How Change Happens

Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don't

Leslie R. Crutchfield

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119413813
• eBook ISBN: 9781119413783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Discover how those who change the world do so with this thoughtful and timely book

Why do some changes occur, and others don't? What are the factors that drive successful social and environmental movements, while others falter? How Change Happens examines the leadership approaches, campaign strategies, and ground-level tactics employed in a range of modern social change campaigns. The book explores successful movements that have achieved phenomenal impact since the 1980s—tobacco control, gun rights expansion, LGBT marriage equality, and acid rain elimination. It also examines recent campaigns that seem to have fizzled, like Occupy Wall Street, and those that continue to struggle, like gun violence prevention and carbon emissions reduction. And it explores implications for movements that are newly emerging, like Black Lives Matter. By comparing successful social change campaigns to the rest, How Change Happens reveals powerful lessons for changemakers who seek to impact society and the planet for the better in the 21 st century.

Author Leslie Crutchfield is a writer, lecturer, social impact advisor, and leading authority on scaling social innovation. She is Executive Director of the Global Social Enterprise Initiative (GSEI) at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, and co-author of two previous books, Forces for Good and Do More than Give. She serves as a senior advisor with FSG, the global social impact consulting firm. She is frequently invited to speak at nonprofit, philanthropic, and corporate events, and has appeared on shows such as ABC News Now and NPR, among others. She is an active media contributor, with pieces appearing in The Washington Post. Fortune.com, CNN/Money and Harvard Business Review.com.

• Examines why some societal shifts occur, and others don't
• Illustrates the factors that drive successful social and environmental movements
• Looks at the approaches, strategies, and tactics that changemakers employ in order to effect widescale change

Whatever cause inspires you, advance it by applying the must-read advice in How Change Happens —whether you lead a social change effort, or if you're tired of just watching from the outside and want to join the fray, or if you simply want to better understand how change happens, this book is the place to start.

1
Turn Grassroots Gold

Grassroots [grass-roots] noun: The common or ordinary people, especially as contrasted with the leadership or elite of a political party, social organization, etc.; the rank and file.¹

IN ONE OF the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history, Omar Mateen killed or injured more than one hundred people in a popular gay night club in Orlando, Florida, in a hateful terrorist act on June 12, 2016. Furor ignited when Donald Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, tweeted hours after the tragedy, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism. . . .” Democrats reacted on Capitol Hill, shouting “Pass the Bill” over a stalled vote for a proposed “no-fly, no-buy” law to prevent suspected terrorists from purchasing guns. Some Democratic leaders walked off the floor as Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called for a moment of silence in memory of the victims and then launched an unprecedented fourteen-hour Senate floor filibuster to force a vote on tighter gun laws for suspected terrorists. The NRA countered that radical Islamic terrorists would not be deterred by gun control laws, and its supporters protested any infringement on Second Amendment freedoms. Meanwhile, thousands of the surviving victims and family members and friends joined with LGBT rights activists and gun control advocates to hold candlelight vigils, mount protests, and stage “die-ins”—one outside NRA headquarters in Virginia. The entire spectacle was covered 24/7 by cable news and other media, with many reporters reminding viewers the vast majority of Americans favor “common sense” gun measures.

And then, not much changed.

Drive about a hundred miles south of Washington, D.C., to Charlottesville, Virginia, to understand why. There, a more muted scene unfolded during that same summer month of June 2016: A few days after the mass shooting in Orlando, the Charlottesville City Council met and discussed a resolution asking state and federal lawmakers for stricter gun laws. The resolution passed 4 to 0. Despite the unanimous vote, the majority of local residents attending the meeting objected. “My hope for tonight is that the Charlottesville City Council, in all it’s [sic] wisdom, decides to forget about this whole thing,” said Albert Shank, an Army veteran and Charlottesville resident. “And they let us go on to continue to observe our rights, and obey the Second Amendment.”² The council members didn’t actually have any legal power over gun rights, and their vote was merely a “call to action” due to the Virginia state preemption laws, which prevented local jurisdictions from enacting gun laws that were stricter than what the state had already ruled.³ The Charlottesville City Council—and every other local council in the state of Virginia—was rendered impotent on imposing any kind of further firearm restriction.

