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July 28, 2006
"United Vision for Idaho (UVI)"
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Roger Sherman and Judy Brown, Program Director and Director of the Idaho Center on Budget and Tax Policy at United Vision for Idaho. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on July 28. You may need to hit refresh periodically during the interview to see the latest responses. Read background Silver Spring, MD
How did you get involved in social justice work?
Judy Brown
My parents took a steep slide into poverty when I was 6. I ended up growing up in the 1950s and 1960s a low-income neighborhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that was a little pocket of poverty surrounded by upper-middle class splendor. My neighborhood was about half white and half Chicano. The surrounding neighborhoods were essentially 100 percent white, which helps explain why my little neighborhood was located within the boundaries of a top-notch public high school. I should also add that I have four brothers and no sisters, and I am the second-oldest.
It was a unique vantage point for noting and wondering why girls were treated differently than boys; white kids were treated differently than brown kids, especially if they spoke English with an accent; people with money were treated differently than people without, and so on.
I eventually went off to Cornell on a scholarship and although I majored in chemistry, I also became fascinated by economics. I joined the Peace Corps partly to see what poverty was like in other parts of the world. Then I did graduate work in economics. Initially I thought I was interested in environmental economics, but gradually realized what I was really interested in was the distribution of income – how we explain, justify and rationalize the coexistence of poverty and wealth, and how we can use public policy to promote fairness.
Roger: I grew up in a family that had a strong commitment to justice. As children of immigrants and of the depression, my parents—my Dad was a social worker and my Mom a teacher--gave me a sense from early on that we all have a role to play in making the world better. I was also raised in the Unitarian faith, which led me to connect making the world a better place with my religiousness. As a kid in segregated Houston, Texas, I also began to see how race was being used to drive us apart.
In college I began to develop my activism and joined VISTA in 1979
to learn the ropes as an organizer. That’s how I got to Idaho. Since then I have worked for three organizations working for social, economic, and environmental justice. I have been with United Vision for Idaho since1996.
Hailey
Hi,
My wife and I have been in coversations with New York, Phoenix, Denver and San Jose Youth At Risk. Our committment is to bring to Idaho, those aboove organizations' work. We intend to be able to provide to youth identified as "at risk", a future that they create, invent or design, free from who their past dictates they will be. We would love to work with you in conjunction with what you've set up to strengthen our mutual visions.
Thank you,
Tyler Lohrke
208-720-2514
Roger Sherman
It sounds great. I don’t know a whole lot about the organization. What sounds fantastic about it is the idea to have it be owned and controlled by youth, and that fits so closely with our vision of people determining what direction is best for them. I think that too often particularly youth are asked to become part of programs they don’t control, and then they choose to go elsewhere, and often I think that’s why youth become at risk for various kinds of problems and don’t get the opportunities to be the most they can be. So we would be excited to work with you and other folks in Idaho who we would see as sharing our vision of self-determination.
Judy: It would be so exciting to have a group like this join the UVI coalition and be more active in Idaho in general because the advocacy community in Idaho has some empty spots in it and developing ongoing voices for children of all ages has been an ongoing need. There are efforts underway to improve advocacy for younger children. UVI also has a member group called the Idaho Progressive Students Alliance that is student activists, mostly at the college level, but also at the high school level, which UVI started and developed.
Over the last year, I worked on a research piece with Idaho Kids Count on the transition to adulthood on how young people in Idaho between 18 to 25 make the transition from childhood to a self-sustaining adult. There’s so much need in this area in Idaho, and it would be so exciting to have an organization take the lead in this area.
Savannah, GA
What advice would you give to a group of organizations that wanted to start the process that you have.
What would you do first?
Where did you go for help?
