ISSUES IN CHILD ADVOCACY: EXPLORING THE LINKS BETWEEN PERCEIVED WEAKNESSES OF THE CHILDREN'S MOVEMENT AND OBSERVED FUNDING PATTERNS

When one compares the criticisms of child advocacy -- developed by both scholars and practitioners alike -- with the funding patterns and priorities previously described, it is not hard to draw at least some tentative observations concerning the ways in which foundations reinforce, if not create, some of the acknowledged weaknesses and/or limitations of the children's movement. What are those criticisms? They include the failure to develop a politically mobilized constituency for children, the lack of an overarching children's policy agenda, and relatively weak or unsophisticated efforts to target legislative leaders in the policy change process.

Disconnection from Constituency

If there is one consistent theme running through the literature and interview data, it is that the children's advocacy community lacks a politically mobilized constituency, with many suggesting that child advocates need to move from Atraditional to Acivic engagement models of advocacy. While those who articulate this point differ in their emphasis on who should be mobilized on behalf of children -- parents in general, business and civic leaders, low income and other historically disenfranchised constituencies -- most agree that, in the absence of constituency, professional advocates will be constrained in their ability to advance anything but the most incremental of reforms.

In their conference paper, for example, Theda Skocpol and Jillian Dickert convincingly argue that the replacement of federated membership organizations by centrally-managed and professionally-run advocacy organizations has reduced prospects for the enactment of significant new national measures on behalf of children and families. While class-based and racially exclusionary, such old-line groups as the National Congress of Mothers and the General Federation of Women's Clubs were effective in social policy reform precisely because their structure as federated membership associations allowed them both to develop local members and to link them together across states and communities in a broader national movement for change.

The issue of constituency has, of course, been more generally discussed by those concerned about the ways in which changes in America's civic and political landscape have impacted on national policy priorities. In this sense, the absence of constituency, although a recognized problem for the child advocacy community, is not unique to it. Margaret Weir and Marshall Ganz (1997), for example, relate declining levels of citizen engagement to the changes in the structure and function of American political parties, the evolution of social movements into Washington-based lobbies, and the media's growing role in the political process. Not only have these developments weakened the ties between citizen constituencies and public policymakers, they have also significantly reduced opportunities for the public participation of ordinary citizens, especially the poor. Although few seem to discuss what specific remedies are available to bring people back into politics, there is general agreement that a renewed national commitment to vulnerable populations -- included but not limited to children -- will only emerge through organized efforts to activate and link citizens together in larger networks capable of developing and implementing local, state and national reform strategies.

Lack of an Overarching Policy Agenda

Another key issue for the children's movement is the failure to develop a common policy vision or unified agenda capable of substantially improving the lives of America's children. As Weir and Ganz note, AFrom the 1970s on, advocacy organizations run by professional staff members at the state and national levels found that they could operate most effectively if they focused on single issues that could be addressed with specific insider strategies based on lobbying, litigation and fund raising (1997, 160). The tendency -- amply demonstrated in Sara Rosenbaum and Colleen Sonosky's analysis of the child health insurance program -- is to look at what is possible, or winnable, not necessarily desirable. When nonprofit organizations function both as service deliverers and advocates, the tendency toward more technocratic and specialized approaches to policy reform can be even more pronounced. Significant pressures also exist -- fueled by fund raising imperatives -- to find one's niche in the policy marketplace and to demonstrate impact.

As with constituency-building, issue fragmentation and policy specialization are not unique to child advocacy. In his interesting analysis of Apublic interest liberalism, Michael McCann (1986) analyzes the conundrum in which environmental and consumer advocates found themselves by pursuing specific or narrowly-based concerns. His argument is that the public interest movement has marginalized itself from national politics by staying Aaloof from those traditional macroeconomic issues of income, wage, price, tax, debt and investment management policies which concern most citizens. For McCann, the public interest movement's Ainherent narrowness of conceptual concern has deprived it of an ability to speak to the concerns of most Americans and to develop or promote Aa comprehensive program that specifies the actions necessary to provide welfare for all.... Preferring political pragmatism to broad-based vision, the paradoxical result is an admirable ability to win important legislative or public policy battles within a more general political context of losing the war.

