Or check out this North Country Matters: St. Lawrence County Community Development Programs with Norma Cary and Daisy Cox. The St. Lawrence County Community Development Program is a private, not-for-profit agency that operates programs and services for low-income families to assist them toward self-sufficiency. Norma Cary discusses the programs run by the CDP: Daisy Cox talks about the Neighborhood Center Program and how it helps to feed people in need. (Sept. 22, 2015)
Here is the text of my talk.
Using Advocacy to
Build Community
Annual CDP Dinner – June 16 @ 5 pm
Parishville Fire Hall
First let me say how honored
I am to be here with you. I respect and value the work you do every day to knit
together the patches in the safety net that holds up so many of our county
brother and sisters’ heads above water.
I learned about community the
same way every one does. Our first community is the family. My bothers and my
sister, who is with me tonight, and I grew up hearing our father express
himself on community: “Be a credit to
yourself, your family, and your community.”
It is very fitting that we
are meeting in a volunteer fire hall tonight. We moved to Hannawa Falls
in 1957. In 1960 my father and many other community folks worried about what
would happen in the event of a fire in our small hamlet. Potsdam was 5 miles away and they knew that a
structure fire can take hold in the 15-20 minutes it would take a neighboring
department to respond.
So these men came together
and created a plan to build a volunteer responder network from the ground up. Their
first fire truck was an old milk truck they turned into a pumper. They were off
and running and never looked back. The women of community supported their efforts
with bake sales and field days.
My mother was known as the
Pie Lady of Hannawa because she would bake 30-40 pies in a day for church or
firemen’s bake sales.
So to me, community is very
personal and one of the ways we built it is through advocacy. One definition
for Advocacy is “an activity by an individual or group which aims to
influence decisions within political, economic, and social systems and
institutions.”
I actually like to think of
advocacy as problem solving – people recognizing there is something that needs
to be done and coming together to do it.
When it comes to advocacy, I’ve learned that we have
to take into account psychology.
For example, everyone wants to help the sick, but not
the unemployed.
Research explains why
health-care costs are running out of control, while costs to unemployment
protection are kept in line. We tend to view illness as the result of bad luck
and worthy of help. In modern societies, more people die from lifestyle
diseases than from broken legs and infections, and there are considerable
socio-economic differences in who will suffer from these lifestyle diseases.
But we continue to think of illness as random accidents. This even applies
across the political spectrum, where conservatives who normally oppose
government spending think of sick people as unfortunate and deserving of care.
The reality is that you are
far more likely to become unemployed – or underemployed – through no fault of
your own – by accident, let us say, than you are to get sick, which is often a
result of deliberate choices you’ve made. But we believe - and policy makers
continue to act as if - “bad luck” is related to health care rather than
employment.
When it comes to advocacy, I’ve learned that you can find
partners in strange places.
Thousands of truck drivers are combating human
trafficking, one truck stop at a time. Truckers
Against Trafficking, or TAT, is a nonprofit organization rallying America’s
3.4 million truck drivers to combat trafficking. Over
214,000 people have trained by TAT; they have partnered with hundreds of
companies in the trucking industry, like Wal-Mart Transportation and UPS.
Here’s another example of how
advocates working on Human Trafficking can intersect with another group. Modern slavery – labor trafficking - is
destroying the environment' - If slavery were a country it would have a
population of some 35
million people and the gross domestic product of Angola. Angola is small and poor, but it would be the
third largest emitter of CO2 (2.54 billion tons per year) in the world after China (7.39 billion tons) and the United States (5.58 billion
tons). So by combining forces, these two powerful advocacy groups could
have even greater impact.
In another example of Climate Action - Labor groups and environmentalists are teaming up to
push for more action on climate change. The two have not always been on the
same side when it comes to things like building natural gas pipelines. But now,
both say going green is a social justice
issue.
When it comes to advocacy, I’ve learned that using the
lens of Public Health helps to re-frame issues that seem at loggerheads.
We just had another horrific
example of the problems of gun violence in our country this past weekend. But
as long as we talk about gun violence through the lens of the 2nd
amendment, we won’t get anywhere. But when we talk about gun violence through
the lens of public health, we can change the conversation.
If a virus was killing
thousands of people every year, we’d mobilize the resources of the entire
medical community to act. Think about our national response to the threat of
Ebola a few years ago – we changed our health care system into an early warning
system to prevent infection, almost overnight. And Ebola only threatened us
externally.
When it comes to advocacy, I’ve learned that understanding
just how big a problem is helps to expand your community & advocate base.
We have a tendency to develop
short-sightedness when we are confronting a problem – fixing it or at least
alleviating the immediate effects tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
Yet if we take a step back, we can see things more holistically.