Roger Sherman
When UVI started, we worked closely with regional organizations called the Western States Center, which is in Portland, Oregon. And in the early days, when we had no staff and no infrastructure, Western States Center helped provide some of the staffing to facilitate initial meetings, to support our director-to-be, and help to guide us through that process. At that point, I was the director of a statewide low-income organization called the Idaho Citizens Network. Much of the basis for this work was really long-term relationships among and between key staff and leaders of originally 14 organizations. So we were building on a history of relationships and trust that had been built up among those organizations and the people, but a great deal of what UVI had to do in the early stages after we were born was to really solidify that trust among the groups.
We had an incident where the members of the AFL-CIO were very angry at the Idaho Conservation League. Now, these are both members of the United Vision for Idaho, but the union members were angry about the closure of a sawmill which they blamed on conservationists. So it was disconcerting to have the president of AFL-CIO and about 200 union members in the parking lot of the Conservation League with the Conservation League staff on a balcony above them, with everyone shouting back and forth. It has taken some time to heal that kind of a rift because that wedge was driven in pretty strongly, but over time, there is increasing trust between conservation organizations and the unions. Some of it is the that the union leaders are becoming more aware of the impact of NAFTA and the policies of the federal government more than the interests of the conservation community who were not really working to close the mills or stop logging altogether.
So we have done some visioning process, such as if you were looking out some 20 years, what would we want things to look like? We did that with all these groups sitting at the table and realized that it was remarkably similar among the groups gathered, including conservationists and union members, gays and lesbians, low-income people, et cetera. We found that when we looked out that far, we would say this is the world we’re looking for, but when we looked at the world we’re living in today, we’d find there were huge wedges being driven between the groups. Our job is to resist those wedges.
Judy: UVI has worked over the years very hard to develop a mission statement that helps keep us focused on the longer view and the boarder picture. I also think that in addition to those relationships and the mission and the vision, from almost the very beginning, we also saw a role for fiscal work in the organization as a very important hub for progressive activism. And that is because Idaho, like many states, is a relatively low-income state, and we struggle really hard to fund public priorities. What we don’t want is for different members of our family to fight with each other for a piece of the budget pie when the problem really is that the budget pie is too small. So that’s why we work a lot on the tax side and making sure that the state is able to generate revenues to fund those priorities.
As Roger mentioned, The Western States gave help in the beginning, but on the fiscal side, there are lots and lots of resources nowadays to help state groups, such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Economic Policy Institute, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, US Action, and United for a Fair Economy. Focusing on the size of the budget pie rather than fighting over the pieces of the pie allows us to avoid being wedged apart.
Skokie
How do you engage new partners to stay the course of alliance work when they themselves are struggling to keep their organizations afloat?
Roger Sherman
We made a commitment early on to do ongoing organizational development with groups in certain priority areas which are determined by our board at a yearly retreat, but certain things have been ongoing from the beginning. It’s mainly focused on under-resourced groups and groups in priority areas that we have determined such as Latino groups, GLBT groups, people of faith, and youth. So we have both done issue work with those groups, some level of fundraising for those groups, and some level of board and staff support and development.
Judy: Our executive director, I think, has done a great job of thinking very long term about how to grow the movement. We have such a tough time in Idaho funding our various works, so he has been involved for some years now in creating what is called the Fund for Idaho, which is a progressive alternative to a community foundation. Community foundations, at least in Idaho, generally don’t fund things that are risky or that are social-change or activist oriented. So they have been putting together an endowment which, over the years to come, will continue to grow. The Fund for Idaho has now has several small grant cycles, and I think we are all confident that in the future, it will be there to help sustain our work permanently.
Roger: We also house the Alternative Workplace Giving Fund, an alternative to the United Way, which was started prior to UVI’s development, but we have helped to sustain and grow it so that it can be an in-state funding mechanism for social change and other groups who are not part of United Way’s giving structure.
Boston, MA
What type of decision-making model do you use to ensure buy-in among your 24 member organizations and ongoing forward movement around critical issues of shared concern?
