You are watching book tv, television for serious readers. You can watch any program you see online at booktv. Org. Sam daley harris talks about how citizens can come together to exert political power next. This is about an hour and 15 minutes. We are delighted to introduce mr. Ketan. He also founded the microcredit Summer Campaign and most recently in 2012 he 2012 he founded the center for citizen empowerment and transformation. He has and a a great deal of recognition and respect for his work. No other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that it is used as a power. And one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decade. We are thrilled to have you here and congratulate you on the 20th Anniversary Edition of your book reclaiming our democracy. Equally delighted to have former congressman Mickey Edwards join us here today, Vice President of the Aspen Institute and serves as director of the Aspen Institute rodale public leadership, a republican member of congress from oklahoma from 1997 until 1992 serving as a member of the appropriations and budget committee. He committee. He taught for 11 years at harvard john f. Kennedy school of government as well as serving on faculty of the university of maryland law school. Very impressive. He also actively contributes to public discourse. He is also a frequent public speaker and regular guest on many leading radio and Public Television broadcast. So welcome to you both and to all of our audience members. We are looking forward to an interesting conversation about grassroots advocacy. I would remind you to please silence your cell phones. Thank you. Thank you. I am grateful to everyone who has come. Former congressman Mickey Edwards. I am i am going to start with basically three main messages. The first one is kind of obvious. Most people feel hopeless and cynical about making a difference. The second is a little less obvious. I i have seen people make a profound difference on issues that they care about. The last message is the telephone, the challenge, finding an organization that offers the deep structure of support that is empowering, inspiring, transformative or said another way most organizations when it comes to advocacy provide members with a kindergarten and first grade curriculum. Click here. Petition signed. Youre all done. Go back. Go back to sleep. That is the challenge. I will begin with five short stories. These are largely taken from that tour. I tell them not to discourage people but actually to embolden them. Last fall i spoke on 15 college campuses, and i told the the students that i founded results 34 years earlier after i asked 7,000 High School Students what the name of their member of congress was. I asked the College Students last fall 35 years later the same question. 10 . 10 percent could answer correctly, 90 percent could not tell me the name. In march i spoke at a Senior Citizen lecture series. 200 seniors every every two weeks. I went a month early. The moderator said a month from now we will here from ketan on reclaiming our democracy. And there were chuckles in the room. Yes, this is something we have to work on. The students are oblivious. And this one lonely sample, lets say the seniors were, what, cynical, Something Like that . Story number four. In march i spoke at harvard. Never heard a result. We spent 20 minutes. Why do you do it that way . At the end of 20 minutes she looks at me and says, yeah, but congress is really dysfunctional. I said, yes. And this year it appropriated 1. 65 billion dollars. Yes. Really dysfunctional, and this year it appropriated 700 million dollars. Congress is really dysfunctional, but if you roll up your sleeves, do your homework, and get in there you can make big things happen. Before the lecture i spoke to small groups of students sitting at tables. I walk over to the last table. Im in an honors futures class. What is the most important issue we could work on . I said to him, well, my friends and Climate Change tommy if we dont deal with that we are toast. My friends in campaignfinance reform say if we dont fix that nothing will change. Change. For me, i said, the most important issue is why so few of us see ourselves as changemakers. If we if we could fix that one there would be a barrage of people. So im going to tell my story briefly of my move from hopeless to activist, from hopeless to change maker, in the story goes like this a bachelors degree and a masters degree in music. I played percussion instruments in florida for 12 years. Then i started a Citizen Lobby Group on ending poverty. What motivated that change, and when i look back in my life their are two events that had a particularly profound effect on me. And in the orchestra at the ceremony, and just before it started a player came back and told me that a high school Fraternity Brother a year younger had died the day before in a tractortrailer accident in georgia. It was her nextdoor neighbor, so she knew before i did. I was 17. For me it was like, i had forever. But during that time, the funeral and the morning after i went with my friends younger brother to collect the report card. It began to dawn on me that i had 17 more minutes or months or years and the questions of purpose started coming up. No answers, but all of a sudden i got a knew batch of questions. Four years later in 1968 College Graduation date, the night before Robert Kennedy is assassinated. No answers, but the questions are getting clear. Nine years later i am invited to a presentation on ending world hunger. I i go to this thing thinking there are no solutions. It is inevitable. If there were solutions somebody would have done something by now. I go to this thing and realize early that there is no mystery to growing food or clean water or basic health, none of that is mysterious. I am not hopeless about the perceived lack of solution. I am hopeless am hopeless about human nature, people. We just never get around to doing the