(My effort to write the “Functional Psychopathy” post is running into problems. I know what I want to say, but clearly don’t know how to say it. So that one will need to wait for the future.)
For some time I have been working on a series of four presentations to help advocates understand how change strategy can support, expand, and deepen their advocacy efforts. While it is hard for me to view them as final, I thought I’d provide them for review where they are now. The links are to PDF files of each presentation. The PDFs include both the slides and fairly extensive notes (one slide + notes on each page of the PDF). If you want an alternative format, send me an email at ndelisle@mymdrc.org, and I’ll crank one out for you.
Mission 1, Mission 2: Why Our Change Advocacy Organizations Get Off Track
This presentation gives an overview of why strategy for change organizations matters at all. I focus on a very real issue (that all advocacy organizations face); how do we struggle with the problems that our core mission and keeping our doors open create? Sometimes both these missions mesh and sometimes they don’t. How can we manage the evolving relationship between our purpose and our logistics?
Making Our Lives Larger: Creating Effective Social Justice Change Strategy
This presentation tries to revive the importance of strategy as part of our advocacy efforts. These days every plan is called a strategy. But useful strategy isn’t a plan. It is a framework for dealing with the two realities of change advocacy:
- The future is uncertain and no matter how hard we try, we can’t predict it
- We have scarce resources (funding, time, capability) and we still have to produce change
Strategic Frameworks: Tools for Creating a Specific Change Strategy
Since real strategy building is no longer a standard part of non-profit change work, how do we build one? There is a long history of efforts to build strategies and a wide variety of meaningful frameworks to help. Pick the one (or more) that resonate with you and learn more about those.
Executing Strategy: Tools for Making Your Strategy Real
Once you have a strategy, how do you make it real in your advocacy environment? Again, there is a long history of methods for making what you want to be real. And Again, choose the ones that are most attractive you and explore them more.
Well, if something occurs to you, let me know!
Next Post: Systems Thinking for Advocates