Judy Brown
We have always had a unanimity rule for board decisions when we are going to speak out on a public issue publicly. That has obviously led to some interesting discussions at board meetings, but in the tax arena, for example, we started off working on fairly specific tax issues and got fairly specific endorsements to speak out on and even propose policies that would improve the fairness of the Idaho tax system. We have another broad endorsement in the area of accountability for tax breaks, public exposure about who benefits from various tax breaks. Those are both two broad areas in which we do a lot of work.
Roger: Over time, as trust has built, the kinds of unanimous decisions have also gotten to be tougher ones, harder-core ones. Last year, for example, the president of AFL-CIO in Idaho made the motion for us to oppose the ban on gay marriage that will be on our ballot in November. In some years past, that would have been much more controversial as we had taken some safer positions in earlier years, and I think everybody was very pleased that it was the AFL-CIO’s president, and there was unanimity on an issue which there is a very serious wedge that is being used to drive us apart.
Judy: It was very moving. There were tears in people’s eyes at that board meeting.
New York, NY
Integrating policy research and organizing is never easy! How does this work in your organization in practice, and what advice would you have for other grassroots organizations or coalitions that want to arm themselves with the best information possible on their issue given constraints of money and time?
Judy Brown
First of all, Roger and I work very closely together and I think we work well together. I also think that we both keep in our minds that our ultimate goal here is policy change that will make Idaho a better place. Roger’s the key organizer, and I’m the policy analyst. We both keep in mind that the goal were working toward is policy change and that that needs both the research and the organizing to happen.
We have, over time, developed two advisory groups that help us with our work. One is an action group that helps with messaging and moving issues, and the other is what we call a policy group, but it’s more focused on the issues and their consequences. One becomes more active than the other depending on the issue, and the practical matter, given our resources and time, we are only capable of engaging in two or three issues a year. Between interacting with the action group and seeing what they are excited about and interacting with the policy group and thinking about what the impacts of different changes would be, clear priorities generally float to the surface.
Roger: As an organizer, I don’t really believe that knowledge alone is power. I think that knowledge of the kind of research and analysis that Judy does and that we get from other sources, when tied to organizing and media strategies, does give us some power to be able to affect the public debate and change the political decisions that get made. So we have attempted to marry those pieces together--analysis, research, people power--in such a way that the research becomes vital. There’s lots of good research that never gets to be part of the debate no matter how good it is, and we have been able to figure out ways to create power in certain arenas where groups like ours have not traditionally played.
Until we started our work, the whole tax discussion was a business-oriented discussion, and the only people who attended Tax Committee meetings were the lobbyists for business. And they have, of course, always got what they sought. We don’t necessarily get what we want at the committee level all the time, but we do win in the court of public opinion and in the media, which has helped to shed policy over time so that the debate has become more on our terms, both in the arena of taxes, in the arena of wages, and also in the discussion about campaign finance and campaign-finance reform.
Nashville
How are you able to organize people in such a large and often rural area such as Idaho?
Roger Sherman
: It is a challenge to organize people across these distances. Our capabilities have been improved by technology. E-mail has helped us connect activists who are in pockets all over the state and in rural areas and in small cities. We embarked last year on a program we call New Vision, New Voices, which was an effort to bring in voices from around the state in regional meetings to surface leaders in social justice work in communities throughout the state who could then be part of a larger network and give us connections to ideas and strategies and elected officials in parts of the state where we didn’t have them in the past. A lot of the statewide groups in Idaho – and we’ve been guilty of this ourselves – will act as statewide groups because we sit in the capital of the state, but we are committed and continue this work to reach out to people around the state. I wish we had the kind of resources that would allow us to have staff that is located in various areas of the state. Judy is in northern Idaho, about 300 miles from Boise, but we go north, south, east, and west, and there’s still a lot of territory in between. Through the New Vision, New Voices project, what we hope to be able to do is to train a few leaders in each community who can then act as stronger catalysts for ongoing coordinated social change work at the state level.
