Supporting a Movement for Health and Health Equity Lessons from Social Movements: Workshop Summary (2014) / Chapter Skim
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2 Lessons from Social Movements
2 Lessons from Social Movements
Pages 5-20
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From page 5... ...
. Ganz, who studies and teaches leadership, organization, and strategy in social movements and politics and who has worked as a community organizer, described lessons learned from his long experience in building successful social movements and in training change leaders (Ganz, 2010)
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Sociologists define a social movement as "an organized effort to change laws, policies, or practices by people who do not have the power to effect change through conventional channels," Polletta said. She emphasized that while movements often target the government and seek legislative change, they also challenge institutional policies and practices outside the government, as well as popular beliefs and common behaviors.
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These organizations may prove instrumental in leading change beyond the purview of government -- an arena that social movement scholars now recognize as important to achieving movement goals overall, she added. Reforming the practices of the health care industry or of medical schools and other institutions may effectively further the cause of health improvement, Polletta said, and in the current climate of increasingly consumer- or patient-oriented health care this is a real possibility.
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Deploying Effective Messages "To mobilize participants, garner media coverage, enlist support, delegitimize antagonists, and persuade policy makers, movement groups must generate a persuasive message," Polletta said; that is, they must "frame," or communicate, their issue in a way that resonates with the general public. Effective framings explain the problem, offer a solution, and motivate participation, and they do so in the context of dominant values, such as equality, cost effectiveness, and personal responsibility, Polletta said.
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That social movements have served as the main engine of political change in this country is not an accident, he said; rather, it is a direct result of the "particularly sclerotic set of electoral and formal political institutions" established by the founding fathers, who intentionally created a system with multiple barriers to innovation, including "many veto points, [at the] legislative, judicial, state level, and such deep principles of unequal representation, whether the Three-Fifths rule3 as applied to voting or institutions like the Senate that allocated representation regardless of the electorate." Models for change instead emerged from the religious movements known as the Great Awakenings, which were followed by the temperance movement, the abolition movement, the suffrage movement, the populist movement, the early labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the conservative movement, 2 Speaker Martha Arguello of Physicians for Social Responsibility–Los Angeles later challenged Polletta's characterization of McKibben as "the father of the climate change movement." The environmental justice movement has had a long interest in climate change, Arguello said, and it is crucial to recognize their broad, committed leadership on this issue, particularly as that recognition influences funding decisions.
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According to Ganz, "social movements emerge from the efforts of purposeful actors, individuals or organizations, to respond to changes, to conditions experienced as unjust -- not just inconvenient, but unjust -- so as to assert new public values, form new relationships, and mobilize political, economic, and cultural power to translate those values into action." He also defined social movements by what they are not: fashions, styles, or fads, none of which are collective, strategic, or organized. However, he added, to say that a social movement is organized "doesn't always mean that everybody is getting along," because social movements often incorporate competing groups.
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Marshall Ganz's Core Practices of Movement Building According to Ganz, five "core practices" are required to build and organize successful social movements. They are: 1. Relationship Building "Movements are built by the formation of new relationships among people," Ganz said.
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2. Developing a Narrative Ganz, as did Polletta, emphasized that successful social movements tell a story. The purpose of the story, he said, is to "articulate the challenge that is to be faced and bring alive the values to be drawn upon in order to find the moral or emotional resources to confront that challenge." Such a narrative prepares movement participants -- whether as individuals, communities, or movements as a whole -- to face daunting challenges by countering fear with hope, empathy, and a sense of self-worth.
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Ultimately, building effective movements requires both the identification and recruitment of leaders and also their development, either with formal or informal training, Ganz said. Effective social movements carry out this identification, recruitment, and development at multiple organizational levels throughout the movement, he added.
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County Board of Health, who asked how a movement for population health improvement and health equity might define its opposition and avoid alienating key allies. Polletta replied, "We don't want to antagonize anyone, but we know that having an antagonist is mobilizing.
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and other oil companies that have now glossy advertisements where they talk about local movement building," Polletta observed. She noted that both she and Ganz had defined social movements as representing people who are relatively powerless, so the danger of the movements being co-opted by the powerful is always there.
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" Longtime combatants can develop a relationship of respect, Ganz said, and such a relationship should be possible between business and public health community and its partners. The challenge in such relationships stems from power imbalances, he explained; thus, the public health community needs to organize itself to achieve the status of equal partner to industry so that it can exercise agency and truly collaborate.
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For example, she said, urban planners could take up the issue of population health improvement and health equity, developing their own movement to create cities that can be more responsive to public health concerns. "I think there are all kinds of alliances that could be made," Polletta said.
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To illustrate this point, she told the story of Harvard University School of Public Health professor Jay Winsten, who in 1988 worked with Hollywood writers and producers to embed the concept of the "designated driver" in prime-time television shows -- an apparent factor in a subsequent substantial decline in alcohol-related traffic fatalities.4 Although Winsten's actions did not substitute for organizing in the anti-drunk-driving movement, Polletta observed, Winsten was able to take advantage of an opportunity and benefit the movement. A movement can measure its progress in various ways, Ganz said, by counting its members, by counting its leaders, or by measuring the extent to which it has developed infrastructure.
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What could be done to change that? "I am struck by how much media attention there is right now to the inefficiencies of health care provision," Polletta replied.
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However, he added, the moral authority of the public health field is "enormous" in the United States, and that authority can be leveraged to effect change. "I really do think that there is something stirring in this whole world of healing," he said.
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