical programmatic and capacity-building role to play. The author offers analysis and strategies for integrating youth development grant making across foundation interest areas. The programs described illustrate the diversity of youth organizing and advocacy programs that could be supported by funders, whether or not any particular philanthropic institution has a grant-making focus on youth development or youth organizing. The article ends with an in-depth portrait of the self-reported needs of youth organizing and advocacy programs and concrete strategies for foundations seeking to more effectively enable youth organizing and advocacy to play an important role in bringing about a more vibrant, diverse, and effective democratic culture.     

One Community's Path to Greater Social Justice

SUMMARY

Across the nation, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities are facing the challenge of advancing civil rights on the local and state levels. One community successfully met that challenge with the passage of the Fairness Ordinance in Lexington-Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1999. Although the opposition characterized the Fairness Alliance as a “million dollar operation out of Washington,” the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) recognized the work of the Alliance as a model of local grassroots organizing with its Creating Change Award. This case study examines that campaign and the strategies the Fairness Alliance used, including effective lobbying and coalition building between the LGBT community and business, civic, political, community, and religious leaders.     

From tragedy to triumph: a segue to community building for children and families

In 2000, more than 60 nonprofit agencies, health care providers, government officials, and community advocates in Tarrant County, Texas, came together to work for systemic change in the mental health care system. The coalition, known as the Mental Health Connection, began working toward a "No Wrong Door" approach to mental health services, which required aggressive coordination between federal, private, and nonprofit resources. The result is a five- to six-year plan for implementation of a new systems of care model for children with severe emotional disturbances and their families. The Mental Health Connection also focuses on legislative advocacy to bring about necessary policy changes at the local, state, and federal levels. Finally, the coalition focuses on developing sustainable revenue streams that will allow the new systems to remain in place once the group accomplishes the initial mission of the Mental Health Connection.     

Utilizing Digital Advocacy in Community Organizing: Lessons Learned from Organizing in Virtual Spaces to Promote Worker Rights and Economic Justice

This article discusses the usefulness and challenges associated with utilizing social media technologies in the context of community organizing practice, often referred to as digital advocacy. We ground the analysis of digital advocacy in the context of a recent organizing effort undertaken by social work academics, grass roots organizers, and allies to support the boycott of Hyatt Hotels in San Antonio, Texas, by marginalized hotel workers and labor unions through advocating that the Society for Social Work Research relocate their 2014 conference from the Grand Hyatt, San Antonio, and to work toward better conference planning procedures in the future.     

Transcending Nations

While the literature on 'transnational advocacy networks' is beginning to unfold in different world regions, little attention has been given to cross-border organizing strategies that occur within borderlands as regions.In these spaces,networks can flourish through kinship, personal friendships, organizational coalitions, and official bodies. This article argues that cross-border organizing is a variant of 'local politics,' but that it presents far great obstacles than either transnational strategies or typical local politics due to multiple political institutions and ensuing complexity and accountability problems. At the US-Mexico border, other challenges emerge given economic poverty, limited civic capacity, and bi-national inequalities. This article provides a conceptual framework to compare cross-border organizing experiences with and without an institutional shroud that legitimizes activists'claims,exercises authority, and distributes resources.     

Coleman Advocates for Children And Youth: a pioneering child advocacy organization (1974-2008)

Coleman Advocates for Youth and Children is a pioneering 30-year-old child advocacy organization founded by several affluent community members and children's service professionals to stop housing abused and neglected children in juvenile hall. Today, low-income youth and parents in families of color are now assuming leadership in developing a unique hybrid approach that integrates community organizing with more traditional child advocacy strategies and focuses on increasing affordable housing and improving the city's educational system. The strategies employed by Coleman have also evolved, shifting from insider advocacy with administrative officials to public campaigns targeting the city budget process, to local initiative campaigns, and most recently to electoral politics. This organizational history features the issues mission and structure, leadership, managing issues, advocacy strategies and community relations, and funding.     

Campaigning to save market women's livelihoods in Hanoi: experience from HealthBridge

Traditional markets are at the heart of economic and social life in many cities, but in many, supermarkets and commercial centres are replacing the markets as governments pursue modernisation strategies. HealthBridge in Vietnam engaged in a multi-faceted advocacy campaign to show the importance of the markets in the country's capital, Hanoi, for women's livelihoods, the local economy, health, and the environment. The aim was to change attitudes among decision-makers and ensure the survival of markets as a relevant and positive aspect of life in the city.     

