Hello and welcome back to A Better World.
This is your host, Mitchell J Raven, and I'm very glad you're
joining us again today. Today we're going to have
another very interesting show. We have invited back my
colleague and dear friend Sam Daly Harris.
Sam is one of my heroes. I tell him that.
I tell others that because I'm always talking about his books,
especially his latest Reclaiming Our Democracy Now, Sam has very
interesting background. I mean, he started off as a
percussionist. He was a musician, and he sure
is now, I imagine. But his work has become focused
on, earlier in his life, microcredits, and he worked with
Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus in the microcredit
conferences around the country and probably around the world,
helping to fund small, small loans largely to women in
developing countries, helping them get a leg up in a local
economy. And he's done a lot of beautiful
work in that space. But he's also been a major
activist and a Democratic activist, if you will, and he's
written extensively about this. He's well known.
He's a consultant in many different areas, largely around
the environment and working with the issues of global warming,
reducing the carbon footprint and empowering organizations to
move forward in the political sphere and to be effective.
That's really what Sam does, better than anybody else I know,
and he's always inspiring to me. Just a couple of other words
about Sam and his background. He's the founder and president
of Results. A good word for it, right?
An international citizen's lobby dedicated to creating the
political will to end hunger and poverty.
Daley Harris is the author of the book As I mentioned,
Reclaiming Democracy, Healing, the Break Between People and
Government recently reissued to commemorate its 20th
anniversary. So that gives you a little bit
of an orientation of Sam and Sam's work, and it's again, Sam,
a pleasure to have you on a better world.
Again, it's. Great to be with you.
Thank you for having me. I'm so glad.
So your your motivation is for us to have a civic literacy, a
civic intelligence and civic courage to use what is given to
us, as in this case American citizens, and to exercise our
franchise as citizens and let our representatives know what we
think, know what we feel, and help them get educated about
those meaningful subjects and take it from there.
How do you do it? Does it work?
Well, let me take it from how did I get there a little bit.
What was my journey? And I'm going to tell a little
briefer version of it. But as you said, I was a
musician. I played percussion instruments
in the Miami Philharmonic for 12 years and taught high school
music. And 44 years ago I founded the
anti poverty lobby results. And a lot of times I'm asked
music poverty lobby, what's the connection?
And when I look back in my life, there's certain experiences that
start pointing me in a different direction.
In 1964 high school graduation, I learned of the death of a
friend a a year younger. Four years later, 1968 college
graduation, US Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated right
around that time. In both cases, it really got me
to asking the questions of purpose.
Why am I here? What am I here to do?
What is my purpose? Nine years later, I'm still a
musician. I'm invited to a presentation on
ending world hunger, put on by The Hunger Project, and I go to
this event thinking, well, hunger is inevitable.
What do I know? I'm a musician.
I'm thinking, well, it's inevitable because there are no
solutions. Again, what do I know?
Because if there were solutions, somebody would have done
something by now. But I go to the event and it's
obvious right away. There's no mystery to growing
food or clean water. I'm not hopeless about the
perceived lack of solutions. I'm hopeless about human nature.
People, well Jeff, just never get around to doing what can be
done. But there's one human nature.
I have some control over my own. And my questions Why am I here?
What am I here to do? So I get involved in a big way.
This is the end of the story in 1978.
Nineteen 79 I speak to 7000 high school students on ending world
hunger classroom by classroom. And before I go in the first
classroom, I read some statements from Jimmy Carter's
Commission on World Hunger and others calling for the political
will to end hunger. So I asked 7000 high school
students, what's the name of your member of Congress?
I don't want to know if you wrote them.
I don't want to know if you met them.
Just the name out of 7000 asked Only 200.
Fewer than 3% could answer correctly.
Over 6800 could not tell me. Over 97% could not tell me.
The name of their member of Congress.
And results grew out of this gap between the calls for the
political will to end hunger on the one hand, and the lack of
basic information on who represented us in Washington on
the other. Wow, that must have been just
startling and stunning to experience that level of ill
education, if you. Will, yeah.
And if I could share this other thing.
I've been doing this exercise where I've been taking a
methodology that I teach on, writing a letter to the editor,
find an article that's an opening to the topic you want to
discuss, and then write the editor.