McCann's critique of public interest liberalism as little more than an amalgam of diverse and uncoordinated policy efforts can be almost equally applied to the children's movement. Indeed, in concentrating on a number of discreet, if crucial, policy issues, most child advocates have failed to articulate common analytic or moral principles on which to develop a unified social vision, guide action or pursue broad-based reform. Instead, child advocates zero in on discreet policy areas such as early childhood education, immunization campaigns, medical insurance, and the like. One result is that legislators don't sense that the child advocacy community is unified in its goals and objectives.

As Republican pollster John Deardourff remarked at a mid-1990s conference on constituency building for children, legislative decision makers typically say that they know what the American Association of Retired People wants, but have little idea about what constitutes a child and family policy agenda: A Children's hospitals in most states do a good job of going in and defending their budgets. So do a lot of the day-care providers, who have an association that pays for lobbyists. But overall there is no coalition that can give a legislator the kids' agenda for this year and the bills it will take to get them accomplished. Legislators thus don't see Athat they pay any price for not doing child advocacy (The Children's Partnership 1996, 16).

Ineffective Legislative Advocacy

The lack of constituency and the failure to develop an overarching and more coherent policy approach to child well-being are both contributing factors to what some also observe to be weak legislative work by child advocates. Based on interviews with 177 state legislators, a report found that most seemed ill-informed about how well children and families were faring in their districts (State Legislative Leaders Foundation 1995). They hear little from their constituents on child and family policy matters, discern no clear legislative agenda for children and families, and hold a somewhat negative view of child advocates as Aelitists. State legislative leaders also tend to view certain strategies pursued by child advocates as either counterproductive (issuing long written reports) or ineffective (conducting media campaigns).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the report concluded that child advocates are not provided with the training, funding and flexibility essential to successful legislative advocacy. Indeed, one of the report's central findings is that legislative advocacy is neither aggressively pursued nor effectively implemented as a major strategy largely because many, of not most, foundations place restrictions on the use of funds for such purposes. This may explain why almost two-thirds of state-based child advocates reported that they neither organize their supporters by legislative districts nor organize supporters in the districts of key legislative committee chairs (State Legislative Leaders Foundation 1995).

Interestingly, a retrospective study of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count program found that, while media coverage of children's issues had increased substantially and a voluminous amount of reliable and user-friendly data had been developed and distributed, few of the Kids Count grantees were actually able to cite concrete examples of improved program or policy decisions (Academy for Educational Development, n.d.). In fact, grantees reported that, in the present political climate, positive change in their states and communities would be rare. One Indiana respondent, for example, admitted feeling ineffective at the state level, Agiven the mood of the current legislature, while another Washington state grantee felt that Athe lack of improvement in this area is due to an overall political climate emphasizing ideology over analysis. In what seems generally to be true for Kids Count grantees, this respondent felt that far more influence had been exerted in institutional arenas where agency staff had the discretion to make program or policy decisions. [11]

All of these problems are obviously exacerbated by the way in which grantmaking foundations direct their resources. Professionally-driven activities, for example, are clearly the preferred route to policy change for the vast majority of foundations that do fund advocacy. According to Jenkins, foundations directed a full 78 percent of their grant dollars to professional advocates and technical assistance intermediaries between 1953 and 1990, but only 14 percent to grassroots social action groups (1996). [12] The data developed for this paper also show a marked tendency among grantmakers to avoid grassroots constituency development activities in favor of more traditional advocacy operations such as public education through media outreach, data collection and dissemination, and technical assistance provision to governmental and nonprofit child-serving entities. The $22 million provided in 1996 for public education and media outreach purposes, for example, far outpaced the amounts directed to support new leadership development, citizen-based advocacy, membership development, and direct or grassroots legislative lobbying.

