On a September day in 2010, I stood in front of a room of volunteers, all of whom had come to DC for the Voices for National Service (VNS) Capitol Hill Day. These volunteers hailed from nearly every state in the union. Some were alumni of AmeriCorps programs; others were board members of well-known service powered organizations like Habitat for Humanity, City Year, or Teach for America. Some were on the staff of programs that depend on Senior Corps—like Meals on Wheels. It was a very diverse group, but everyone in the room had either been in a service program or was connected to the power of national service through their work or volunteer activity. I had been asked to inform, motivate, and inspire these people and help them to successfully pass our message on to their members of Congress. As I told them that day, “Your members of Congress are much more interested in your thoughts than in mine. I’m a lobbyist, but you are constituents—that’s where the power comes from, your ability to vote for or against them.” The room was full of active, passionate voters, and we needed to be able to harness that power for our cause. I ended by telling them that change begins with individuals, and that only they could achieve the changes they sought—it was up to them to make a difference.
I was not yet working for VNS. I thought that my job that day would be just to fire up the advocates as a favor for a friend and then move on. But once that friend, AnnMaura Connolly, a leader in the social entrepreneur movement and president of VNS, had me invested in the cause, I couldn’t turn back. We had not gathered for an easy task: our main message to be delivered on Capitol Hill that day was to push back against a recent Republican House budget proposal that zeroed out the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS)—the agency that runs AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, VISTA, and other national service programs. The Republicans were in the minority—though that would soon change after the 2010 midterms—but we still wanted to push back hard against their proposal to make our point. This wasn’t a fight about how big we could grow our funding; this was a fight against a party that was ideologically opposed to the government having a role in serving communities. Their slogan was “national service is paid volunteerism,” which was false and frankly quite wounding to the hundreds of millions of people who had served and been served by CNCS programs. It was time to show Congress what CNCS was really about.
CNCS was established in 1993 and has six priorities: disaster services, economic opportunity, education, environmental stewardship, healthy futures, and support of veterans and military families. CNCS came about during the Clinton administration, but the idea of harnessing the power of civilian workers was not new. There is a long history of such service in the United States, from the beginnings of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 to the establishment of the Peace Corps in 1961. More recently, President George H. W. Bush had created an Office of National Service in the White House after his inaugural address in 1989, calling for a “new engagement in the lives of others, a new activism, hands-on and involved, that gets the job done.” On the morning of Bill Clinton’s inauguration, George H. W. Bush asked him to keep and grow the national service idea, and Clinton in turn asked George W. Bush to do the same. This passing of the torch is remarkable and bipartisan, and to me it shows that on the highest political level there is real consensus that this is a program that embodies the values of being American.
Yet despite this bipartisan idea of citizenship in service, CNCS has come under various attacks from Republicans from its inception. It has often been called a permanent boot camp for Democratic organizers, and that first poison pill has never been fully expelled from the politics of CNCS. The Republican House budget was just another battle in a war that had been fought for years.
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I spoke to those eager volunteers early on in my involvement with VNS, and little did we know the challenges we would face in the upcoming years. VNS was founded in 2003 as a coalition of national and local service programs that were all seeking to increase support for CNCS as well as increase its budget. VNS is an outside organization that advocates on Capitol Hill and with the administration for budgets and appropriations to grow CNCS programs and improve its mission. My involvement with VNS started in 2006, when I began my work with America Forward. A major player in the America Forward coalition was City Year, and they are arguably the largest and most well-known national service agency in the nation. In fact, the idea of AmeriCorps was inspired by a visit from Governor Bill Clinton (then a candidate for president) to City Year’s original program in Boston. I linked Bono up with City Year because I wanted him to connect with a US organization doing work in Africa on AIDS. That allowed me to get to know Alan Khazei and his wife, Vanessa, with whom I worked to create America Forward.
