A force for good - Part 2

From this post onward, I'll start to cover the 6 practices of high impact nonprofits that they cover in the book.

1. Advocate and serve

Some nonprofits focus on providing a social service, like legal help, medical care, or food. Others focus on advocacy and raising awareness about a certain cause, like Doctors for America. The authors found that the most successful organizations combine both service and advocacy. This makes sense considering both extremes. A nonprofit that only offers a service without doing advocacy is like a healthcare system that prescribes you asthma medication but does nothing about the huge factory that’s smogging up the whole town. They are alleviating symptoms but not addressing the underlying issue. On the other hand, organizations that only focus on advocacy are doing nothing to address the immediate suffering of their constituents. Systems-level change can take a long time, and doing nothing to help those in need in the moment is not optimal.

You may be thinking that advocacy and service are two different beasts, and require two totally different skillsets. This is true, and the most successful nonprofits recognize this. I focused on the section of the book that talks about service-oriented nonprofits who later take up advocacy, since that’s the boat the RB falls into. Service-oriented nonprofits hire policy experts to lead their advocacy activities and carry out successful lobbying. Getting into advocacy can also help fundraising by increasing the number of people who are aware of your cause. One of the 12 model nonprofits boasted a donor-base of over 300,000 people, each of whom made an annual donation of $25. This adds up.

How RB is already practicing this

Over the past year, the exec board has had many conversations about how to increase and sustain our impact. So many of the problems faced by our constituents in La Zona Sur are rooted in government policy, social justice, and resource allocation. We can build toilets and teach workshops forever, but unless the government makes some big changes, there will continue to be thousands of people in La Zona Sur who lack basic health infrastructure. Recently, we decided to embark on a research project about the Bolivian healthcare system. This past summer, we interviewed local, regional, and national healthcare professionals and government leaders in the hope of making an expository documentary about the current problems and inequities that exist in the Bolivian healthcare system. We have also been thinking about how to utilize our media coverage to spread a message, rather than just gain more publicity. Before, we used our TV interviews and press coverage as a chance to tell people, “hey, here we are, we are doing meaningful work, support us”, whereas now, we want to tell people, “hey, there are a lot of messed up things going on right here that are affecting people that you care about, help us address these pressing issues!!”

How RB can improve based on this advice

I think we need to learn more about the details of Bolivian government, politics, history, culture, and law. Although nearly the entire executive board has spent countless hours learning about these topics, writing research papers, reading books, and conducting interviews, we need to push ourselves to acquire a more rigorous understanding of these complex systems. And not just for ourselves, but for our volunteers too. We need to talk more about how our work fits into the larger schema of Bolivian society.

I think a key to advocacy in Bolivia will be mobilizing Bolivians to spread the word about our cause. Ultimately, our impact will be far greater if we have a network of Bolivians (not foreigners) who are passionate advocates. I kept thinking about Partners in Health’s advocacy arm, Partners in Health Engage. They have a vast network of students across the US who are advocating for large-scale policy change year-round. Maybe eventually there’ll be a Refresh Bolivia Engage….