Foundations have also likely reinforced the single-issue orientation of child advocacy organizations by organizing grantmaking programs and allocating resources on a categorical (e.g., by program area) rather than a strategic basis (e.g., data generation and dissemination, constituency building, policy development). In addition to Asingle-issue funding, foundations have tended to fund short-term, usually limiting their grants to one or two years, and rarely more then three. Such short-term funding commitments, exacerbated by the shifting program interests of many foundations, work against child advocates' ability to think and act long-term. When foundations add their own program initiatives to the mix, child advocates are often left chasing after program dollars that may or may not fit within their own organizational priorities and longer-range goals.

Finally, another aspect of foundation grantmaking that many argue reduces the effectiveness of advocacy organizations is their propensity to fund projects rather than general operations. Ironically, such categorical funding may reproduce or reinforce in the child advocacy community the kind of specialized thinking and fragmented approach that many foundations seek to counteract when they fund system reform efforts to increase cross-agency coordination of services to children and their families at the state or local levels. Foundations also provided few resources to child advocacy organizations to support strategic planning processes or fund raising activities that could strengthen the institutional capacities of child advocacy organizations, assist them to think long-term, and develop a more integrated and unifying social vision.

Practitioner Perspectives. Most child advocates who were interviewed (n=12) were willing to be quite probing and candid about what they regarded as the weaknesses of their own community and the ways in which foundations feed into and reinforce them. While the interviews surfaced different strategic emphases and points of view, almost all acknowledged the failure of the children's movement to build and activate broad-based constituencies for children. One linked this failure to the Aaversion that the child advocacy community has to political action. In her view, child advocates had become:

... very seduced by slick public relations materials and advertising, much of which is brilliantly done. But who is reading it and what is it producing? There's also a lot of soft media work, a lot of >hug a kid today' type stuff. I'm quite skeptical...

She added that effective advocacy also means a willingness to challenge the status quo through public actions and events and to be able to use a lot of different strategies, including not only media work but also political mailings, community mobilization, legislative hearings, and other activities.

Others agreed as well that, while media work is important, it has often come to replace rather than support political action. One state-level advocate, for example, questioned the utility of the media for policy change, stating that in the current Amedia frenzy, some child advocates are constantly, almost reflexively, seeking media. [13] ASure it helps to raise consciousness, he stated, Abut raised consciousness is no guarantee of anything and it shouldn't be confused with policy change. This person continued in some detail to describe what he considered to be the components of effective child advocacy:

Effective advocacy is much more complicated than most people realize. It is very goal-oriented. There is executive branch policy issued by agency staff, there's regulatory reform, and there's legislation. In order to get to any of these end points, effective advocacy means having adequate information to support policy change, building a constituency at all different levels to support that reform, developing a consensus among stakeholders that: a) this is the problem; and b) this is the right solution. And then there is public education to develop broader public support for your advocacy agenda. And then there is doing all the things that are specific to advocacy, including finding or developing the legislative vehicle or policy draft or regulatory language. There is also devoting time to shepherd that vehicle through the legislative or administrative process to make sure that opposing forces are not going to amend or delete what you're trying to do. And finally, there is the monitoring of the implementation to insure that agency directives or legislation takes actual effect.

Another advocate took a different tact, arguing that the strategic use of media was very important to constituency building for children:

Effective advocacy no doubt has several different components and properly sequenced steps. But absent media communications, few others will work. Without resources to buy media access, our recourse is to obtain media coverage of the issues through stories and op-eds. This is especially critical in our state because of the overlap that exists between media consumers and political activists. Politicians want to be associated with popular effective programs, and so we are targeting the politically active voters through our media efforts. This, coupled with other forms of public or community mobilization, is what we call strategic political reform.