City Year has led the VNS coalition since its inception under the auspices of the indefatigable and brilliant AnnMaura Connolly, who you’ll hear from at the end of this chapter. AnnMaura is the senior vice president at City Year and with CEO and founder Michael Brown represents one of the most thoughtful, strategic, and politically sophisticated nonprofit leaders in the nation today. After successfully guiding the ideas of America Forward to victory in the 2008 presidential campaign, I worked side by side with AnnMaura to get the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act drafted and passed in time for President Barack Obama to sign it as his second bill and to have Senator Kennedy on hand for the last public signing ceremony of his life. The act was both the authorization of the social innovation agenda we advanced with America Forward and a reboot of the national service movement, a way to mature it and create a new twenty-first-century design for national service.
Our partnership and friendship were firmly in place from our time working with America Forward, but AnnMaura knew the VNS needed a little more special attention—a reset on strategy and tactics as they approached the opportunity of Obama and the opposition of the Republican leadership, notably Paul Ryan, then chair of the Budget Committee and soon to be Speaker of the House. I was still working with America Forward, and I saw a very exciting opportunity to be involved simultaneously on both projects. Social innovation was redefining the role of government, and I saw national service as the human capital pipeline to grow the best ideas in social innovation to scale. There was a lovely vision that, taken together, these two ideas would and could reshape social policy in the twenty-first century, and I wanted to be a part of that.
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After the midterm elections of 2010, it became obvious that AnnMaura was right to be a little worried. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget actually zeroed out the entire CNCS—they would get no funding from Congress whatsoever. Unlike the budget zero from that first Capitol Hill Day, this one really mattered. Looking back, this was ironically to our benefit: we didn’t have to explain to anyone how the budget was going to hurt them. Zero is a very clear message, so we were able to go right into full-scale defense mode. This was the height of the Tea Party movement, and when I went to meet with AnnMaura, I told her we needed to go local. The Tea Party had sprung up as a grassroots organization, and we needed to meet them there. We needed to get out into the communities of the Tea Party people and show them how CNCS was helping their neighbors.
This was a completely novel idea for VNS. They had previously relied on what I call elite-ball politics, calling in big-name allies to save them from one problem or another, including regular attacks from Republicans in Congress. President Clinton fought and won the first battles, and then champions like Senator Ted Kennedy put up powerful firewalls in the Senate to stop Republicans from tearing it down. The game changed dramatically with the rise of the Tea Party; Democratic majorities in the House and Senate were lost, and with those losses the protections we relied upon were weakened. It’s worth sharing that Bill Clinton originally proposed AmeriCorps at the urging of George H. W. Bush—a fact that frequently is conveniently forgotten. Republicans pounced on it then as a “boot camp for Democratic campaign operatives.” Tea Party budget cutters have taken over the Republican Party and frequently target domestic spending; CNCS is always on the list for cuts, with a justification that the US “should not pay for volunteers.” But VNS was started in the early 2000s when George W. Bush was brought to the White House on a wave of fiscally conservative Republicans in the House and Senate.
We soon realized we had a big challenge to address before we could even start our advocacy campaign: no one really knew what CNCS was nor did they really understand what AmeriCorps did, never mind Senior Corps, VISTA, or the Conservation Corps. Our labels were too varied and the brand was so diffused that its impact was not commonly visible or valued. This had a direct effect on how quickly we could localize our advocacy strategy.
What we eventually came up with was what we called the Intel model. Basically, almost all of today’s computers, PCs and Macs alike, use chips created by Intel. We wanted to go into these congressional districts and show people everything that was powered by CNCS: Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels. All of these valuable programs benefited from CNCS, but no one knew it. People knew the names of the programs; we just needed to show them that they were all part of a bigger brand. Our job was to make sure people in Congress knew just how much CNCS was giving their community, and we needed to do it quickly.