DRUG POLICY IN THE TIME OF AIDS:

In 1985, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded an ethnographic research project in San Francisco to study the needle sharing behavior of injection drug users (IDUs). The goal of the research was to develop a strategy to slow the spread of HIV among this hidden and hard to reach population of drug users and their sexual partners. This small-scale project grew into a model intervention in which bleach, condoms, and street-based education by outreach workers were employed to inform IDUs of the risk of AIDS and of methods for protecting themselves. The "reach and teach bleach" model was adopted by NIDA and implemented in a number of American cities. This study describes the development of the model intervention, the adoption of the model by NIDA as part of its National AIDS Demonstration Research (NADR) project, and the political circumstances under which the city of San Francisco applied for the NADR grant. Drawing on Social Worlds/Arena theory, and based on extensive interviews and participant observation, a sociohistorical analysis examines the initial development, implementation, and disintegration of the model outreach project and the impact of the program on drug policy in the city of San Francisco.     

The Black Family in the 21st Century and the Church as an Action System: A Macro Perspective

Abstract

The Black church has played a leadership function for African Americans during times of crisis such as slavery and the civil rights movement. This article suggests that the current crisis in the African American community is the disintegration of the African American family because of economic, social and value shifts, as well as misguided social policy. The Black church must again mount a spiritual and political campaign to save African American families, thereby ensuring their prosperity.     

Community mobilization and health care in rural China

This study is based on interviews conducted in Xiao San Jiang Township, China. This article describes the health care system before and after the reforms of the late 1970s and the impact on community mobilization and health care provision. The success of the Chinese health care system is attributed to mass participation in disease prevention. There were the public health campaigns of the 1950s at the brigade level that mobilized people to adopt personal and environmental sanitation, pest control, and primary health education. There were organizations, such as the Youth Leagues and the Women's Federations. The large groups encouraged use of services, such as family planning services, gynecological screening, and immunization. The Barefoot Doctor and Cooperative Medical Care Insurance Schemes were introduced. Brigades became directly involved in health care delivery, and health workers increased access to primary health services. There was multisectoral collaboration between mass and government organizations. Each commune official had multiple roles and information flowed between sectors. The end result was community mobilization of resources in an organization-intensive social structure and increased hopes for improvements in health. The propaganda was effective in health promotion. In the late 1970s, township management districts and village committees replaced the brigades and communes. The responsibility system gave households responsibility for the productivity of specific plots of land in order to fulfill government quotas. Members of a health project funded by a Hong Kong-based primary health care organization discovered a number of problems. Community mobilization was waning, and mass organizations were not effective. The insurance system collapsed. People tired of political slogans. Although other countries are now adopting community health approaches, China is moving away from this approach.     

Against all odds: Revitalization of local self-help alternatives by longterm mental health consumers

The article presents a grounded theory case study of a consumer-run alternative services organization, operated by and for people labeled chronically mentally ill in Michigan. We analyze the organization's emergence and development as a process of revitalization through which participants mobilized to transform their private and public identities. Innovations, including self-disclosure rituals and advocacy strategies, were developed by the group's founder during a period of social dislocation following deinstitutionalization. Subsequently, through their advocacy efforts for and with other consumers, group members laid the foundation for a unique form of locally-based political activism, blending innovative self-advocacy strategies with a critique of conventional mental health care. Active participants' efforts have created a mental health consumer organization that members perceive as an empowering and sometimes rehabilitative alternative within Michigan's public mental health care system.     

Reinvigorating resilience: violence against women,land rights,and the women's peace movement in Myanmar

In Myanmar, movements for gender justice strive to foster personal and collective security, vibrant livelihoods, and political engagement during a period of rapid and uncertain transition. This article draws from the experience of the Gender Equality Network (GEN), a coalition of over 100 organisations in Myanmar. It examines three cases in which GEN sought to document existing forms of resilience and expand these mechanisms through national-level advocacy. The first describes current attempts to publicise, and eventually eliminate, violence against women (VAW). VAW is a fundamental threat to personal safety, but also to the principle of societal accountability – that is, the extent to which society upholds the interests and rights of women and girls. The second focuses on women's (lack of) access to natural resources and economic decision-making, drawing on gender-focused input into the National Land Use Policy. Finally, we examine the impacts of conflict on women's resilience, and women's increasing participation in the peace process. In all three cases, effective mobilisation and networking not only increased female political voice, but also enabled creation of a more resilient democracy by modelling effective policy, research, advocacy, and communication strategies.     

