Taking It To The Next Level - Participation 201

Sending in emails and phone calls is great and all, but what if you want to take the next step and go bigger?

Meetings

It can be easy to get meetings with the offices of local electeds. They have staff on each of their priority geography and issue areas whose job it is to get input from the community. Getting a meeting can feel like an accomplishment — and sometimes it is — but don’t lose sight of the fact that access doesn’t equal influence. It just opens the door to a conversation.

There are three basic types of meetings:

1. The first kind is meeting with staffers. This is the easiest kind of meeting to get, especially with a junior staffer like a field representative. That’s the only type of meeting you may be able to secure when you’re starting out, but it’s a foot in the door. If you have more power or you’re not getting enough traction, you’ll want to meet with a more senior staffer. That could be someone like the District Director for hyper-local issues or the Planning or Legislative Director or even Chief of Staff for broad policy issues.

2. The second type involves the elected officials themselves. These are usually harder to get. Often they’ll only come after you’ve had one or more meetings with staffers. These are great moments to propose a partnership with them to work on an issue together, to ask them to champion a piece of legislation, or to secure their commitment to vote the way you want. It can be especially powerful to bring a mix of impacted constituents to tell their stories, policy experts, and/or leaders of organizations.

3. The final kind involves an elected official, in a large public forum (including virtually). This type of encounter requires you to organize a big public event, often with multiple co-sponsors, to secure their commitment to attend, and to put them on the spot by having speakers with compelling stories share what they need and press them to do something about it. Community organizing groups have had good success with approaches like this, especially at candidate forums where they can ask for commitments to do certain things if the person is elected.

For all of these meetings, it’s really important to do your homework and come super prepared.

Neighborhood Councils (City of LA only)

One approach to influencing LA City Councilmembers involves the City’s system of Neighborhood Councils (NCs). Neighborhood Councils can pass resolutions calling for various kinds of policy change. In particular, they can pass a “Community Impact Statement” (CIS) on City legislation. A CIS entitles a representative from the Neighborhood Council to have a full 5 minutes at the City Council meeting before anyone else gets to speak.

There are approximately 100 NCs around the City. Ordinary people run for them and are elected to multi-year terms. NCs operate like mini-City Councils so there are time limits for speakers, strict rules for voting, and so on. Much of the advice about influencing higher levels of government applies to these bodies. The major difference is that these Councilmembers are not paid – they do this as volunteers in their spare time – and they have very limited real authority. Their real power comes from their ability to concentrate community attention and influence City Councilmembers.

For a more detailed exploration, check out a discussion that LA Forward hosted with two neighborhood Councilmembers at https://www.laforward.institute/trainings

You can find a full list of NCs at https://empowerla.org/councils/

Future content for this website will cover NCs in more depth, so stay tuned.

Appointees and Civil Servants

Another way to generate support or opposition for your policy approach is to work with parts of the local government that aren’t elected. If you can get a government agency or appointed commission to give their stamp of approval, that may convince elected officials of its merits or give them the political cover they need to act.

There are a large number of high-ranking officials in the City and County Governments who are appointed by elected officials like the Mayor or County Supervisors. Sometimes like with the City or County Clerk, the positions aren’t especially political. In other cases, like LAPD Chief of Police or the LA City Planning Commissioners the people chosen by the Mayor or other elected officials are extremely political and they also play a major role in setting policy.

Unlike elected officials, appointees are not directly accountable to the public through voting. In some cases, you’ll have appointees who are deeply interested in policy and making a difference. In the best case, they’ll be interested in getting your expert opinion and potentially even adopting your policy proposal wholesale.

Likewise, you may find good partners for your cause in the civil servants who work for various local agencies.

In the best case, civil servants in the government’s various departments may be personally and/or institutionally interested in social justice and as a result will go above and beyond the minimum duties of their job. They can become some of your strongest allies — in it for the cause and not just the short-term political gain. 

No matter what landscape you’re facing, civil servants will likely respond best to perceived expertise and especially well to thought-out plans and proposals that make their job easier.

Media Coverage

It almost always pays off to have the media, especially large and influential institutions like the LA Times, on your side. One big news story or opinion editorial can sometimes be enough to get things moving on a policy that’s been bottled up in committee or the bureaucracy for years.

This isn’t the place for a full tutorial on how to get good coverage, but it’s something you should be thinking about. It rarely hurts to know reporters and develop good relationships with them. Don’t be shy about putting out a press release when you’re doing something big like releasing a huge petition, sending in a letter with many sign-ons, or planning a protest.

Can’t get enough done with these tactics? Looking to make an even bigger impact? Read our tips on going all in.