To make matters slightly more complicated, Republican opposition to CNCS had resulted in a blanket ban on active national service members, such as AmeriCorps members, engaging in any political or advocacy efforts. Republicans feared the program was a training program for Democratic campaign operatives and had won statutory prohibitions on advocacy activity. Service members are allowed to vote, but that is it; they are completely barred from participating in anything political. The regulations are quite strict, and programs that have pushed the boundaries have been caught, defunded, and publicly held up by Republicans as evidence for eliminating CNCS. This, to me, is a First Amendment issue, but it was clearly not the time to fight that battle. We were in a tough spot; VNS’s best assets are clearly the people serving local communities, but we were unable to use them. Instead, we were going to have to rely on program alumni, friends and families of corps members, and board members of organizations with AmeriCorps grants. The staff and boards of organizations where CNCS programs were operating had to do the tough and important work of directly advocating for the programs with members of Congress—specifically those members whose districts have programs served by CNCS funding. This patchwork of support would have to be quickly woven together if we were going to make any progress.
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In order to determine where we should focus our efforts, we decided our targets should be every congressional district that had an AmeriCorps program and a member of Congress we thought was reachable. We eliminated the hard right Tea Party members for two reasons: we weren’t going to change their minds, and we didn’t want to show our hand because we wanted an element of surprise. That left us with 411 offices that we wanted to target during the Easter recess, and we wanted to have at least five people in each of those offices telling a story, five people in each office saying, “If you close down CNCS tomorrow, here is what our community would lose.”
We encouraged the volunteers to include some theater. We had them bring pictures of people working in soup kitchens or building houses, we wanted them to call the press, make a big deal out of what they were doing. If their representative wouldn’t meet with them, we encouraged them to go to town hall meetings and stand up and talk there. Anything we could do to bring attention to the role of CNCS, we did. One creative group put up a billboard in Janesville, Wisconsin—Paul Ryan’s hometown—with a photo of Paul and another of a group of AmeriCorps volunteers with a headline that read: “Paul Ryan expects to be paid $174,000 a year for his public service but wants AmeriCorps members to be paid $0 for their service.”
My favorite anecdote from this campaign came from Montana. A group of Senior Corps members who worked in a soup kitchen organized themselves to show up in the local district office of Denny Rehberg, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee in charge of funding CNCS. They brought the large wooden soup spoons used to make vats of soup in a senior center in Helena, Montana. The visual prompted the local paper to photograph them, and their picture ended up on the front page of the local paper. Their message clearly got passed to their representative: he never went back to his position of zeroing out CNCS—in fact his chairman’s proposal fully funded Senior Corps. These women had made it very clear that it would be bad for their representative to be seen opposing them. This was local activism at its best: what politician wanted to be seen opposing such a wonderful group of senior citizens?
We created that sort of noise in all 411 offices during the Easter recess, and we scared enough politicians that CNCS ended up with only a small budget cut. It was a remarkable achievement. VNS heard directly from many congressional offices about the tremendous impact that had resulted from our local efforts. I was tired, but proud. We had worked hard, and we had made a difference on our own. It is always a risk to take a well-established group like VNS and change its strategic position and its culture. I was very aware throughout the process that if we lost it would all be on my shoulders, but I knew that if we won we would create a much more powerful group. In politics generally there is no second place; there is no consolation prize or Miss Congeniality sash. I had spent much of the campaign in a state of excited anxiety mixed with a deep sense of responsibility, and now I was finally able to relax. VNS had successfully developed a ground-level model, and our tactics had been successful.
Honestly, we had hoped for some more support from the White House. We asked if President Obama could do an event with some national service groups, and we had hoped for more prioritization in the presidential budgets, but they were in the midst of the economic crisis and were unable to give us the support we wanted. It was a bittersweet moment; our successes came just as our hopes for a national service-focused White House began to disappear. After our first success the White House called a meeting of organizations that were in trouble with the Republican budget proposals and used VNS as their prototype for what effective advocacy looked like. We were proof that localizing efforts was the only viable way to survive the first attack by the Tea Party. We had succeeded without their support, and they were hopeful that others could as well.
