Political Community Service

I'm posting to start a conversation of how best for the LCYDs to use their time and resources to better our community while maximizing our political effect. I am just finishing my year of being and Americorps*/VISTA in Tallahassee with the Community Neighborhood Renaissance Partnership (www.tallpartners.org), a fantastic nonprofit, but I've seen the good and unfortunate sides of dogoodery. My comments below are based primarily on how I perceive to avoid the unfortunate and make sure we're participating with the good, and I welcome others to ask any questions they have to further the conversation.


What should we be working on?
Several good ideas have already been mentioned towards this end. Maintaining/ preserving/ creating a healthy environment, fighting poverty, promoting education, and preserving family. All of these are excellent, and I'm sure we can think of more.

What are the problems resulting from these issues and why are these bad?
This question allows us to focus on what is wrong, and how something different (spurred by more Democrats in office) would be better. How does cutting down a tree or destroying a wetland effect the environment? What are horrendous correlations to life in poverty? Why is it important for children to have adults around who care about them? It's important at this stage to develop measures for your issue, carbon dioxide levels, crime rates, unwanted pregnancies, juvenile delinquency, recidivism etc. These become the things we can actually measure progress by.

(the following two questions I think are valuable and interesting, but not absolutely necessary)
What does the government do to deal with these problems?
What, especially monetarily, is the government investing in such things as water treatment, police, correctional facilities, etc.

What does the government do to correct these problems?
What programs are in place to actually lower crime rates, etc. Do they work?

What actions work to correct these problems?
By knowing this, we'll have a good understanding of what we should be advocating that the government do, as well as what we should be investing our time working on in the nonprofit sector until the government cowboys up to fund it properly. Good nonprofits evaluate their programs for grants, etc. to show the impact they are having. We should only work with these. If there is a nonprofit that we agree with, and believe their programs have a positive effect but they have not had the resources to evaluate it, our best use of resources would be to help them evaluate their programs.

How best can we help the organizations that are correcting these problems?
After fully grasping the situation we're dealing with, we should balance being visible with being maximally helpful. For instance, many times Habitat For Humanity has more building volunteers than they can use, but they can't use the building volunteers because noone is volunteering to do the filing and other indirect work needed. Obviously direct service with an organization would be the best for our visibility, but we should also be willing to work to build the capacity for us and others to participate in the direct service.

By having a full understanding of why we're volunteering, and working with organizations that know the impact it will have, we will give ourselves strong footing to raise awareness about the issues, advocate real solutions, and candidates who can make those solutions a reality. Thank you for your time.