At the same time, this advocate noted how difficult it was to raise money from grantmaking foundations for what he saw as deeply political, if non-partisan, work on behalf of kids. In fact, he explicitly emphasized not having sought the support of major foundations in the interest of maintaining the maximum amount of strategic flexibility for his organization.

Several child advocates also discussed the need for advocates to broaden their base by moving from child to family advocacy and/or to develop a Abig picture agenda for children, youth and families. One national advocate with prior state and local experience stated that:

Child advocates haven't yet figured out how to connect the issues they care about to broader public debates, issues and concerns. There is little broad-gauged thinking and strategizing. We are operating too much in isolation from the public at large and we need to figure out how to reframe issues and to communicate more effectively with civic groups. We could and should take lessons in this regard from some of the community organizing networks that have brilliantly reframed the minimum wage issue into a living wage issue.

Other thoughtful self-criticisms included the belief that the children's movement has focused too much energy and attention on problem documentation and not enough on the development and promotion of concrete policy solutions. Given scarce resources and the need for impact, others acknowledged a tendency for child advocates to gravitate toward the Aeasier issues, or those around which broader-based constituencies can be more easily built. One, for example, asked how a constituency for Aother people's children can be built, especially when communities are increasingly divided by race and economic status? Another observed that child advocates tend to fall back on the things they know and do well, such as gathering data or writing reports, with one expressing the view that the pot of money increasingly available for data collection and analysis had encouraged more Acareerists to move into the field. These professionals, he argued, bring a Afaith in data as a primary mechanism for change, with less emphasis consequently given to community mobilization and citizen activation strategies.

While child advocates demonstrated a clear willingness to examine and critique their own practices, they were also eager to discuss their specific and general frustrations with the foundation community. Common sentiments included: 1) foundations don't really understand or like to fund advocacy; 2) grantseeking organizations often have to twist and turn to fit into foundation priorities; 3) little candor exists between those who fund and those who do the work; and 4) foundations maintain unrealistic expectations about what advocates can produce in return for the relatively small amounts of money provided. In a particularly forceful manner, one child advocate stated:

Unless they themselves are doing it, foundations neither understand nor trust advocacy. They want to put their own programs together or to dictate how we should our work. It is so maddening because we have a long-term track record and can show impact and results in terms of changes in law and public policy, but we still don't get respect for our work. If you look outside of advocacy, the picture is substantially different. When foundations fund the symphony, for example, they don't tell them what music to play. No, they let the artistic director select the programs and design the set and assemble the players in the ways their experience and creative energies suggest. After our years of experience, one wonders what you have to do to get foundations to believe that you know what you're doing, and to let you do it.

Another stated:

Foundations are stuck in a direct service or research mode. They don't understand or respect the nitty-gritty of advocacy. They say they want to build constituency, but they're not willing to acknowledge that effective constituency building takes time and resources, especially when it involves those who should be at the table but often are not. We get rejections all the time for this aspect of our work. The grants we do get are small relative to the sums that foundations pour into service agencies and systems, yet it always seems like we're held to a higher standard and expected to produce so much more.

Others expressed similar concerns that foundations exert undue influence over their choice of issues, strategies and methods. The following illustrates the frustrations that child advocates experience over foundation-designed programs and the perceived unwillingness of many to let advocates determine how best to move an agenda forward:

Foundations develop funding initiatives and we structure our programs to fit them. We all play this game, and it is a dangerous one. A good, candid dialogue needs to happen, with longer-term thinking about agendas and how to build toward them.

Frankly, we survive by pretending that we are something that we're not. So many of the good things that we've done have happened in spite, not because, of our funding.

Whether intended or not, foundations control the agenda. It is difficult to raise funds so the tendency quite honestly is to evaluate potential strategies and activities according to two basic criteria: can money for this be raised and can we win? These types of questions, however, can turn us in the wrong direction, away from some of the things that may need doing most.