In hindsight, a number of things contributed to the success of VNS, but in no small part it was that zero that set us on the path. A zero requires no analysis—everyone knew immediately this was a big and important fight. We had a common enemy that we could use to rally everyone. The threat was so serious that it also created a need for a change in tactic. My mother was fond of the saying “necessity is the mother of invention,” and in this case it was 100 percent true. We needed to get away from the elite strategy and rapidly build a field strategy to localize the politics and fight back effectively. I think the shock of the zero snapped the community of national service participants and program providers out of a sense of complacency, in which they didn’t really care much about the big picture of budgets and advocacy but only about their own slice. When the whole pie is stolen or it never gets baked at all, everyone loses. That first big fight was, in a way, the easiest part. If we couldn’t change the zero, we were doomed. Yet the fight was far from over.
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I frequently tell clients that an effective first strike is valuable in and of itself, but it also sends a clear message that you aren’t an easy target. In many cases this affords a certain level of protection from the anti-government spending bullies who know how to come after you but rarely are prepared for you to retaliate in kind. Yet it is extremely important that you not falter after that first strike. You must be prepared to continue the fight. After that year of intensity we worked on maintaining a strong local presence, and that’s what VNS continues to do today.
It is not possible for any organization or group of grassroots activists to maintain such an intense level of effort as we did in that first blitz of all 411 offices, so instead we have moved to a focused strategy on top-tier targeted districts, which we began in 2014. Every year we select five congressional districts, two Democratic and three Republican, and focus specifically on those areas. These members of Congress are all on the subcommittee that funds CNCS; we focus on the subcommittee because if we win there, we largely just need to hold on for the remainder of the process. As budget and appropriations bills move forward we do engage the larger community, but the intense activity gets focused on those five primary targets each year.
Within those five districts we try to get in touch with every person who has worked for a CNCS group and every board member who is willing to engage with us, and we spend a year training them and teaching them how to create a relationship with their member of Congress. We basically ran a desk operation out of our office, holding regular meetings with leaders in each of those five districts. We set up activities, help them develop scripts for meetings, and coach them on their agendas. When we are finished with the year, we have a trained cadre of people and leaders who can sustain our efforts and maintain a deep relationship with their member of Congress, always reminding them of the power of CNCS. Every local person we train and every AmeriCorps alumnus who wants to share their passion with their member of Congress is one more person who can make national service a priority in years to come.
This is the future of VNS: harnessing that local capacity and beginning to build a millennial voting bloc. Millennials will control the future of our country, and VNS is trying to make national service a relevant issue to them. We have spent a lot of time thinking about this recently: What does national service look like to millennials? Is it important to them? What can we do to make national service an important voting issue for them? Our initial research on these questions is favorable and lends itself to creating this message platform and a campaign to distribute it. Millennials are more socially progressive, more globally invested, more socially active, and more willing to invest in their communities and the wider world around them. These are great qualities for a future voting bloc that could carry national service to its next level of government engagement. If we are able to make a millennial tradition of supporting national service, that value is sustainable from 2020 to 2060, as millennials will be 60 percent of the voting population over those forty years. We are trying to set up a situation where hopefully both, but at least one, political party will include a robust national service vision in their platform to attract millennial voters. If we can do that, national service can become a sustainable political force.
Voices for National Service was founded in 2003 after the national service community faced significant proposed cuts to funding for AmeriCorps. Misleading arguments about paid volunteering and government mismanagement threatened CNCS, which had become a vital source of resources for organizations facing mounting challenges in underresourced communities across America.