things that can be done, but there is one human nature i have some control over, my own. My question, why am i here, what am i here to here to do. And this is the end of the story. In 1978 dash 79i i spoke to High School Students in miami and los angeles. And before i went into the first classroom i i read statements from the Us National Academy of sciences calling for the political will to end hunger. I decided i decided to ask i still to five High School Students. Out of 7,200, fewer than 3 new. 3 percent new. 6,800, just over 97 percent did not no. And this Citizen Lobby Group started out of that, the call for the political will to end hunger on the one hand on the lack of basic information on who represented us in washington on the other. So in a moment i will discuss one the grassroots led victory with congress. That is what is ultimately important. I really want to give some attention to these questions. How did that happen . What are some of the secrets to the empowerment of ordinary citizens who can often be so discouraged, what discouraged, what kind of structure of support and ethos are required. Results began my being. The volunteers and about 60 cities generated 90 editorials. Where the editorial boards wrote these pieces, we would send three at a a time, for at a time to members of congress to people in the administration. At the end of the campaign the following handwritten note was written. I want to convey my heart felt thanks to the efforts of results on behalf of Vulnerable Children and mothers everywhere. I thank you in my mind for what you and your colleagues are accomplishing that thought i should do it at least once this year. So results continued for 30 years, 30 years, year in, year out, 1984 through today on his maternal and child health programs. And the bilateral programs alone have increased. Now now what i am about to show you people do not no. This slide in this line that follows. In 1984 unicef was estimating that 31,000 children around the world under five were dying every day through things like measles coupled with malnutrition. In the latest report came out a couple weeks ago. 41,000. 41,000 day has plummeted to 17,008. If you ask most people they will give you some variation of it is going to hell in a handbasket. Since 1990 the world has saved almost 100 million childrens lives including 21 million newborns. That is that is the part that people dont know and need to. And they have been at the center of the advocacy since 1984. So in 2013 former deputy executive director of unicef was quoted in the New York Times article as saying to a great extent it was because of the receptivity created by results that the us funding for Child Survival increased so dramatically, and that led many other countries to come on board. So what does it take to empower citizens like this . I will go over a a little more deeply little later, but one of the pieces of the structure of support is an organizing strategy that most advocacy efforts either dont understand or dont have the discipline to follow. Most ngo advocacy efforts failed to provide a single legislative focus, i dont mean a single mouse click focus, but a deeper engagement focus. Developing a legislative agenda that is inspiring and focused, keep staff and volunteers from sliding to issue to issue and allow them to drill down deep on one issue and develop deep relationships with members of congress and the media. But lets take a look at how this has been used more recently. In 2,007 results volunteer Marshall Saunders decided to address an issue involving Climate Change. He went home to san diego. Early on he said, i realize i i was giving people monday 8 percent of the problem. 2 what they could do about it. They could not change enough light bulbs or by enough previous is to make up for it. One morning i was reading mike paper and drinking my coffee and noticed an article saying that congress had appropriated fossil fuel subsidies. I i convinced 18 people to change there label that they this is never going to work. He asked me to coach them. I worked with them for several years. Lets look at a few of their achievements to get a sense of going way beyond the mouseclick, the steeper advocacy. In 2,010 volunteers generated 36 letters to the editor published. In the first eight months of this year volunteers have had 1,486 letters to the editor published. In 2,010 there were 105 meetings with members of congress, members of congress, canadian parliament, or their staff. The first eight months of this year they had 792 such meetings. If you want greatness, if you want greatness from volunteers you have to provide a great structure of support. One of the missing pieces is an empowering monthly conference calls. Here call. Here is how you can do that. Here is how you can do that in a disempowering way. The first the first part is our guest speaker. Most groups, im going to give you three components, all of which most groups leave out. The first group is a guest speaker. Most groups have there staff do it every month. But if they do, the other disempowering way to do it is to have the speaker talk for the entire 25 minutes. No interaction, no q a. The the empowering way to do it is insist that the speaker speak for ten minutes and at 15 more minutes for interaction. More empowering, more energizing. The next thing most groups would leave out, grassroots victories. First of all, they would not do it. Normally people just share the victory. For example, someone might say we met with our member of congress yesterday. It is a blast. But they leave out that it took 11 phone calls to get the meeting, they had to meet with the district director first and their knees were knocking before they went in if you leave that out people around the country are going, going, maybe we should give up on this and go to something else. We have only made two calls. Calls. I guess we have nine more to go. Its much more empowering. The last one. Practice