Fixing a Broken System: Lobbying for Social and Environmental Change
TLDR: Lobbying congress is often ineffective. Organizations should focus more of their time and resources on cultivating robust social entrepreneurship programs that can engage diverse stakeholders and innovate rapidly to address urgent public good issues.
As a young and passionate undergraduate I got involved with as many organizations focused on social and environmental issues as I could. In 2014, after working for the Udall Senate Campaign in Colorado, I joined forces with Population Connection. Their mission is simple: help empower individuals through family planning, education, and sustainability programs.
While Population Connection does this in a variety of ways, I want to focus on their U.S. congressional lobbying efforts as I had the privilege to lead a delegation of CU Boulder students on three occasions to participate in direct lobbying of Colorado’s elected congressional members through Capitol Hill Days. The foci of these lobbying efforts centered on increasing funding for international family planning and reproductive health programs, including additional funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), as well as to legislate the end to the “Global Gag Rule” that restricts funding to U.S. funded health facilities if they discuss and or offer abortion services. These lobbying efforts relied on a dual approach of providing comprehensive, data driven, studies supporting the request for funding and sensible international development policy approaches that ultimately gave educational and reproductive health decision making back to localities across the globe. Bridging the often siloed fields of research and policy is something that Population Connection did exceedingly well and is one of the primary reasons I so strongly supported the organization in Washington D.C. and on campus. However, their approach failed to make a real impact in an acceptable time frame and the congressional leaders failed to prioritize our requests in their agenda.
The ability to go to the offices of my state’s congressional leaders and speak with them directly about these important issues is one of the greatest privileges I’ve had. However, I believe this privilege is diminishing in efficacy as the pace and scale of polarization increase each year. Despite Population Connection’s efforts the UNFPA remains under funded and the Global Gag Rule is still in place. As long as this is the case, unnecessary deaths of women from childbirth, unnecessary deaths of children from malnutrition, and unnecessary burden on families will remain the norm in many developing countries. Hence, there is an immediate and strong need to change tactics in order to better address how research is communicated to decision makers and how this research is used to develop sensible and beneficial policies.
As a researcher focusing on economic forecasting in a U.S. National Laboratory, I do everything I can to remain unbiased and communicate technical findings to non-technical audiences, including policy makers. However, publishing findings from this research is often held up by slow administrative processes and at times by competing agendas. Worse, still, are the delays in transforming these research findings into meaningful policies and innovative technologies that would actually address systemic and acute issues. While no magic bullet exist for this, I think that organizations like Population Connection might be more effective in their missions were they to redirect some of their resources towards social entrepreneurship initiatives.
Social entrepreneurship can address issues in a more direct and empowering way than simply throwing money at the issue, if any money is ever even allocated. Furthermore, social entrepreneurship often brings more awareness to issues and cultivates space for robust and rapid innovation as many stakeholders can engage. The Watson Institute and Techstars, both Boulder based organizations, as well as Denver based Growhaus, are exemplary of how this can be cultivated and shared for the public good. With this in mind, I invite readers to discuss how to improve social entrepreneurship efforts, share resources, and strategize how to scale so that we can all work together to make address global issues.
Thanks for your time.