Using the Web to Teach Power Analysis

Abstract

Traditionally community organizers have used newspaper accounts of community or legislative coalition building and government records on campaign donations and business start-ups to examine the inter-relationships among interest groups, corporations, and political decision-makers. However, the prevalence of much of this data on the Internet makes some of these traditional methods obsolete. In this paper, the author describes how much of this research can be conducted on the World Wide Web.     

Community Organizing and the Detroit Water Struggle: Report from the Front Lines

At this moment in history, both the need for macro social work approaches and interest in macro social practice among social workers are growing. One macro approach that is particularly well-suited to confronting current political and economic conditions is grassroots community organizing. Some authors have suggested that most successful efforts at community organizing are those which can link the lived experiences of grassroots community members to larger movements for social justice. The struggle for access to affordable water in Detroit is a prime example of such an effort. In 2014, indignation at the announcement that the city would be shutting off the water of all those who could not afford to pay their water bills, combined with resistance to the imposition of emergency management on the city, galvanized a movement that brought together a wide variety of community members, activists, and organizers. As a participant-observer in this struggle, I conducted videotaped interviews with 15 organizers and activists concerning their views on the successes and challenges they have witnessed and the crucial “next steps” for community activists in Detroit. This article reports on these interviews and examines the lessons for community organizers that emerged from them.     

Chinese Transnationalism in Britain: A Longer History

This article looks at the early history of the British Chinese community in the light of transnational studies. It questions the belief that homeland and intradiasporic economic ties are predominantly new, save on the rare occasions that elites maintained them, and that early political transnationalism was less common still and even more sure to be elite based. In so doing, it draws attention to the role played by political elites in galvanising migrant communities. It also analyses the role played by class-based organisations in constructing transnational ties, a form of Chinese transnationalism that other studies fail to note. It finds that transnational practices and institutions pervaded the early community in its immigrant phases, both from below and from above. This immigration was overwhelmingly proletarian, but nonetheless transnational. Though basically economic, the transnational community was also political. Capturing a mass base among Chinese overseas was a central strategy of late-Qing dissidents. Crucially, China's early radicals shared a Cantonese origin with their compatriots in Britain, North America, Australia, and elsewhere. The article's findings challenge transnational theories, which stress contemporaneity, economics, and elites. The political cultivation of Chinese in Southeast Asia by Republicans and Communists has been the subject of numerous studies. Far less is known about analogous activities in Europe. By exploring early Republican and Communist influences on the Chinese in Britain, this article traces further paths along which diasporic nationalism spread.     

Measuring consumer digital engagement and political consumerism as outcomes of corporate political advocacy

Given the need for more research into consumer digital engagement in response to corporate political advocacy (CPA) within the public relations body of knowledge, this study examines CPA in the scholarly literature on business ethics and public relations. To advance the understanding of CPA, particularly how to measure behavioral outcomes of CPA, we develop and validate an original scale with four dimensions from two domains. The first domain of CPA outcomes is consumer digital engagement (CDE-CPA), which considers a variety of sociopolitical activities on social media and degrees of behavioral effort required for these activities. The second is political consumerism, which measures consumer political preference expression through purchasing behavior including buycotting and boycotting. Theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.     

Racial differences in urban neighboring

Despite mixed expectations generated by existing theories and evidence, this analysis documents clear racial differences in urban neighboring behavior. Using data from a survey of Nashville, Tennessee, residents, we show that blacks interact with their neighbors more often than whites do, and in a greater variety of ways. The only noteworthy similarity between the two groups is the positive impact of neighboring on feelings of community affect. Overall, our results support the view that neighbor relations — like other kinds of informal participation — have helped blacks cope with constrained social opportunities and provided them with access to resources unavailable through formal institutional channels.Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1989.     

Local and Regional Governments and Age-Friendly Communities: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area

The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which cities, county departments of adult and aging services, county transportation authorities, and public transit agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area have in place age-friendly policies, programs, and infrastructure in the areas of community design, housing, transportation, health care and supportive services, and opportunities for community engagement. The most common age-friendly features include those that target alternative forms of mobility (for example, incentives for mixed-use neighborhoods and changes to improve the accessibility of public transit), while the least common policies and programs are those that aim to help older adults continue driving, such as driver education programs, driver assessment programs, and slow-moving vehicle ordinances. The article concludes with policy and research implications of these findings.