We needed to organize ourselves and come together to make the case for the federal investment and connect the dots between that investment and communities across the country. We needed an ongoing presence in Washington instead of scrambling when crises arose. And we did. In 2003 we worked with colleagues across the field to organize one hundred hours of consecutive citizen testimony on the Hill, offering people who worked in community programs a chance to share their story about what national service meant to them. Corporate CEOs, university presidents, leaders of faith-based and community groups, and governors and mayors across the political spectrum told stories that illuminated the critical role of the federal investment in service in communities large and small, rural and urban, across the country. Editorial boards from the New York Times to the Houston Chronicle and across the country weighed in. Thousands of citizens came to Washington by bus, train, or car to tell their inspiring stories of service and impact during our citizens hearing. We invited the members to testify, too. We worked together to earn the highest appropriation ever for domestic service programs for the next year. And that was the beginning of VNS.
I first met Tom Sheridan during the Democratic convention in Boston in 2004, which nominated John Kerry for president and introduced the nation to a young candidate for a Senate seat in Illinois, Barack Obama. I was not attending the convention but was in Boston because of my work at City Year. Tom was there at the convention with Bono, and brought him to the City Year headquarters to meet with our AmeriCorps members, staff, and champions. I was struck by the rock star but also by Tom’s ability to convince diverse groups to work together around a common mission, as I learned he had done with a divisive and disparate set of cancer groups. It was clear that Tom had a natural skill at building a cohesive movement, and I knew we needed those skills to help us build a strong coalition at VNS. Tom knew how to build a case and engage, and he did it all with discipline and sophistication.
In 2009, VNS and our colleagues across the field worked together on the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which was a labor of love led by Senators Hatch and Kennedy. The act passed with significant bipartisan support in 2009 to increase funding for CNCS. It was a remarkable achievement on the part of the national service community, and it paved the way for a significant ramping up of national service. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle came together to craft a visionary piece of legislation that focused on scaling national service in the areas where it was having the most significant impact. We made it clear that national service was something that mattered on both sides of the aisle and for all citizens. We also knew that if more Americans were given an opportunity to serve, it would go a long way toward uniting Americans to address the problems facing their communities and the country.
Despite the passage of that landmark legislation, national service continued to face strong headwinds, not just preventing the expansion of national service but also threatening our ability to maintain current funding levels. We began to work with the Sheridan Group and our colleagues across the national service movement to engage more deeply with congressional decision makers, to focus on building relationships and on the ground, in communities where national service members served. Tom played an essential role in helping us educate our coalition members about the urgency of building strong relationships. Tom helped us understand that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle needed to understand the consequences of their decisions and what would be lost if funding for national service were to be cut or disappear.
For too long, the national service movement had relied on the White House and a handful of congressional champions to help us get over tough spots. Because our system of national service relies on hundreds of nonprofits to recruit and deploy members for their service, we now needed to ask those nonprofits to help members of Congress understand how the federal investment made a difference in the communities they represented. We needed to take our message local. Members of Congress needed to understand that CNCS funding was not just a nice thing; it was necessary in their home community.
Together we worked to train a network of leaders to establish VNS chapters in states represented by members of Congress with decision-making authority over funding for CNCS. This new program designed and deployed a range of advocacy tactics, including in-district site visits, letters to the editor, op-eds, and the activation of key community leaders. As a result of this effort and other grassroots outreach, not only did Congress reverse its originally proposed cuts to national service, but it actually increased funding for CNCS in fiscal year 2016.
Tom is as good as it gets in terms of understanding the political process, and we make a good team of yin and yang. I appreciate how he pushes people to move way beyond their comfort zone when it’s required—and that’s not infrequently when you’re trying to build movements for powerful change.
My work with VNS has shown me the true power of local politics and clearly demonstrated the issues that come from public funding. We were able to avoid budget cuts year after year because of a few key lessons.
When you rely on public funds for your organization, your longevity is tied to the election cycle. Elections have consequences, and those consequences spill directly into budget battles or policy fights that can and do threaten the existence of vital programs and services. VNS learned this the hard way after the midterm elections in 2010; in order to fight to keep their funding they needed to get involved in politics, and they needed to do it quickly and effectively.
