From Grassroots to Grasstops: NAMAC Advocates on the Hill
On my first post-election trip to Washington, D.C., in early February this year, I made the observation to the young journalist sharing a cab with me that the city seemed so bright and lively. As it reawakened to a new beginning—and hopes for stimulus dollars—it was still wrapped in reminders of the November triumph: Obama banners, flyers, murals, and window posters everywhere. She replied, “You’re from San Francisco? It’s funny, all my West Coast friends who come here now say that. So romantic.” Perhaps. But the line, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead,” did come up for me as I ran from meetings to appointments to receptions to dinner gatherings, trying to pull together a coherent picture of how we can move our cultural advocacy work from the margins to the center in the Obama era. No doubt, there is a sense of true empowerment: “we” are part of government now, and it is our responsibility to make sure our voices—representing so many who have never had any reason to believe in democratic participation—can have a once-in-a-generation chance to make a major impact. And for us, it is around what we know best: the arts and media culture.
During the first meeting I attended at the Media Consortium conference, I noted that story and values still trump technology. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and creator of the campaign site MyBarackObama, told us that online social media was strictly a method and a tactic that the campaign used to attract passionate people, organizing them around values and vision. Hughes’s objective was to connect those individuals through a strong story (why this candidate is important) and a strong fundraising infrastructure (how your money will impact the campaign) and to point people to on-the-ground organizing and real world events and gatherings (how you can participate locally and in your community to get Obama elected). The online world, with its agile ability to show videos and gather trusted guides and testimonials, while building a longer narrative arc for the candidate, was just the first step in the chain of connecting and communicating to people why “this is important.” Hughes made it very clear that no technology or cool gadget was deployed unless it had a proven ability to develop both the organization and the ground troops.
At that same meeting, Art Kleiner, the editor of Strategy + Business magazine, laid out the sustainability challenges for both commercial and nonprofit media, offering this key insight: “All media has two basic assets: to convene an audience, and see what no one else sees.” The more distinctively we can deploy these assets, the more we have a chance to thrive. The way we communicate to and relate with our audiences—by building and expressing an identity that includes them—will help us through the chaos of this period. Bringing people together around common values, building relationships that matter, and experimenting with developing models rather than staying static, Kleiner said, was the “key to getting to something better” in the long run.
Energized by these thoughts and those ubiquitous Shepard Fairey images of Obama coloring the urban DC landscape, I started talking to media reform colleagues around town like Harold Feld (formerly of Media Access Project), Nathaniel James and Beth McConnell (Media and Democracy Coalition), and Gigi Sohn (Public Knowledge), to test a hunch we were discussing among NAMAC staff members after the election.
I wanted to gauge how we could build a new arts advocacy movement to include the voices and expertise of community arts and media organizations who have little to no representation in government, be it local, state, or federal. Those February conversations led to the development of a project (now seeking funding) called the Campaign and Policy Institute. As a first step towards re-animating a policy and advocacy program for NAMAC, we are designing it to train a group of visual and media arts leaders in the tried and true tools of advocacy—from mobilizing the grassroots to influencing the “grasstops” and elected officials. The goal is to train those who can work with and train others throughout their networks, building up arts advocacy capacity where it did not exist before.
When we returned to Washington at the end of March for the Arts Advocacy Days, we had already gotten strong interest from arts organization colleagues to sign on as interested collaborators in the Campaign and Policy Institute. During that visit we spent a day in advocacy training with Americans for the Arts and got a terrific crash course in how to lobby on the Hill with code words like “stimulus,” “recovery,” “shovel-ready” and a new one, “budget dust”—as in, “we’re just talking budget dust for the arts”—ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.
We learned what our messages were. We memorized them. Our slogan was “Arts = Jobs,” and we had the data to support it. We heard how to include arts funding into education and healthcare reform. When our California delegation of twelve arts representatives went to the offices of Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, George Miller, and Barbara Lee, we talked about workforce development. We talked about National Service and the Digital Arts Service Corps. We talked about art as economic development and the need for arts education. We lobbied to increase funding for the NEA.
We watched Wynton Marsalis, Linda Ronstadt, and Josh Groban testify on behalf of the arts in a congressional hearing. And we realized how important it is to get the message out that everyone has to make advocacy a daily part of their mission. It became crystal clear while we were lobbying that federal and state funding for the arts will no longer come to us because we deserve it, especially during these challenging times. The case has to be built clearly and forcefully and expressed over and over: The arts produce jobs. Artists are vital members of the economic ecology of communities. The arts are part of the economic and workforce engine of our country. And arts education for all citizens is a right we have to fight for.
It may not come naturally to lobby for the arts as “economic growth drivers,” and collect data to support this, but it will make a huge difference in moving us from the edges to the center of the great debates of our time. If we can’t define ourselves to ordinary politicians who hold the purse strings and need votes, and can’t make the case for “why we are important,” we will simply evaporate on the contentious political stage. We elected them, and they and their staffers are there to listen and consider our requests.
We are in a populist moment again, and making it work for us is the name of the game. Who would have thought twelve months ago that the New Deal would be the meme du jour of 2009?