But I've been finding an article that's an opening to reclaiming
democracy, Cynicism, making a difference.
And I write the columnist or the producer of the show, and I want
to just give you a couple of titles from 2023 last year.
One was from the Boston Globe. You can name the Three Stooges.
Can you name your three members of Congress?
So it's like an example of we're we're just not very civically
literate. Another column, it was in The
Atlantic, and the title was Find the Form of Activism that Won't
Make You Miserable. And he was basically saying
plant trees, work in a soup kitchen, but don't do political
advocacy. It'll make you miserable.
And then I wrote him about the the main thrust of the book,
which we'll discuss in a moment, and he liked that idea one more.
There was a a column in Salon where the a political science
professor from the University of Pennsylvania was being
interviewed. And the professor basically said
it's really difficult to make a difference other than at
election time. That's even true for a political
science professor. And I say no, no, elections are
critical, but so is the time between elections and the book
is all about, and we can go in detail in a moment, the
difference you can make and how between elections, and of course
elections are critical. Of course, these points are
excellent, and I remember back long before my time.
But the idea of the citizen representative, which was the
way things were back then, before we had professional
politicians, career politicians who get into office.
They gerrymander and Jerry Rigg to keep themselves in office,
and it's impossible, nearly nearly, to overcome an
incumbent. They have all of the tricks of
the trade and they keep themselves in power.
Unless there is a scandal of some sort that's overt, whether
it is theft or sex or, you know, their favorites, whatever it may
be. But that's a problem because
then the the citizen representative used to then go
back home and resume his normal life as a citizen at home.
Now we have a very different scenario.
So things have changed in the political arena, you know, But
you I would like to hear because you, you make a difference in
such a way through the education of these groups that you've had
all over the country and beyond. And it's really been impactful
in making a difference in legislation and why don't we
start with that? Well, let me tell you the main
thrust of the book and then how that works in legislation.
Most everyone, well everyone knows when it comes to advocacy,
protests and people know transactional advocacy.
They don't know the word, but transactional is like sign the
petition Transaction complete. The book is about
transformational advocacy and the idea there is when you are
trained, encouraged, and succeed at doing things as an advocate
you never thought you could do, like meet with a member of
Congress and bring them on board to the your issue.
Or like, write a letter to the editor and have it published on
an issue you care about. When you do those kinds of
things that you never thought you could do, you see yourself
in a new light. You see yourself as a community
leader. And the subtitle of the 2024
edition is Reclaiming Our Democracy, Every Citizen's Guide
to Transformational Advocacy. And so let me give you an
example of a victory. In 2019, the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria was 17 years old, and it
had saved 38 million lives. And in 2019, it was up for a
replenishment of three years. And President Trump called for a
29% cut to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria. And other countries would take
the US lead. Now, most people didn't even
know about this. And if they did, most people
would throw up their hands. What can you do?
You can't fight City Hall. They won't listen to me.
But the people I know roll up their sleeves and they get
involved. And they got hundreds of
Republicans and Democrats to cosign, sponsor really
resolutions in the House and Senate in support of the Global
Fund. They signed letters to the
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and to the chairs of the
Appropriations Committee and the House and Senate in support of
the Global Fund. And at the end of the the
period, 2 Republicans and two Democrats stood on a stage in
Lyon, France at the Global Fund replenishment and announced that
the Congress would increase the Global Fund to fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria by 16%, not cut it by 29% and that's an
example of people making a difference.
And two years later, the Global Fund announced that it had saved
50 million lives since its inception in 2002.
And and and by the time of 2020-2021 kind of thing, it's.
Such a good story. And it it it just speaks to how
you and your work and writing have empowered people to get
off. As we say in the old language,
they're taught us, yes. It's a technical term.
It is a technical term, it's a political term.
Yeah, yeah, you. Won't go into that part.
But no, this is the part of your work that I have such respect
for. An admiration.
I mean, just this morning I wrote a letter, as I've written
so many, to our dear President Biden, asking him to please
resign because he is fomenting acts of war and criminality
across the world and killing innocent children because of the
way we fund these wars. And it doesn't matter where they
are. They're killing people.
And I'm against that. I don't know what it is.