In the stressful time that followed the release of Ryan’s budget, it would’ve been easy to get distracted by the idea of a large national campaign—maybe we should put an ad in the New York Times, or maybe we should try to call in some of our big-name allies, like former Presidents Bush and Clinton. Instead, VNS recognized the local power harnessed by Tea Party members, and we quickly worked to use that power ourselves. Having local constituents meet with their members of Congress may seem like a small move, but we proved it could be incredibly successful. We didn’t ignore the support of the former presidents, and we did indeed use them in our fight, but we didn’t rely on them to power our whole campaign.
Those senior citizens with soup spoons made a difference. Congressman Rehberg saw that article in the paper and realized it would not be good to have his name listed as leading an effort to oppose those women and take food from hungry seniors. The ability to turn a simple office visit into an event covered by the press can be incredibly valuable. A powerful picture on the front page of the newspaper gets the attention of thousands of people and multiplies the message. That is relevant to any politician.
When you are in a budget fight, don’t justify your programs by talking about billions of dollars or millions of people and programs—the volume undermines the impact. We worked hard to personalize the consequences: 2,500 kids in our middle schools won’t have a reading tutor; 175 senior citizens in our community won’t get a hot meal delivered. These are real people in real communities. Politicians don’t want to be held personally accountable for these types of consequences. Personalize, localize, politicize—that’s a formula that has real impact.
Policy: Voices for National Service was founded to bring together all of the various groups and corps organized and funded under the CNCS banner (AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, Conservation Corps, VISTA, etc.). These entities engage in a fairly competitive process to see which corps and programs receive what allocations of money through competitive grants. They may be competitors for the final dollars but must work together annually on budgets and appropriations in order to secure the greatest levels of funding for the coalition overall. This is true not only when budgets are threatened, but also when political winds are more favorable and large gains can be made.
Once every ten years our work moves to reauthorizing the bill that allows CNCS to operate as an agency of the federal government. (The last reauthorization was in 2009 and was named in honor of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.) Our strategy for working the budget for CNCS spans a twenty-four-month calendar of activity beginning before the funds are ever allocated. That may seem a bit crazy, but the process is long, arduous, and competitive—even in good political times. Add opposition, as we’ve had for nearly a decade now, and the curve for success gets steeper and more harrowing.
Our process begins with CNCS as they prepare budget numbers and requests nearly two years before the money will flow. Then we work the White House to attempt to influence the president’s budget with a favorable request for the agency. This process happens through the Office of Management and Budget. If the White House is for you, the process is easy, and the power of that recommended funding level is helpful. Sadly, the opposite is true, too.
Once the president’s recommendations are sent to Capitol Hill, the House and Senate engage their respective budget committees to revise and amend the numbers, ending with a joint congressional budget resolution that sets the amounts, caps, and rules that the congressional appropriations committees can allocate for a fiscal year (this process is happening almost one year in advance of the actual spending). The appropriations committee then divides its work into thirteen subcommittees covering the entire federal government; those subcommittees have the power to put real numbers next to each agency’s budget and line-item programs. The rubber really hits the road in these subcommittee deliberations. Since the House and Senate operate on parallel tracks, it is common for the subcommittees that decide on CNCS funding to come up with different numbers. Each chamber must then move the subcommittee bill to full committee and from full committee to the floor of the House and Senate. They are given the target date of October 1 each year to complete their work and pass bills that fund the country for the next full year. In recent times they’ve missed that deadline regularly, and continuing resolutions or threats to close down the government are becoming annual moments of crisis and concern. Our work is to track that process and make changes for the better at every step. If we aren’t making progress, we’re busy keeping cuts from destroying the work of the national service organizations on the ground trying to serve people and communities in need.
