January 19, 2024

As many of you know, while launching the Center I’ve also worked as a strategic advisor for Harris County (Texas) Commissioner Rodney Ellis, in the third largest county in America.

On the one hand, working in government seems – and is – very different from community foundation policy leadership.  Yet the two are very intertwined, because they’re both leading organizations that claim responsibility for community-wide strength in the regions they serve. This is true even with regard to community foundations that choose not to engage on the policy issues at the heart of their missions. Because advancing good policy is then left to government alone – or worse, has to drive for good policy while a key potential partner remains silent.

This undermines the possibility of the community’s systemic strength. 

Policy doesn’t change unless policymakers feel confident they have sustainable public support for the needed changes. Good policy ideas don’t advance themselves; they need enough demonstrated public support to enable policymakers to feel confident that their voting constituents will appreciate and stand by the decisions they make.

This is because even positive change upsets people’s expectations, forcing them to think and operate differently - in ways that aren’t even completely foreseeable. Because it introduces uncertainty, people reflexively resist it. (For a deeper dive into these dynamics, see "Adversaries as Allies," a law review piece from my time at the Innocence Project.)

No one knows this better than policymakers, who need their voters to appreciate them if they’re going to keep their jobs, or move up the ladder.  As a result, overcoming resistance to change is the key to enabling policy improvements.

Yet to be clear, the need is not to convince policymakers of the need for change, but to create demonstrated support for change from their voters. Indeed, majorities of policymakers need to see they have support and cover from their communities if a policy is to be improved. 

Policymakers need to recognize support that is strong enough to weather people’s discomfort when experiencing the change. Because experienced policymakers know that some form of counterattack on any reform is virtually guaranteed. This is especially true for policies that don’t obviously or directly benefit some voters, yet they have to endure a change and potentially the loss of a tangible or intangible benefit.

The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is a valuable example of the pressures involved. For decades, people had generally supported health care reform. Yet year after year, it wasn’t tried – or was tried and famously failed, as in the early Clinton administration. The years of inactivity in the face of need demonstrated that policymakers lacked sufficient public demonstrations of support on the issue. For their leaders to invest in such an effort, health care reform proponents had to demonstrate they had a more potent political weapon than those fighting against health care reform.  And the key to moving forward was not the strength of the supporters or the opponents, but where those in the middle – the unsure policymakers – would fall on the issue when it came time to vote.  

Simply put, it's the votes in the middle that make or break any reform effort. Because it’s only when policymaking leadership sees both the value of supporting an issue AND that there’s enough votes to enable passage that they’ll regard the issue as mainstream enough to fight for – which they know will be required of themselves and those they lead before, during, and after the specific (and always a slightly uncertain) vote on the issue.

The responses of the people in the middle dictate whether reform is possible – or will be repealed. 

In the health care example, it wasn’t until one party had the power across the legislative and executive branches to turn the relatively popular, longstanding need into policy change that leaders were willing to commit to it. Yet those same people also knew the legislation would be vigorously attacked, before, during, and after passage.  Indeed, opponents turned health care reform into an enemy of the people, and their main rallying cry in the next elections. Implementation was problematic, which supportive lawmakers then had to explain and defend – even when they, too, were concerned about whether the changes they’d made were wise.  

To vote for change in such a situation, those policymakers needed to see and feel that leading mainstream and popular voices would stand with them in the public debate, to validate and influence the overwhelming majority of potential voters who really don’t know enough about the facts to make their own educated decisions about whether or not the change was wise. Those policymakers knew the public’s sense of the reform – before, during, and after enactment - would determine the fate not only of the reform, but also their careers.  

While public support for “Obamacare” has finally firmed up across both parties, the intervening decade was extremely scary years for elected officials. In fact, many original supporters did lose, or chose to leave, their seats after voting for it. And ultimately, there was enough post-passage resistance to the law that after a decade of rancor, health care reform was almost repealed when the other party took complete power. (But for the famous last-minute thumbs-down from Senator McCain, it would have been repealed.) This despite the fact that today, health care reform is considered the status quo by broad swaths of voters of all persuasions. Yet but for the public and institutional support that enabled its narrow passage, people with pre-existing medical conditions would still be denied coverage, and those who did not receive employer-sponsored or entitlement-mandated health care insurance would simply not have realistic access to coverage.

