This month's CTIPP CAN call helped trauma-informed advocates develop their policymaking agenda as we move into a new Congress and state/local legislative session in 2025. Through networking and resource-sharing, we discussed strategies to help move communities out of the cycle of patchwork policy and toward holistic solutions. We also explored how best to target decision-makers in favor of trauma-informed policymaking.
This is the second CTIPP CAN of a four-month series focused on education, networking, and resource-sharing for the trauma-informed movement.
RESOURCES:
GUIDE: Trauma-Informed Meetings, Discussions & Conversations
RISE Up Act and CMWRA Summary and August 2024 CTIPP CAN webinar
Issue-Solution Tree Activity
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Hello everyone and welcome to the second call of our four part series as we prepare to take action and advance trauma informed approaches to advocacy as we promote trauma informed policies and practices in 2025. Today we will focus on developing an advocacy agenda and we are thrilled to have all of you here with us today.
As we welcome folks to today's call, many of us are dealing with either directly experiencing or indirectly experiencing through loved ones and through media, the devastating extreme weather events that have hit the United States in the last few weeks, particularly the back to back hurricanes that hit the Southeast portion of the United States at the beginning of the month.
Now, I want to recognize that we do not address every catastrophic event that occurs at CTIPP because we don't have the capacity and resources to respond in the ways that we wish we could. I recognize that while we recognize the recent hurricanes, we have not recognized other hurricanes as well as tornadoes and wildfires and other extreme events at the time.
We have wanted to respond with support and love as best as we could, and we now feel we are adequately able to do so. We wanted to let you all know that on October 1st, we held a webinar launching the new TRCN commissioning program, which works to build population level resilience to the impacts of the climate ecosystem, biodiversity catastrophe that we are experiencing, which will continue to increase the frequency and severity of not just extreme weather, but other conditions that increase stress, such as changing agricultural and water systems.
We work to support the development and sustainability of transformational resilience coordinating networks, which are community led coalitions that organize to support well being through the challenges that we currently face. This embodies a public health approach to the climate crisis. And if you know, or are part of a coalition that is interested in organizing in this way, or you're interested in starting one, you can watch the webinar and sign up to join our upcoming Community of Practice for Prospective TRCNs, which means folks and groups who are just starting out.
The upcoming Community of Practice will be two part, October 22nd and October 29th. You can view the October 1st webinar, sign up for the upcoming COP, and learn more about the commissioning program on the website link that I believe Laura just posted in the chat or is about to. This, as with all of our resources, is available at no cost to participants, and we just wanted to let you all know in case you or someone you know may be interested.
We wanted to thank you all who showed up last month and provided us with incredibly valuable feedback to help inform the direction of our calls moving forward. We wanted to be responsive to what we heard from you all. So we want to highlight a few areas of common inquiry. We had some first time CTIPP folks on the call and we were asked for a quick overview of our website.
We know there's a lot of resources and initiatives to look through. So Laura is going to do a quick rundown here in a moment. We also had questions about where. Folks can find our community agreements to use in their own organizations and meetings, the QR code on the side of this page, as well as the bitly link on this page.
And I believe that that is also being posted in the chat. is good for a quick guide on trauma informed meetings, conversations, and discussions. In this resource, you will find a number of helpful tips, as well as sample community agreements to hold such meetings. In a few minutes, we will also go over the community agreements together in support of today's breakout rooms.
Speaking of breakout rooms, we got a lot of great feedback from all of you that the connections created in the breakout rooms are invaluable and many of you requested more time. At the same time, some folks shared that they would prefer to not be in a breakout room and do independent reflection. We love this feedback are so glad that many of you found the connections with other advocates so valuable and appreciate those sharing that breakout rooms didn't work for all of you during these calls, whether that is because you were in a location that is challenging to come off mute and engage.
Or just because quiet reflection is your preferred method of processing and integrating the information during these calls, we will extend the time of the breakout sessions today, as well as make the breakout rooms open for you to choose to go into, which will allow those who prefer to do independent work during that time to remain in the main room to be able to do so.