Judy: I would like to broaden it from organizing in such a huge state to outreach across such a large state. Our work is, of course, evolving. A few years ago, we began making ourselves available to do presentations to Rotary Clubs, and that is a very effective way, in a state like this, to get before smaller communities.
Roger: And before an audience that is not our usual suspects.
Judy: Not our usual suspects, but often surprisingly sympathetic to our point of view. As time goes on, we will probably do less of that as we rely more on our Web site.
Roger: Really? (Laughs). I think we’ll continue to do face-to-face work.
Judy: (Laughs) I also want to mention our press work. One of the things we need to do in Idaho is reshape the way people think about government. Cartoons can be good for that. For a number of years, about five, we have joined the legislative session, commissioned one cartoon a week that puts our frame on some timely issue. And we make these available free to newspapers all around the state. We get especially good pickup from some of the smaller rural weeklies. That’s a fun piece of our work, I think.
Roger: Me, too.
Tempe, AZ
How do you sustain yourself in this work? How do you keep at it when the obstacles are so huge?
Judy Brown
On the one hand, I am doing exactly the work I always wanted to do, and I feel very lucky in that regard. On the other hand, I also know burn-out is an occupational hazard – plus I maintain a hectic travel schedule. I think I have gradually become more intentional in shaping how I structure my time to nurture myself.
I like to spend time alone in nature. Idaho is a very, very beautiful state. I try to drive between Boise and Moscow, with time for stops along the way, at least twice a year.
I also like to go to art museums. I go to several national conferences each year, often in large cities, and I try to make time to go to a museum.
I joined a book group a number of years ago, both because I love to read and because it helps me keep in touch with good friends in Moscow.
I have belonged for a long time to the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Moscow, and that sustains me.
I spend lots and lots of evenings and weekends at home with my family.
Roger: I have been doing this work in various forms for the past 27 years and my faith remains strong. This work is about struggle but it’s also about fun. I work with fantastic people and get to deal with important issues almost all of the time. I tell people that I make a distinction between “the work” and “the job”. If “the job” ever gets to be more than “the work”, I’ll know it’s time for a change. The work for justice and the people we get to be involved with sustain me. And too, my family and friends keep me going. There are days when the best thing I can do is go home to my three girls and forget all about the fight—and just play. After all they—and everyone else’s kids—are the reason we do this work. Isn’t it?
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The Brotherhood/Sister Sol Will Allen of Growing Power Community Food Center and Anthony Flaccavento of Appalachian Sustainable Development Padres Unidos Bob Fulkerson, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada David Utter, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana Hopi Foundation Bhairavi Desai, New York Taxi Workers Alliance Joyce and Nelson Johnson, Beloved Community Center Arnold Aprill, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education David Cohen, Advocacy Institute co-founder Sandra Barnhill, Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers, Inc. Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger Montana Human Rights Network Hawaiian Community Assets Abby Scher, Independent Press Association-New York Eddie Bautista, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest Richard Townsell, Lawndale Christian Development Corp. Parents United for Responsible Education Lily Yeh, Village of Arts & Humanities Andrea Cruz, Southeast Georgia Communities Project Marilyn Smith, Abused Deaf Women's Advocacy Services John Logue, Ohio Employee Ownership Center Gerry Roll, Hazard Perry County Community Ministries Lateefah Simon, Center for Young Women's Development Regional AIDS Interfaith Network (RAIN) Terrol Johnson and Tristan Reader of Tohono O'odham Community Action Ruth Wise, New Road Community Development Group Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums John Parvensky of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless Dale Asis of CAAELII Cynthia Chandler and Cassandra Shaylor of Justice Now Bill Rauch of the Cornerstone Theater Company Milo Mumgaard, Executive Director, Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition Phill Wilson of the African American AIDS Policy and Training Institute Chris Fitzsimon of the Common Sense Foundation Leadership Talk with MOSES Transportation Task Force of Detroit Leadership Talk with The Brotherhood/Sister Sol Hope House Director Carol Fennelly From Crack House to School
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