I write all of this to say that what enabled that challenged law to pass was not just policymaker support or pure guts. It was data, facts, human stories, institutional support (or in some cases, neutrality), community demand, organizational advocacy, and more. Which was shaped, coordinated, and reinforced by various leaders from within those communities, working together. 

Systemic reforms don’t just happen. Efforts inevitably fail unless community leadership clearly, strongly, and effectively demands it. If policymakers can’t feel that, those obviously needed changes will simply not happen.  End of story. 

This may all be new to you if you’ve never been a concerted part of an effort to pass a specific reform. Yet if you apply these thoughts to your community foundation board’s exploration of whether or not to engage on policy issues at all, you might recognize many of the same dynamics and realities as government policymakers do. 

In my policy work inside government, I know it’s not enough for us to pursue laws, policy, and implementation that we know will best serve our communities. We know we need others to publicly speak up and support those issues. We know that institutional leaders are key validators and influencers, especially on changes that will increase opportunity for all. Because we know that no matter how much the community at large might want change, it’s inevitable there will be organized pushback to such changes. Policymakers need to know that their institutions will stand with them to maintain such changes.

Policymakers are painfully aware of how limited their power is. Alone, their policy reforms will go nowhere. Yet where the facts point them in a direction and they can see that other institutions, organizations, and majorities across their constituency will commit to such change, they sense its worth committing their policymaking power – and reputations as leaders – to advance such policies. They also know that if that support does not materialize after they’ve committed to an issue, they undermine their policymaking power – and even their elected seats. 

Community foundations are significant entities the intersection of policy power in their communities. Through funding, yes, but I’d argue even more importantly by finding our policy voices, understanding policy realities, and strategically engaging our communities to see the value of key policies at the heart of our missions. We have unique power to engage in these ways, proximity to those we serve, and institutional profiles that give us tremendous potential to advance our missions by thoughtfully supporting policies that strengthen our communities – and increase the ROI we provide our funders.

As I listened to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech on Monday night, I thought about the critical importance of community leadership to enable the most obviously needed reforms. Reforms that weren’t convenient, yet which morality and community strength required. Reforms that weren’t yet popular, yet which history would prove correct.

And as I woke up the next morning, thinking about my work ahead in 2024, I thought of where my work in 2023 brought me. I wondered whether or not community foundations will step into their policy leadership potential, what policymaking realities will take shape in the absolutely pivotal year ahead, and how critically important it is for those who see the need for reform to engage if they expect their wishes to become reality. And to accept that if they don’t, the failure of those policies will be partly theirs.

As I’ve contemplated 2024, I can only wonder where the future of community foundation policy leadership lies, and what’s needed to advance it. In 2023 the Center for Community Foundation Policy Leadership engaged over 150 community foundations, partnered with all the major community foundation supporting organizations, and engaged across many community foundation policy leadership fronts.  

Yet despite continued expressions of interest, field-wide pursuit of the policy leadership that’d been discussed for years has not coalesced or materialized into something recognizable. 

In the year ahead, I will continue to seek to enable community foundations to engage their policy leadership potential, yet in ways that focus more on supporting specific community foundations that choose to engage, private foundations that could leverage community foundation policy leadership in specific jurisdictions, and with community organizations that desperately want funding support and mainstream partnership for their policy goals.

I’m sharing these thoughts with you because you’re the 350 community foundation leaders who have expressed specific interest in developing your organizations’ policy leadership potential. Given your interest and perspective as to what will help your organization and the field engage more actively on the policy issues at the heart of your missions, I’d be glad to hear and discuss any and all of you about your thoughts, questions, and ideas about the same. 

If so, let’s connect via Stephen@CFPolicyLeadership.net or feel free to schedule a time for us together.  And in any event, more to come in future posts!