The situation in Charlottesville mirrors that of the vast majority of communities across the country. At the local level, even when the most seemingly innocuous resolution is up for consideration by city councils, NRA members and gun rights supporters mobilize to express their views and defend Second Amendment rights. They show up, they speak up, they vote—and dutifully persuade family members, neighbors, and friends to do the same. The NRA projects a visible, palpable presence at statehouses, council chambers, and courtrooms across the country whenever a piece of legislation or law related to guns is up for consideration. It’s the dutiful activism of citizens like Albert Shank—and hundreds of thousands of others like him across the country—that shore up the phenomenal legislative and electoral victories of the NRA.

The NRA’s grassroots organizing strategy is the single most important reason why the movement has been so successful in defending and expanding the rights of gun owners in the United States. Its grassroots membership is far more important than the financial support the NRA receives from gun manufacturers, which historically have provided only a minor percentage of the budget.⁴ And it’s the fundamental reason why even the most unorthodox NRA policy proposals are enacted. The gun rights movement’s grassroots army is the reason why, despite the waves of angry anti-gun protests, heartbreaking vigils, and pleading calls for reform that erupt after each tragic mass shooting—from Columbine to Sandy Hook, Orlando to Las Vegas—gun violence prevention groups still largely lose ground. On the surface, it’s baffling, because the vast majority of Americans support “common sense” gun policies such as universal background checks, including Democrats and Republicans, gun owners as well as non-owners.⁵ Given the widespread public support of measures like these, it would seem gun safety advocates should be winning handily. But except in a handful of progressive states, they don’t. The main reason for their defeat nationally is that gun control advocates historically failed to match the scale and intensity of the NRA’s grassroots-fueled movement.

Leading from the Grassroots

As we examined a range of social and environmental movements surging since the 1980s, it became irrefutably clear that those with strong and robust grassroots—measured by both size and intensity of the base—win. It is the single most important factor in the NRA’s success since the group first politicized in the mid-1970s and then intensified its grassroots organizing efforts starting in the 1990s. And in almost every other winning modern societal change we studied, grassroots activism played the key role.

The war to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples was waged at local and state ballot boxes, coordinated in large part by Freedom to Marry campaign leaders who successfully galvanized memberships of major national LGBT groups like Lambda Legal, GLAD, and NCLR, and hundreds of state and local groups, forging coalitions to galvanize grassroots action. Likewise, the anti–drunk driving movement was almost entirely predicated on chapter-based strategies of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), RID, and others to mobilize survivors and victims’ families and friends. The modern tobacco control movement was sparked by grassroots activists who rallied in the 1970s to pass the first community bans in Arizona and Minnesota.⁶

California soon followed suit, and with the 1976 launch of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights (ANR) by a group of Berkeley-based advocates, ANR (formerly Californians for Nonsmokers’ Rights) expanded the grassroots charge against the tobacco industry to protect non-smokers from secondhand smoke. The tobacco control movement accelerated again with the 1995 launch of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (the Campaign). A national organization created to provide technical support and critically needed resources to state-based grassroots coalitions, the Campaign also mounted national media and public norm change campaigns and provided a powerful counterweight to the influential tobacco industry lobby at the federal level.

Even the global polio eradication movement credits its success in large part to Rotary International’s grassroots membership, which puts more than a million boots on the ground through its thirty thousand chapters as Rotarians marshal the social and political will to fight polio in each country where the disease remains—eliminating it in 99.9 percent of the world to date.

Conversely, the causes that are faltering in the early 21st century can attribute their struggles in some part to weak or uneven grassroots efforts. One example is gun violence prevention. Prior to when Everytown for Gun Safety formed in 2014, for nearly forty years, two main groups had dominated the gun control agenda: the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. The Brady Campaign was founded in 1974 (named National Council to Control Handguns, and later re-named Handgun Control, Inc., from 1980 to 2000). The Brady Campaign quickly became the wealthiest and most politically important gun control group in America—“the de facto chief.”⁷ The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence represented a consortium of women’s, civic, labor, and religious associations; both organizations advocated for national legislation to prohibit gun use and ownership among the general public. What was missing, however, was a robust sustained movement of individual activists and local groups pushing for gun control from the grassroots up. As Kristin Goss noted in Disarmed: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction: How Change Happens
• 1 Turn Grassroots Gold
• 2 Sharpen Your 10/10/10/20 = 50 Vision
• 3 Change Hearts and Policy
• 4 Reckon with Adversarial Allies
• 5 Break from Business as Usual
• 6 Be Leaderfull
• Conclusion: Where We Go from Here: From Forces for Good to How Change Happens
• Appendix A: Research Parameters
• Appendix B: List of Interviews
• Appendix C: Additional Resources on Movements and Systems
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author and GSEI
• Index
• EULA