The Battles We Pick

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The Battles We Pick

David Shorr

23 episodes

1 month ago

Send us a text Civic strategist Caitie Whelan's professional mission is to level the playing field of public policy. As she puts it on her website, "If regular folks don’t know how to have a voice in policymaking, lobbyists do. And they are very good at shaping it for their special interests." Caitie's work helping clients climb the learning curve of policy change advocacy made her a great guest for the podcast. As she guides clients along the advocacy learning curve, Catie focuses on three ...

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Send us a text Civic strategist Caitie Whelan's professional mission is to level the playing field of public policy. As she puts it on her website, "If regular folks don’t know how to have a voice in policymaking, lobbyists do. And they are very good at shaping it for their special interests." Caitie's work helping clients climb the learning curve of policy change advocacy made her a great guest for the podcast. As she guides clients along the advocacy learning curve, Catie focuses on three ...

Show more...

Episodes (20/23)

The Battles We Pick

Civic Strategist Caitie Whelan on "Giving folks the tools to make public policy for the people"

Send us a text Civic strategist Caitie Whelan's professional mission is to level the playing field of public policy. As she puts it on her website, "If regular folks don’t know how to have a voice in policymaking, lobbyists do. And they are very good at shaping it for their special interests." Caitie's work helping clients climb the learning curve of policy change advocacy made her a great guest for the podcast. As she guides clients along the advocacy learning curve, Catie focuses on three ...

10 months ago

30 minutes

The Battles We Pick

White nationalism researcher Hannah Gais on the overlap of hate groups and the GOP

Send us a text The Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center is well known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate and extremist groups. So it was great to have one of their researchers, Hannah Gais, as a guest on the podcast. Discussing her work on White nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups, Hannah told me about the extremist voices and ideas that the MAGA Republicans have welcomed into their Party. As one example, Hannah gave the back story on the Holocaust-denier who appe...

1 year ago

45 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Veteran immigrant rights advocate Charles Kamasaki on the last comprehensive reform, and the next

Send us a text It is often noted that the last time Congress enacted comprehensive immigration reform was in the 1980s. Charles Kamasaki was not only deeply involved in shaping that legislation as an advocate, but he's also written an authoritative history of the effort titled Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die. Kamasaki has for several decades guided the work of the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, Unidos US, formerly known as the National...

1 year ago

43 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Civic Power coauthor Sabeel Rahman on bringing affected communities directly into decision-making

Send us a text Cornell Law School Professor Sabeel Rahman is coauthor of an important recent book, Civic Power, about the urgent need to revitalize American democracy with much closer links between government and those it's meant to serve. The only path to meaningful equity and true government "by the people" is to engage affected communities as genuine agenda-setting and decision-making partners. Putting the traditionally disempowered at the center entails a fundamentally new approach...

1 year ago

44 minutes

The Battles We Pick

African social entrepreneur Lolo Cynthia on getting healthy sexuality education into schools

Send us a text Lolo Cynthia is an African reproductive health activist, social entrepreneur, and experienced communicator. She shared some of the negative experiences that led her to focus on healthy sexuality and talked about how she gets schools to open up to the curriculum on sex and relationships that she developed. Drawing on what she’s observed about various advocacy efforts, Lolo has clear advice to offer on the best way to develop narratives as the basis of your advocacy on. It ...

1 year ago

47 minutes

The Battles We Pick

PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel on the battle over free speech and book banning

Send us a text Suzanne Nossel leads the US chapter of PEN, the international network of professional writers dedicated to promoting and protecting the basic right to freedom of expression. Suzanne's book on the subject is titled Dare to Speak: Defending Freedom of Speech for All. Recently she highlighted the broader global struggle between freedom and autocracy in a Foreign Affairs article on The Real Culture Wars. I asked Suzanne how we got here, how a society that had prided itself on commi...

1 year ago

37 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Memphis Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas on her Driving Equality Ordinance to Save Black Lives

Send us a text After Tyre Nichols was killed by Memphis Police officers who had pulled him over for a trivial traffic infraction, City Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas "had never seen so many CNN cars and trucks and people in my life trying to see what was the next step for Memphis." With all that interest and scrutiny, colleagues on the Council assembled a package of police reforms. For Councilwoman Easter-Thomas, most notable was a big gap in the proposed ordinance: no reforms of the typ...

1 year ago

50 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Philanthropic adviser Stephen Saloom on the unique and vital role of community foundations

Send us a text One interesting angle on advocacy are the effort some people devote to prodding certain key players to get more involved. In sectors like philanthropy, there can be a reluctance because it seems too political. As founder of the Center for Community Foundation Policy Leadership, longtime criminal justice reform advocate Stephen Saloom has been focused on encouraging and supporting community foundations to advocate on their issues. As Stephen shared on the podcast, the st...

1 year ago

52 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Advocacy evaluation pioneer Sarah Stachowiak on emerging challenges for the advocacy field

Send us a text First episode back after a hiatus of several months, so I needed a great guest. Sarah Stachowiak is CEO of the Seattle-based evaluation consulting firm ORS Impact and has been an important role model for me and helped steer me toward becoming an evaluation consultant. Sarah's firm not only does great work for clients, but they provide vital thought leadership through the excellent resources they publish. Sarah and her colleagues advise some of philanthropy's most influent...