This is new for us. But we are happy to give it a try. Appreciate your grace and patience in advance if tech gets a little wonky on us, as we have practiced, but this is the first time that we're doing it live with a big group. So there will hopefully not, but might be a learning curve in getting this right.
And we will get into more specific directions around this when the first breakout room comes around. Finally, someone mentioned that they would love to see more information on anti racism work as it relates to trauma informed care. So you all know your feedback on the Google form is completely anonymous, unless you tell us who you are in an answer, of course.
So we don't know who asked that question, and therefore wanted to quickly direct you and anyone else who may be interested toward two resources. The first is an article written by two CTIPP board members at the beginning of 2022 titled To Be Anti Racist Is To Be Trauma Informed. If we are to do truly trauma informed work, as we see in SAMHSA principles we lean into around recognizing cultural, gender, and historical differences, we must also work to address the intergenerational traumas, many of which are rooted in systemic oppression, that have existed since the founding of our nation and have persisted since.
This piece brings in a variety of research to a relatively short piece. It only takes a few minutes to read and it discusses exactly what the questions we were asked. In addition to the QR code on the slide, I believe that Laura is putting the link to that article in the chat and In addition to that piece, which directly answers the question that we were asked, I also wanted to highlight this more recent piece for those who are interested that is relevant to advocacy efforts, highlighting opportunities to mobilize around supporting trauma informed policies in trauma informed ways, where there are currently political fear mongering tactics surrounding DEI and other related efforts, which we have seen impact policies and practices that promote well being.
including in a few cases efforts specifically around the language of trauma informed care. There are examples of such efforts highlighted, in some cases bipartisan bills that were passed and have since become politicized, as well as suggestions about ways to navigate these challenges. I wanted to share this resource with this group as well because some folks on this call may make.
May wish to make this part of the agenda or leverage elements of this information as you all advocate in the year ahead. Now, I will turn it over to my wonderful colleague, Laura, to quickly talk about the CTIPP website for folks on the call who are new to our organization. Thank you, Jesse. So, Just real quickly, there are a couple of things that we wanted to highlight.
So if you're looking for our main initiatives on the homepage at the top in the nav bar, we've got an initiative tab. And that is sort of choose your own adventure, right? So whether you're looking to educate, activate, or advocate, we've got a pathway for you. And when you click on any of these, um, Logos.
It will then take you to the program page with more information and all the various resources that we have associated with it, whether that's toolkits, guides, video series, um, an advocacy series, a community of practice, we have all sorts of things to, um, to review. Slide. And then we also have a really robust resource center that we've been building out for the past few years.
And there's a couple ways to explore it so the the search bar is is really intuitive and can help you find anything on like very specific topics. But then if you just want to explore we've also organized all the content. By the following categories that you can see on your screen. So we've got case studies, we've got all of our past CTIPP CAN calls.
Most of them also have transcripts. We're working through that now to get all that updated to increase accessibility, but, uh, that should have transcripts for the last two or three years already. Um, our events, we've got all of our toolkits and our guides and res, uh, excuse me, and news and our podcasts as well.
So lots of different ways to, um, to explore the resources we have. Thanks, Laura. And then last but certainly not least, per the request to discuss community agreements in addition to the guide that we shared earlier, we will go over our community agreements now. We want for this information to support the breakouts that we will do today.
And we want to ensure that in those breakout rooms and as we create community, we are creating conditions of safety and empowerment in the breakout rooms. Nobody should be forced to share anything that they don't want to while also leaving, uh, having space for everyone to share their thoughts and ideas.
Demonstrating respect for others and engaging in curiosity around others perspectives rather than judgment. Be inclusive and make space for others. Speak from your experiences as best as possible and in this call and after, we encourage everyone to engage in ongoing self reflection and to do what you need to take care of yourselves.