I find it abhorrent. And I don't want my tax dollars
to be going to that effort when we need so many things like the
group that you just referred to, I'd way rather see our money
going to fund an organization like that doing good.
So tell me, how do you deal with deal with the thornier issues
that we face as a nation? How do you deal with, for for
instance, the issues of increasing surveillance,
increasing violations of our own constitution that most people
don't even know is happening, increasing censorship that's
actually originating in the White House, doing things that
are completely against the 1st Amendment?
I I'd love to know. Well, let me say, let me say it
a couple of ways. I work with groups.
Maybe it's the Quaker Lobby, FC and L Friends Committee on
national legislation. Their focus is various peace
issues or I work with a group maybe Citizens Climate Lobby.
Their focus is climate change and and the like.
And so I'll be coaching them on being more effective.
So let me give you an example of what someone should look for in
an organization that delivers transformational advocacy. 3
things. Thing One, and there's two
subheads under this one is recruitment and building
community. They're constantly bringing new
people in and not like Make My E Blast list larger though.
They're bringing new people in and forming them into chapters.
That's the recruitment and then the building.
Community. They have a monthly all of
organization, not just for the leaders, all of organization
webinar with guest speakers and Q&A and inspiration.
So recruitment and community Building 2 training.
They're training you. How do you get the meeting?
How do you prepare for the meeting?
What do you ask for? How do you write a letter to the
editor? How do you table at Earth Day or
whenever to bring new people in? Three.
The organization helps you have breakthroughs.
There's a drawing in the book, your comfort zone in one corner,
and then where the magic happens in the other corner.
And is it an organization that helps breakthroughs, helps you
move out of your comfort zone over to where the magic happens,
Recruitment and community building, training and
encouraging breakthroughs. That's a kind of an organization
we're looking for. Let me give you an example of,
well, we don't find that much. And so that's because most
organizations are afraid of making big asks of volunteers.
And let me give you an example of why that works when you do
it. I was coaching this two years
ago. I was coaching Mike Robinson.
He was the leader of the Foundation for Climate
Restoration chapter in Seattle and their focus was removing the
carbon that's already in the atmosphere.
And the the chapter was two or three months old, and they were
getting ready for their first ever conference call, the whole
nationwide first ever in February 2022.
And he told me that they had had four meetings with state
representatives in Washington state and one was chair of the
Committee on Energy and Environment.
And the chair knew everything about climate change, but it
barely heard of carbon removal. And he asked the new baby
chapter if they would brief him and his staff on carbon removal
so they could look for some legislative remedies.
And I said, well, wait a minute. You have had four meetings with
elected officials in two or three months.
Had you ever met with an elected official before?
He said, no, this is my first time.
I said, had you ever written an elected official before?
He said, I'd never written, I'd never called.
I'd never met with an elected official before these four.
And I said, put that in your talk.
If you don't tell people it was your first ever, they're going
to think he's an expert. I'm not an expert.
He could do it. I couldn't do it and really want
to let people know tell the truth.
Yeah. And and let people know that you
were a beginner and they can make a difference with this
also. Maybe I could tell one other
story that really drills deep on this transformational
experience. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's it's amazing. So this is woman.
He's she's amazing. She had a lived experience of
poverty. Her name is Maxine Thomas.
She joins a group called Circles for people who are motivated to
move out of poverty. And this group realizes they
have a story to tell. So they googled where can we get
help telling our story and they find results.
The anti poverty lobby I founded in 1980 and she goes.
She gets a scholarship to go to a results conference in
Washington DC She has to borrow a suitcase.
She doesn't own a suitcase. She goes to the results
conference and she only goes to sessions on global poverty.
She doesn't even go to any of the domestic poverty sessions.
But the night before their Hill visits, their visits with their
senators and representatives, she learns that the Earned
Income Tax Credit is about to expire.
And she she's the Earned Incomes Tax Credit is for working people
at low and middle income, and in 2020 they received 3100 on
average for a family. And she has this meeting.
I'm going to read what she says about her meeting with her
member of Congress, she says. The first Congressional meeting
on lobby day was with Senator Dan Coats and brought Nuahas.
He was there for the entire meeting.
I can still feel it. I was a ball of emotion.
It felt like an out of body experience.
I was processing being in DC and now I'm in an exclusive meeting.
