Connect our work lives to their cause
APEP has the privilege of working with Verité, the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, and Made in a Free World on a project that will help companies understand and avoid the risk that their supply chains will include trafficked individuals. We like this campaign from Not for Sale: “work free for a day so others can be free forever.” It asks us for money, but in a way that connects our working life to the cause. In a month when the U.S. and France celebrate revolutionary commitments to freedom, it’s a useful reminder that millions currently are denied theirs.
Scaling up through normative change
Efforts to achieve “scale” get a lot of attention. Amidst the clog of advice and lessons on scaling up, this take caught our eye: scale up by establishing a new social norm. Howard Husock highlights examples – like the “village movement” around aging in place – to show how good ideas have been taken to scale by cultivating a new norm that inspired others to adopt the approach. As Husock acknowledges, influencing norms ain’t easy. But it’s one powerful way for good solutions to social problems to achieve scale.
Post-breakfast debrief
For idling vacationers who missed out on our recent Advocacy Evaluation Breakfast, Sue Hoechstetter of Alliance for Justice and David Haiman of Movement Matters shared their new tool for assessing community organizing capacity, PowerCheck. Thanks to Sue and David for leading a rich discussion about key indicators of capacity and the intersections between community organizing and advocacy. Check out their presentation here. Or give the tool itself a whirl – it’s free!
Next Friday sans So What?
Next week we APEP-pers will be far flung across the globe, so look for your next dose of gentle snark on July 31.
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep.
