How To Think About Creating Societal Change

I’ve been working on a “how to” series and this is the latest installment, following  how to talk to the media, how to be a good adjunct professor and how to write a column.

There are countless books, articles and podcasts about creating movements. I want to speak to the underlying motivation and thinking of the people who start those movements. Why should or shouldn’t they take this issue on? What do they need to get out of it? Where can you really make a difference? What are the costs beyond just money? What’s a good use of time and money and what isn’t? 

Hunger is an issue I’ve always been interested in. I’ve been volunteering weekly in soup kitchens since 1991. Still do. But I wasn’t able to start writing checks to hunger groups until I launched my first company, Tusk Strategies, in 2010. I wrote what was, for me, a big check to the Food Bank for New York. It was big enough that they did what all nonprofits do when someone writes a big check – they pay attention to you to try to get you to write an even bigger check. Which I did. 

But as I got to know them and to look under the hood, I realized something – these were lovely people who were doing God’s work. But a lot of public policies they supported didn’t happen because, in my view, their loveliness also meant they lacked the political mettle, sophistication and resources to win a tough legislative battle on an issue like materially expanding funding for school meals. What if my people, who run major corporate campaigns for a living, were to run hunger campaigns? And what if I paid for all of the things a good campaign has – lobbyists, pr, polling, ads, grassroots? Would that make a difference?

That eventually led to creating Solving Hunger (which sits within Tusk Philanthropies). To date, we’ve run 30 bills in state legislatures across the country. We’ve passed 24 of them. In total, they’ve helped provide regular meals for 13 million more people. About six million dollars of my money so far has helped unlock about two billion in new government spending on hunger programs. This year, we’re running campaigns in Illinois, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Arkansas and laying the groundwork in Ohio — you can read all about this in our latest annual report. None of these campaigns are easy, but hopefully the end result will be several hundred thousand more people getting the food they need. 

We’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. But most of the time, we’ve learned from them. So based on that, here’s my sense of what to think about when deciding whether to try to tackle a major societal problem. 

(1). Pick an issue you really care about. Changing anything in a meaningful way is incredibly hard, slow and frustrating, so it has to really matter to you to be worth it. Don’t pick an issue because it’s trendy or other people you know are interested in it. Pick something that is so important to you that even as you fail time and time again, and as you spend more and more money on it than you ever planned, the value you get from just trying is enough to allow you to keep going. If you don’t know what that issue is, keep looking until you find it. And if there’s nothing that moves you or stirs your passions, then there’s probably some deeper internal issues worth exploring. 

(2). Pick an issue that has tangible solutions. If it’s something broad like climate change, pick one thing like changing the permitting process in six states for wind energy or getting your local school district to switch to electric school buses. If it’s something narrower like fighting teenage drug addiction in your community, pick something tangible like closing the 8 illegal weed shops in your neighborhood or creating a new after school treatment program for teens. For your work to mean anything, you have to meaningfully affect change. That means organizing people, raising money, spending money, proposing legislation, knocking on doors, making your case blog post by blog post. It means having a specific goal, a plan for how to get there, and while that plan will need to change as you go along, executing it from start to finish. Merely tweeting and complaining rarely achieves anything real – it’s mainly performative for your own ego, reputation and need for validation. So go in with a clear set of goals, knowing in advance that they will be hard to achieve, but that once you do the work, you can hopefully point to tangible outcomes (and be proud of it). 

(3). Pick an issue where the way it’s currently being handled can be done better. I chose to focus on state-based legislation around hunger programs because I felt like many of the groups working on hunger lacked the resources, toughness and sophistication to truly change the underlying political dynamic in state legislatures. If the issue you care about is already being fought effectively by the existing nonprofits in the space, then you’re better off just making and raising and giving as much money to those groups rather than creating something new. 