We're all dressed up. It was high level.
The volunteers were polished and sharp.
But I was scared and worried that whether whether I would say
the right thing, that's that's all of us at the first meeting,
Scared and worried. I think it was Lisa who asked me
would you like to say anything? I thank the senator, I said.
I learned last night why I'm here.
I didn't know I could come from Indianapolis to talk with you.
Someone who represents us and can help us.
I can't imagine what will happen when the earned if the earned
income tax credit is taken away from families like mine.
I'm able to take a deep breath and catch up on my bills because
of the EITCI look forward to tax time because that's the only
time I can handle all my financial burden.
I like to take my kids to the mall to buy shoes without
worrying if we'll take away from other bills.
And then at the end of the day, after all of her meetings with
Congress, she says. I was euphoric.
I was on this high and felt I was part of something
revolutionary, and that's an example of the experience of
transformation, I think earlier in the chapter, she says.
I have a heart for service, but I didn't know anything for about
advocacy, especially political advocacy.
And then by the end, that's the transformation that I just told
you I'll. Tell you I I'm going to tell you
a little story which is long ago I was considering medicine and I
got wiser and I dropped it. I stuck with psychology but
during that inter period I got a job at Columbia law School so I
could go to Columbia Pre Med for that was they didn't pay you
much of anything but they paid you in courses.
So I was working in Columbia law School and I saw all of these
students first year, second year and 3rd year students grading
all around waiting to be part of corporate America.
That's all they cared about. And God, there's so much good
stuff that could be done for the people who are in need beyond
the corporate sphere. I mean, of course you want to
make money. Everybody wants to make money.
There's not a problem with that. But can't you think a little
larger? And the people who really need
your work also? Anyway, I realized also that
civic education was something that was far and few between.
And so I developed a program that I gave to the Dean of the
law school, where I came up with the whole curriculum to teach
high school students that might not ever get to college about
civic responsibility, civic obligation and just their own
legal positions, lawful positions in our society.
And he looked at it before he tore it up and said, well, nice
thinking. You know, I appreciate the
thought. And exactly.
Anyway. So I think that that experience
when I was all of 22 or so years old has allowed me to appreciate
what it is you're up to all the more.
And. And I'm going to answer a
question that I posed to you by listening to what you're saying.
Sam And that is in the sense, it doesn't matter what the content
of the subject is that needs to be dealt with.
But if you have the tools that you teach in your book and in
your groups of how to be effective communicators, how to
be community leaders, how to set up a meeting with a
representative, House of Representatives or Congress or
local, yes, you can use those skills for dealing with any
matter at hand. Yes.
Let me give you along that line some bad news and some good
news. OK, found out.
It's on. Yeah.
The independent sector did a study last year and found that
31% of nonprofits were doing advocacy, which was less than
half the numbered percent doing advocacy earlier.
Another study of from the Congressional Management
Foundation asked advocacy professionals what their main
offering was, and 79% said that it was online petitions.
But only 3% of congressional staff said that made a
difference. So that's why it's all the more
important for all your viewers and your listeners to find
organizations that deliver transformational advocacy 'cause
they can be few and far between. And the main, another main
message for the group is this is a methodology that can help you
make a difference and heal our democracy in the process.
It's not the only solutions needed, but it's one critical
missing piece citizens awakening to their power.
Hallelujah. God bless you, Sam Daily Harris.
I totally, totally agree. It's it's a message of
empowerment and it's a call to our own responsibility as
citizens. I mean, you know, democracy ebbs
and floats. It is not a guarantee.
As Jefferson said, the cost of democracy is eternal vigilance
and I think we need to really abide by that that old idea that
is ever present. So Sam, thanks for your good
work. I want to continue to encourage
you, and for all of you, I want you to really take all of what
Sam had to say here to heart. Because while it's good to be
part of an organization even if you're not, your voice is
important. And I always say that one letter
represents in their minds, their congressman or senators minds,
at least 1000, if not a few thousand voices.
So think that way. You are giving voice to people
who are not willing or ready to share, but you are.
So on that note. Thanks again.
Thanks. Keep up the.
Good work. This is Mitchell J Raven for a
Better World. Thanks so much for joining us
again today and I look forward to seeing you all next week.