Politics: For many years CNCS enjoyed being the priority of the president and of a vast bipartisan majority in Congress. George H. W. Bush had begun the initial effort of what became CNCS in his inaugural address by calling for “a thousand points of light.” It was established by President Clinton and grew and thrived. With the election of George W. Bush it grew further. Congressional champions as powerful and diverse as Senators Ted Kennedy, Orrin Hatch, and John McCain; Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Rosa DeLauro; and even Speaker John Boehner supported this agency and its programs. The community depended on this high-level support and the related advocacy effort was inside the Beltway, keeping friends and champions close and asking for favors in the critical moments.
Then came the Republican Tea Party phenomenon. The entire balance of bipartisanship and cooperation was upended. The politics went from consensual and cordial to tense and toxic in one election cycle. The new Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, threatened CNCS with elimination—he actually proposed zero funding. In that moment, VNS knew it needed to drastically change course and reinvent its strategy. The Sheridan Group immediately recommended that CNCS take the fight to the local level. We knew members of Congress really care most about what happens at home. We threw ourselves into the districts where Appropriations Committee members were from. We found all the agencies that got any funding through CNCS, we contacted AmeriCorps alumni in those cities and states, and we talked to mayors, local celebrities, and church leaders. Our goal was to leave no stone unturned in making a local case for funding CNCS programs. Perhaps most important, we translated all the good these programs were doing and then made the absence of those good programs a direct consequence for the member if we lost. We did hundreds of pages of analysis to get data: if AmeriCorps were not in Joplin, Missouri, when a tornado struck, five thousand volunteers wouldn’t have been on the streets that night providing emergency assistance, ten thousand hours of cleanup would not have happened, and hospitals would not have been able to transport patients to nearby undamaged hospitals without CNCS assistance. We got the frontpage of the Helena, Montana, newspaper to feature a photo of two older women working with Senior Corps stirring a cauldron of soup for needy seniors with the caption: “Congress threatens Senior Corps—these women’s jobs and work will be lost.” As soon as those tactics hit local areas, members began taking cover and opposing Paul Ryan. We won that fight in a remarkably quick and effective change of tactic from Beltway lobbying to local advocacy.
Paul Ryan not only kept his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, he got promoted to Speaker of the House. Then Donald Trump got elected president, and in his first budget recommendation, he doubled down on Ryan’s plan to zero out CNCS. We rallied again and made our positive case but also threatened accountability for the consequences of votes in favor of the Trump budget, and we won. As I write this, we are dealing with Trump’s second budget. The blue wave did in fact sweep a leadership change into the House, and with it champions for national service are now in important and powerful positions as chairwomen of committees that matter to the future of CNCS. Trump is still president, and the Senate is still under Republican control, so our fight remains constant and bipartisan. The work never stops, especially in these politically challenging times.
Press: You have undoubtedly heard the expression “All politics is local.” It was the favorite axiom of former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. What you may not know is that local politics is dictated by whatever is on the front page and editorial pages and websites of local newspapers. That’s what members of Congress read first thing every morning. It’s those pages that matter (no offense to the New York Times); the paper of record of any member is the local paper. Our press strategy mimicked this axiom. Local press, lots of it, and in any form we could create it.
This is not glamorous work. We wrote templates for letters to the editor so local folks could personalize them, sign them, and get them published. We trained our local advocates to schedule meetings with the local editorial board and pitch support for CNCS as a topic for them to write on. We helped create newsworthy events for local TV coverage. The CEO of the CNCS under Obama was a woman named Wendy Spencer (a lifelong Republican from Florida, by the way), who flew almost daily to communities across the country to highlight the work of CNCS and bring press attention with her. If a new AmeriCorps award was being made in Kentucky where the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee lived, she’d fly to meet him there to announce the new funding. It was hard, time-consuming work, but it achieved results. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and when we staged that photo of older women stirring soup it garnered lots of attention and support. Press is a powerful amplification of your message and your value, and a great validator of your political power and support. It’s essential to be aggressive with the press, but it need not be cost prohibitive. VNS certainly proved that point in their campaign to save CNCS and protect its funding. We’re not done yet, but we are winning.