If there are other community agreements that you feel are important, please feel free to put them in the chat and or share them with your groups in the breakout rooms. But this serves as a good starting point for community agreements we should all hold ourselves and each other accountable to. If you use these in your community and or organization, know that they are examples and you should feel very open to co creating these community agreements with those you work alongside, as we have worked to do over time with these community agreements with our network, which is why the slide that you see here is actually somewhat different than the community agreements in the toolkit that we shared earlier.
We will share this link again at the end of the call, but we just want to emphasize how important your feedback is to us. You can find the feedback form link at this QR code and bit. ly link, which again is completely anonymous unless you tell us who you are, or you can send us an email if you prefer. We greatly appreciate your engagement and feedback.
Last month, we talked about why trauma informed approaches to advocacy, in addition to trauma informed policies and practices, are so necessary as we meet the moment that we are living in, as well as what this looks like for us. We went into detail about the powerful traumatic forces that continue to compound the ways in which unresolved collective cultural and historical trauma have led to collective denial and disturbance that perpetuates the dysfunction we are experiencing in our politics and throughout our society, and how we can be powerful antidotes to this in the way we promote transformation toward making our world a better place.
If you were not able to make the call or want to review any part of the call or the resources that we shared throughout, you can view this as well as other previously held CTIPPCAN calls, like Laura just walked us through, on our website as well as on our YouTube page. Now, we'll start today's conversation around developing our agendas by working on a problem statement.
Before we get into that, I want to let you know that I will be using the LOVE Act as an example, so that I am not just discussing theoretical application, but also sharing how I am working on this in my own work. I have spoken about the Lowering Overdose and Violence Epidemics, or LOVE Act, to the network over the past few months.
I want to share this with you because as we work to support you all in forging your advocacy efforts, we are working hard to model the model as well. I will highlight the advocacy work we are leading at the federal level as well as we go through these calls, as we encourage you all to take action in support of that work.
And if you don't know what else to advocate for right now, it can be a wonderful place to start. But in building this series to also support you all to develop your own agendas in a specific area or areas that call to you, it feels important to share the agenda that I am leading as it is being co created in Philadelphia.
For those of you who have not heard me talk about the LOVE Act before, it is model legislation that I have based on the success of, among other elements, the success of the Family Policy Council's work in Washington State between 1994 and 2011, which has been written about, most notably in a report called Self Healing Communities, among many other successful projects that have done similar community led trauma informed coalition work, though I mentioned the Family Policy Council's work because it was done by a government, and the Elijah Cumming Healing Cities Act passed in Baltimore. I will get more into the specifics of the architecture of the proposed legislative and administrative strategy throughout this session as we work on developing our agendas.
But I also want to highlight that before LOVE was a proposed bill, it was an initiative that I led to create a trauma informed community for the Maniunk, Roxborough, and East Falls neighborhoods of Philadelphia out of the community center for which I served as the Director of Development. In addition to spotlighting my legislative advocacy around love I am going through presently, I will also highlight my programmatic advocacy around love in the past when I was working at Northlight as some of you may choose to focus your advocacy agendas on something other than legislation.
I humbly present this to you knowing that the project did not sustain the way I hoped that it would. There was a leadership change at the organization at the end of 2019 when this project started to take off. And then when the pandemic caused the chaos at many levels for the organization that it did, particularly given that we focused on emergency services, the capacity to focus on making our services trauma informed during that time reduced even more as we were just trying to survive and meet the growing basic needs in the community.
And then I left the organization to begin my work on the national level in May of 2020. So while the advocacy and program development did make meaningful progress, I am not sharing this to say it was successful, but to share my experiences advocating somewhat successfully for trauma informed practices that may have been sustained in different conditions.
But the initiative itself was developing strategies to bring community members together to work to address the deeper needs of the community beyond just the services that NorthLight offered. As we work to develop our own advocacy agendas, we want to remember our commitments as trauma informed advocates to an ongoing process of learning and growth.
A rigid agenda can pass, but it is much more likely to not only pass, but also meaningfully improve if we continue to make improvements as we learn and grow through the process. For example, just last week I was at City Hall in Philly meeting with the chief of staff of a council member, and after going through my pitch as we got into the conversation, she suggested that this didn't sound like it required Wired legislation but rather could be a budget request.