(4). Pick an issue where you have some expertise so you know what to do and what not to do. Other than volunteering at soup kitchens, I didn’t have a lot of experience in food provision or policy. But I had decades of experience working in government and politics, so any solution that involved passing legislation was something I inherently understood. That has allowed me to both more accurately assess our chances of success or failure on any given issue (knowing that failure is still likely) and to better manage our team, vendors and grantees. If you have the wherewithal to even try to affect major societal change, you clearly have skills and experiences to draw upon. Use them. 

(5). Be prepared to fail. The reason why societal change is hard is because, typically, those in power like things the way they are. Despite what they say, they’re not interested in change. We’ve had a good success rate to date on our hunger bills but we’ve also picked a lot of low hanging fruit in left-leaning blue states. Now, as we tackle mainly purple and red states, the work gets harder, the campaigns will get even more expensive, and our failure rate is going to go way up. This is why it’s so important to be able to take joy in the process itself. If the value to you in the work, in the effort, is innate – if just working on this issue makes you feel good, then it’s worth it. If it requires lots of external validation, you’re going to give up.

(6). Be prepared to make people mad. There are very few causes that no one is working on. There are plenty of causes that aren’t being advanced because they’re not being approached the right way. In our case, we’ve found that it sometimes is necessary to be aggressive and combative with politicians to get them to support new hunger programs. For example, in New York last year, we stationed mobile billboard trucks outside the State Capitol excoriating the Governor and legislature for letting kids go hungry. The local hunger groups, all of whom rely on the good graces of Albany, went nuts. We were making everyone in power mad and putting their groups at risk. My concern wasn’t the existence (or lack thereof) of a handful of nonprofits. It was feeding kids. We kept the billboards up until the State agreed to provide $134 million in new annual funding for school meals (which then scaled to $180 million this year), and when the new school year rolled around, 300,000 kids who were going hungry no longer do. That only happened because we irked the people in power and because we took a risk that felt threatening to our allies (we did the same thing in Connecticut, which led to universal school breakfast and also greatly upset the politicians and the hunger groups alike). This happens a lot in our work – upending the status quo doesn’t just upset your opponents, it often upsets your allies too. You have to be willing to do that. 

(7). Don’t go for easy but empty calories like paying for conferences and coalitions and reports and lots of process. Nonprofits love, love, love process because it sorta resembles actual work but staves off accountability. Your focus should be results, and it’s rare in my experience that a conference ever drives a meaningful result that couldn’t have gotten done on a call instead. Yes, process has pomp and circumstance and lots of chances for people to thank you for your generosity. But your odds of getting anything done go way down. 

(8). Be prepared to have great ideas that cost a lot of money and still don’t work. When Congress was debating the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill (which turned into the Inflation Reduction Act), I thought that since the Senate was split 50-50, if I could get one Senator to refuse to support the final bill without $10 billion in new funding for school meals, they’d be able to get it done ($10 billion in the context of a trillion isn’t much). So I went after any Democratic senator I could get a hold of on the phone or confront face to face at a fancy fundraiser. I wrote check after check, hard money and soft money. They all promised me they would fight to the death for school meals. At the end of the day, every one of them sold us out to placate donors or advocacy groups or people who mattered more to their next election (one problem with school meals is the kids don’t vote, and their parents don’t necessarily vote either). I spent a lot of time and money on a strategy that, in my mind, couldn’t lose. And then it did. 

(9). Be prepared for the long haul. If any serious problem was easy to fix, someone would have fixed it by now. Whether your issue is guns or immigration or income inequality or climate change or housing or curing cancer or anything else, this stuff is hard. You will fail a lot and why anything you achieve won’t happen overnight. It takes years. That’s frustrating but it’s also the price of admission.

The good news is, when you do actually achieve something meaningful like passing universal school meals in a state, it feels exponentially better than buying a fancy car or taking a luxurious vacation. The bad news is, it’s really hard. But I’ve learned how to feel good about myself for the effort and money we’re investing, even when we lose. And for me at least, the peace and contentment that brings is more than worth it.