in being more articulate. Most groups would leave this out. The disempowering way is to do a roleplay, a call to a congressional aide, and it is horrible, awful. All anyone can say is thank you for volunteering. Everyone knows he was a stinker. It is on not empowering to here a crummy roleplay. The empowering the empowering way is to have coaching insight. So what does all of this look like at the individual level . I will read an excerpt from one of the new chapters. The woman i am quoting here, when she wrote this she lived in richmond, virginia. The Richmond Times dispatch. When i started i was suffering from climate trauma. I would read the book and weep at home and at work. Then she joined citizens climate lobby. Eighteen months later she was co leading a workshop on getting relationships with members of congress and editorial writers. We are betting the farm on relationships. Most of us have never done that before. What in the world that is a relationship with member of Congress Look like . Some of us found models for those relationships in other parts of our lives. The model of the work relationship. My relationship model is different. I adore i adore romantic relationships, so i use romance as my model. Its like a blind date, only you have decided ahead of time that you we will marry this fellow, sweet, interesting. The business editor, environment writer, city editor, someone at this paper will find you interesting and compelling. It it is just a matter of being persistent. I see the relationship as an arranged marriage. The legislative director told us in january to an a half years ago. We have met nine times. We schedule 45 minute meetings. He keeps us for well over an hour. He does not want us to leave because a good arranged marriage starts out cold and slowly heats up over time. That is different from a love match that starts out hot and slowly cools down. I see the editorial writer as a painter. His palette is filled with letter to five letters to the editor. I am his model who talks like this. Certainly someone who is cynical and turned off by Political Action does not. I want him to fill his canvas with colors i like so i will have my group send three to five letters to the editor whenever the opportunity arises. The more colors the better chance of having him take one or two of my favorite. During our conference two years ago i met with congressional offices, many folks whose view of the world was different than mine. I had to let go of a lot of emotional baggage. I could no longer judge them i had to let go of my fear of Climate Change and my fear that they would not listen. I had to release fear and center in love. This is sacred and profound work. If i asked normal people to meet with tony congressional offices over three days they would see it as hard or dirty work. She sees it as sacred and profound. That is that is something that we all need to aspire to. Thank you very much. [applauding] thank you so much for some wonderful insight and experiences that you share. I want to invite congressman edwards to pose a few questions, and then we will open it up to the audience. I thought i thought we were supposed to go on and on and on. First of all, i love your book and the work you are doing. We are glad to have you here a couple of thoughts. The thought was that i really liked coming from a former member of the house that your emphasis on reaching out to members of congress because so many people who are in the advocacy world focus on the executive branch. It is an interesting branch. The president gets a helicopter and has easter egg parties, but most of the power and our government is in the congress, the legislative branch. The fact that you have put so much focus on getting people to meet with members of congress and work with them is great. The other thing i noticed is your reference to a couple of republican friends of mine. So many people in the advocacy world, if they are conservatives, only talk to republicans and if they are your girls only talk to democrats and lose a lot of the opportunities. People in Congress Wants to make change. They share the same basic value, even if they have differences over how to get there. There. I thought your approach which was not now, a liberal head of some department, it was great, well done. So the challenge, you ask students to the member of congress was, you was, you could have asked almost anyone, and they would know nothing. The amount the amount of literacy about government and how it works and how you can affect it is just mindboggling. So is there something else, you get these people, and you get them in power, but how do you create a bigger pool of people who not only are upset that understand the system, how to make change and why to make change. You can empower them, but if you walk into a classroom or any kind of group and no one there knows how the government works, they have not had civics courses, studied Critical Thinking about how do you do anything about that, create a bigger pool . It is a great question. Asking students to their who their member of congress is is a very low level question that is a constant challenge. We always try and piggyback. An article. Maybe there are a few more people. Thats a really big challenge. Thats thats why all of the groups i have been working with, they put a lot of emphasis on getting out on the road. They can talk to a larger group. When it comes to learning how Congress Works there is nothing like meeting with your member and knowing when it is authorizing and when it is appropriating. It is a systemic problem. Should some of the focus be on changing the Public Education system so that people dont arrive at that. Not knowing and helping to stir peoples ideas about what matters. For matters. For example, one of the things that i tend to favor, one of the things in the common core that is a little disturbing is that the advice to people who teach english is to focus on n