Foundations don't give core support, but this should be a priority so that advocates can figure out, based on past experience and current opportunities, what the mix should be between policy work, outreach, communications, and base building. Advocates just never get the luxury of putting a program together that makes the most strategic sense.

The funding community has spent so much of its energy giving money to specific issues and projects. And so, part of the question is, are we thinking enough about constituency activation? It is a question of civic engagement, really, but we can't get in under the Acivic engagement funding programs because we are a Achild advocacy organization. Foundations think in such boxes, which keeps us boxed in, as well.

Such statements are not only consistent with the grants data reported on earlier, but also with the views that many child advocate have expressed in other settings or through other reports. In Building a Constituency for Children: A Discussion Among Child Advocates, for example, child advocates stated that while constituency building for children is valuable and even necessary, it is also time consuming and expensive, requiring far more resources than most foundations are willing to provide (National Association of Child Advocates, 1996). Based on a national survey of organizations that advocate on children's behalf, the 1995 State Legislative Leaders Foundation report also concluded that foundations' unwillingness to support legislative advocacy is the biggest barrier to nonprofit organizations' ability to underwrite a sustained and aggressive legislative advocacy program for kids. As Stephen Lakis, President of the Foundation stated in his introductory remarks to the report, A...the responsibility for getting state legislative leaders more involved will continue to rest with those organizations and individuals who are concerned about children and families.... The philanthropic community must revisit its reluctance to fund effective outreach and education to legislative leaders and those the leaders rely upon for information... (1995, iii).

Survey research conducted on state-based child advocacy organizations in the late 1980s and early 1990s reveals how little financial and organizational capacity many of these groups have to address the issues that confront them, including the enormous challenge of building political clout for children. According to Richart and Bing (1991), the average size budget of state-based child advocacy organizations in the early 1990s was $294,454. When the five largest organizations were excluded from the analysis, however, the average budget for the remaining 28 groups surveyed was only $178,779. Not surprisingly, these child advocacy organizations were severely constrained in their ability to hire both support and program staff. One-third had no full-time administrative staff, for example, while the average number of full-time professional staff was two.

Richart and Bing also note that almost all of the child advocacy organizations surveyed have no hard revenue sources on which to rely, forcing their directors to spend significant time raising non-recurring revenues year after year. This, in combination with short staffing arrangements, undercuts the ability of child advocacy organizations to work up to their full capacity and potential. Since the early part of the decade, however, some progress has been made, at least with respect to the Asoft money contributions of foundations and other donors.

A 1995 survey of 35 child advocacy groups affiliated with the National Association of Child Advocates found that they raised a total of $16.7 million to support their work. According to Richart (1997), the mean organizational budgets of these groups increased from $69,807 in 1985 (n=13) to $478,571 in 1996 (n=35). Given the considerable limitations imposed by scarce resources and by what many consider to be a difficult political climate, it is a wonder that child advocates have been able to accomplish as much as they have, not only in keeping children's issues in the public eye but also in Acreating an environment in which children's programs are not even considered as potential candidates for the chopping block (quoted in Richart 1993, 30).

END NOTES

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[11]. It is disturbing to note that, even with increased public attention to children's issues and the continued strong growth of the U.S. economy, state-level poverty rates for children either increased or stayed the same in 12 of the 17 states where Kids Count grantees began their important work in the early part of the decade.

[12]. Jenkins, however, does not believe that the funding of professional movement organizations has been an unmitigated disaster. On the contrary, by ensuring stronger enforcement or implementation of civil rights laws and other legislation won through grassroots efforts, he views professionalization as having consolidated the social movement gains of the 1960s and 1970s. Still, as Jenkins acknowledges, professionalization contributes little to grassroots participation, and funders' professional biases may have reduced the incentives for constituency building among national and state reform leaders (1994, 1998).

[13]. State legislative leaders also report that the media do not dominate the legislative process with respect to child and family policy issues, although they do concede that where media coverage influences public opinion, it can encourage legislators to act on child and family issues (State Legislative Leaders 1995, 13).