1 year ago

43 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Early-career social worker Sadie B. S. on using creative problem-solving to meet human needs

Send us a text This episode features a conversation with our daughter when they were home for Thanksgiving. Sadie is in the early phase of a career in social work, currently working in the University of Arizona's counseling center and planning to begin studies next fall for an MSW. Social workers talk about the micro and macro levels—which translate, respectively, as service provision versus advocacy—and that's where we started our discussion. For instance health care reform makes a huge di...

1 year ago

34 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Author Sasha Issenberg on how he chronicled the major social change of same-sex marriage

Send us a text This episode's guest is a journalist rather than an advocate, the author of one of the best books focused on advocacy work. Political reporter Sasha Issenberg's The Engagement tells the story of the 25-year fight for same-sex marriage, documenting the various efforts, strategies, course-adjustments, and outcomes from the perspectives of proponents and opponents alike. Sasha says he was drawn to the subject particularly because of the way same-sex marriage burst onto the ...

1 year ago

59 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Voting rights attorney Yael Bromberg on turning the tide on voter suppression

Send us a text Election law attorney Yael Bromberg is principal of her own firm and litigation practice. With a specialty in student voting rights, she serves as outside counsel to the Andrew Goodman Foundation—which works on college campuses around the country to promote student voting and is legacy of one of the activists murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. Yael teaches election law at Rutgers University Law School and works with the Harvard Kennedy School’s William...

2 years ago

49 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Veteran advocate and evaluator Kathleen Sullivan and I review key points from the podcast's first ten episodes

Send us a text To mark the podcast being ten-episodes old, I invited close colleague and good friend Kathleen Sullivan of Fine Gauge Strategies to listen back to some of the most interesting points made by those first ten guests. Similar to the way she and I delve into our interviews for evaluation projects, I wanted to have Kathleen highlight the insights she gleaned from the guests—as well as draw connections to trends and perspectives in the evaluation field. We revisited Angela Bruce-Ra...

2 years ago

55 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Strategist and philanthropic adviser Richard Healey on cues progressives sould take from the military's strategic principles

Send us a text The podcast's tenth episode was a reunion with the former executive director of the group where I was an intern right after college. Richard Healey was executive director of not only the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy but also the Institute for Policy Studies as well as founding director more recently of the Grassroots Power Project. In fact, Richard's career as an organizer goes back six decades to his involvement in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movem...

2 years ago

55 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Climate action advocate Clarence Edwards' observations about how power works in Washington

Send us a text Clarence Edwards has worked on nearly every side of US foreign policy and politics—from presidential campaign finance to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to lobbying Congress for groups like the Friends Campaign on National Legislation and Bono’s ONE campaign for global treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS. Clarence even worked in the Washington embassy of one of America’s allies. As he says on the podcast, his career has been everything he’d hoped...

2 years ago

56 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Veteran public interest lawyer Eileen Hershenov on homegrown threats to American democracy

Send us a text In our conversation, Eileen Hershenov of the Anti-Defamation League kept coming back to the theme of advocacy's broadest challenge: to keep progressing and sustaining change over the long haul. As Eileen explained, the only way to sustain progressive organizing is by getting people involved in the effort. Having activists and leaders who are committed to seeking change is how we build progress upon progress. Eileen and I trace our career roots back to our first jobs afte...

2 years ago

52 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Consultant Terry Woodbury on how struggling rural communities can pull back from the brink

Send us a text When Terry Woodbury was fresh out of his masters program at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late-1960s, an internship with a wealthy Kansas congregation—essentially an experiment in changing local racial relations—sent him on a career path as a community organizer. Terry shares his story of facilitating dialogue between Black and White community members in Hutchinson, Kansas. Terry is white and was given a mandate to lead the process of forging relationships with black ne...

2 years ago

53 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Fetal alcohol spectrum advocate Sandra Ionno Butcher on bringing diverse stakeholders together for shared goals

Send us a text Sandra Ionno Butcher has been chief executive of the National Organisation for FASD for six and a half years—and active in efforts on behalf of the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder for nearly a decade—after spending the bulk of her career advocating for nuclear disarmament. With Sandy having lived as an American in the United Kingdom for even longer, it was interesting to get her perspective on the United States' recent tumultuous politics / fascist threat. Sandy has had ...

2 years ago

54 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Anti-poverty advocate Gawain Kripke on the importance of flexibility and opportunism in advocacy

Send us a text Prior to launching his consulting firm Double Dogwood, Gawain Kripke spent the bulk of his career with Oxfam America, most of that time as policy director responsible for the organization’s advocacy efforts. That role put Gawain in many different advocacy contexts, including lobbying Congress for measures to help reduce global poverty. As we discussed on the podcast, it also gave him an appreciation for the judgment and instincts of elected political leaders. He ca...

2 years ago

52 minutes

The Battles We Pick

Amnesty International advocate Adotei Akwei on the inside game, outside game, and movement-building

Send us a text Adotei Akwei is a seasoned and accomplished advocate who has worked for the American Committee on Africa, Human Rights First, CARE USA, and spent over 25 years with Amnesty International USA. Currently he is Amnesty's Chief Membership Collaborations Officer. That role with the organization represents a shift—one he sought out—toward movement- / power-building after many years of inside-game advocacy on human rights in Africa. The relationship between those two halv...

2 years ago

57 minutes