I had never considered this, and to be honest, I'm not even sure if I knew it was an option. In discussion, I pushed back a little bit sharing the importance of legislating at least certain elements which she agreed to. Yet she also stood firm that it may make more sense as we move forward to consider elements that don't necessarily need to be legislated.
So please do not take this commitment to learning and growth as needing to back down on what we believe should happen. But it is about a flexibility to support new and perhaps better pathways for this work. As we move forward, we are going to get into problem statements and propose solutions in a bit and spend a fair amount of time on this as an activity today.
But I will just say here that the ability to clearly articulate the issue or issues that we are trying to address. Note that if there are multiple issues we are working to address, then we should have multiple problem statements, rather than just one massive problem statement, as this can be overwhelming.as well as proposed solutions. This helps to give shape and purpose to our agenda, and we want to ensure that we are building coalition as best as we can to support what we are proposing and that the focus of our impact is positive change of some sort within the community or communities that the folks that we are advocating towards serve.
This last part may sound obvious, but there is so much advocacy and lobbying for private interests that goes on, it feels worth saying. It is a good thing to have a product or service that an organization or system can leverage to make a meaningful impact, but it is a problem if our advocacy is about advancing a private interest over the greater public impact that it will have.
This slide is from the second module of the asynchronous advocacy series available on our website done by Whitney Marris a couple years ago, and is a great place to go deeper if you are interested, as it is a wonderful complement to the process we are going through on these canned calls. You see here that agenda setting is a wonderful place to begin the policy process.
And today we will get to agenda setting as well as some design, though more work will be done by all of you outside this call. So don't necessarily expect to finish product at the end of our time together, though that would be wonderful. This will help us set up for implementation and review of our successful advocacy efforts, which then gets us back to agenda setting.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Advocacy, policy, and practice change our iterative processes. While phases have beginnings and ends, there is not really an end in social change and social justice efforts. As we commit to an ongoing process of learning and growth, we always have room for tweaks and improvements.
We will embark on an activity that will help us begin with a problem identification and move to a proposed solution here in a bit. Even if we know what we want to do, I encourage you to engage thoughtfully in the activity as it can help us more clearly articulate what our work is doing. And you never know what kind of brain blast may come to you in your reflections.
As we think about the problem statement, we want to consider ways that we can frame the problem that make the solution that we are going to propose even more obvious. It can be particularly effective if we lean into existing strengths, what is strong with instead of just what is wrong with, as we promote solutions that can make things better.
And we want to be specific while having the clarity to not need to get too granular to help others understand why the solution we are proposing will make a meaningful difference. We will get into the questions outlined below, but these and perhaps other questions as well are important considerations as we develop our advocacy agendas.
This slide was taken from module three of our advocacy series. And I just want to bring that up in case you want more information and clarity on developing an agenda that module three, as well as that advocacy series as a whole is a great place to go. I am a huge fan of the show, Ted Lasso. The lasso method has absolutely nothing to do with that show, but it felt like a good opportunity to share that fact with you all.
Lasso is an acronym that can help us with problem statements. I alluded to this earlier, but we want to make sure that our problem statements are limited in scope so that they are manageable. If there is a multi pronged approach, then have multiple problem statements that can be brought together. But are not conflating issues into one giant one I know that this is something that I have struggled with in the past around trauma because trauma underlies so many compounding issues But it is easier to help others come to that same realization by breaking down interconnected issues Into their own discrete issues at first and then showing that a proposed solution can address multiple problems at once This can be powerful in supporting our agendas as well as when it is done well, but we want to ensure that we are not conflating multiple issues at once as we try to build consensus.
Is there action that can be taken on the problem we are highlighting? Going back to the last slide, framing a problem statement as it gets to our proposed solution is important. We want to make sure that there is clarity in how our problem statement is worded. Will others support This work we are proposing, whether you have engaged other potential partners in this work or just identified potential groups, it is an important element.