Let’s take the current crises around Substance Use as
a case in point - Almost 50,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2014, and about 14,000 of those
people were under the age of 35. We now have firm evidence that substance use
during adolescence can cause long-term brain changes. And we know that almost
everyone who struggles with addiction began using substances before the age of 18.
We’ve tried treating drug
abuse and dependency as a crime and punishment problem, only using law
enforcement, the courts and the prisons system as the “fix” for over 2
generations now. As is usually the case, when you declare “war” on something –
poverty, drugs, etc., you only bring one tool to the job. You know the old saw
about if you only have a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
New York State has finally started seeing the problem of drug abuse
– particularly opioids and heroin abuse – in a more community-based, holistic
way. The state legislators and the governor have created new legislation passed
just this week that tackles some of these related problems.
Local communities are
focusing on it as well. Mayor Tim Currier in Massena has created a task force
to look how to rebuilt Massena’s economy and community. Like a lot of places,
the old economic driver – the big industrial plants – are gone, taking with it
the basis for Massena’s economy. Drugs are one of the things that rushed in to
fill the void.
I’ve been talking to people
in Jefferson County who are tackling the same issues
of rebuilding community and the economy by bringing together all the players
from every stakeholder group that they can entice to the table. We need to see
that same county-wide effort here in St. Lawrence County. It is not enough for
Massena to working on these issues – we all need to come to the table.
Mayor Currier says “There is nothing wrong with Massena that
what is right with Massena can’t fix.” That’s a great tag line and one we
can apply much more widely as we rebuild community and find the solutions to our
problems from within our own resource base. I like to say that St. Lawrence County and the North Country are resource rich but information poor
– we don’t know all we have going for us and depth of our community and people
resources.
Why is building community so important? It turns out
that money really does change everything, even the way you socialize
The latest research findings illustrate
how having more (or less) money can radically alter the fabric of our
relationships with other people, changing how often we socialize — and with
whom.
In examining several decades
of household survey data, researchers found that as people make more money,
they spend less time socializing with others; they spend more time alone. And
when they do socialize, they spend more time with friends than with family
members or neighbors. They have less overall connectedness to community.
Compared to a low-income
individual (earning $5,000 a year), a person from a higher-income household
($131,000 a year) spends fewer evenings each year socializing with other people
— even after controlling for differences in hours worked.
Compared with people in the
bottom 25 percent of household income, higher-income people (top 25 percent)
spent fewer evenings with family and fewer evenings with neighbors each year.
But when it came to friends, the situation is reversed: Higher-income people
spent more evenings with friends than their low-income counterparts. And those
gaps get even wider as you move farther out on the income spectrum.
We’ve all seen a fraying of
the social fabric in recent decades. The number of people saying they have no
close friends or family members roughly tripled between 1985 and 2004, and the
size of the average close social network has shrunk, as well. So if the
relationship between income and social behavior that researchers are finding is
true, then it’s only natural that decreasing social interactions will be one
consequence of that change.
One positive trend we can
note is that a growing number of colleges and universities are emphasizing
civic engagement in their curriculum -- a move those institutions say is in
response to an erosion of public discourse.
The great news is that Doing Good Can Do You Good
It turns out that helping helps the helper. Some
volunteering, such as taking a housebound person’s dog for a walk, is physical
and can help improve your fitness. But merely connecting with people has health
benefits too. Volunteering may also reduce stress by
taking your mind off problems and helping you relax.
I want to leave you with two thoughts tonight:
So Wes is man who has led a very purposeful life. He said something that really resonated with me that afternoon at Clarkson.
“If you are working on something that
can be finished in your lifetime, you are thinking too small.”
So don’t be afraid to tackle
really big things and don’t be discouraged if you don’t see all the fruits of
your labor. Most of the women and men who labored for 72 years for Women’s
Suffrage in America
never lived to see the 19th amendment pass in 1920. But they never
gave up.
Here’s my second point:
In 2018 the entire Board of
Legislators for St. Lawrence County are up for reelection. Think about taking
your experience, your compassion and your understanding of the real problems of
people in your community and throwing your hat into that political ring. And if
not at the county level, then at the town or village level.
We know that all elected
bodies in this country – no matter how local or how lofty – don’t look like the
people they serve. Those elected are invariably too white, too male, too old, and
too well-off to look like their constituents, for the most part. The truth is,
if you don’t have a seat at the table, you don’t have a voice.
We are not going to change
how we look at and solve the fundamental problems in our communities until we change
who we elect to work on them. You know more than you think and you certainly
have the skills to run things. Consider taking that next step toward serving
your community.
Thank you for all you do and
for your kind attention tonight.