And who owns that problem and the solution. We want to make sure that there is someone or a group of people who are actually tape who are actually able to take action to address the problem that we were working to resolve and that equity and justice are considered in this ownership. Bringing the last couple of slides together into a single sentence, in order to create meaningful solutions, we need to be able to clearly communicate and understand the problems that we are working to address.
This is particularly important as we know that change is an iterative process, and so to be anchored over time in what work we are aiming to do can be a helpful guide as we continue moving forward. As we get started, it is important to begin with what problems we know and what we know of them. Lean into your areas of expertise and interest, and then build upon that with further research.
Going back to last month's session where we talked about leading with our why, being aligned with our interests and passions can be important to sustain our efforts to see meaningful reform get passed. We know that there are so many ways that trauma, both directly and indirectly, impact our society. So during today's activities, I encourage you to lean into your strengths and interests as we practice developing our problem statement.
After the call, or if you prefer to do an independent reflection rather than breakout rooms during the allotted time, You want to look at what gaps there may be in the problem outline and can patch that in with additional research. What you come up with on today's call does not necessarily need to be what you mobilize upon in the year ahead, though it certainly can be.
But going through the process of this practice will be important so if a new idea comes to mind in the future, you know the process you can go through to get started. As we go through these next three slides before our breakout rooms highlighting the advocacy I am doing and have done on both the policy and practice sides with love to enliven the activities you all will be doing during this call.
Please note that the Love Act will be on the left with that picture of Love Park above it. And the love project at North light will be on the right with the image from the last slide. We want to get out of the cycle of patchwork policies and practices and ensure that we move upstream as a society toward mold toward more holistic solutions.
This does not mean that the solutions we come up with need to do everything by themselves all at once, but they should be developed with an understanding of the broader context that they are being implemented in. On the issue solution tree activity that we will get into to help us spell this out, we will start with a problem identification and then move to address the underlying causes of these issues.
While moving forward the solutions for love look differently, as context is different advocating to Philadelphia city government as opposed to in a community center, the problems that they are working to address are virtually the same, or at least very, very similar. for listening. The big problem and issue that I have been working to address is threefold.
First, there is an abundance of unresolved trauma that perpetuates poor outcomes. Second, our inability to heal these traumatic experiences perpetuates the trauma vortex for future generations. And third, our failure to deal with historical and intergenerational traumas impact our ability to heal and prevent trauma today.
Now, each of these are separate problem statements that are interrelated, yet I try to break it down to be more digestible, and admittedly, they are still very big. Do not feel like yours have to be so massive, and perhaps it is more powerful to break it down even further and have smaller problem statements.
I am growing wiser as this process continues, but I am coming to you with the best I have today in trying to figure out ways to resolve the massive problems that our society is facing. Again, Thank you. Always committing to a process of learning and growth. The underlying causes of these issues are, as folks know on this call, so magnanimous that volumes can and have been written on the myriad underlying causes.
So again, getting to framing that puts the work I am trying to promote at the forefront in my advocacy, this Northlight begin to differ. For the LOVE Act, I focus the problem statement on how the lack of coordination and alignment in public agencies and services is indicative of systemic trauma. How limited funding compounded by this systemic trauma leads to competition rather than collaboration, which is a trauma informed principle, so we cannot, as a city, be doing truly trauma informed work if we are not collaborating.
And the work that is being done is so frequently professionalized rather than creating conditions of empowerment for everyone. Pointing out that empowerment, voice, and choice is another principle of trauma informed work, which only allows the work to go so far.
Now, these are three separate problem statements.
While they flow together, they also highlight three different problems. For love at North light. When I talked to my executive director, as I was developing this, the biggest problem was that the basic services that we offered the child care team programs and workforce development and emergency services, which were all amazing, didn't meet all of the deeper needs of the constituents that we served.
We were able to and needed to, in my mind, address the trauma that had been experienced and continued to be experienced by our constituents, which were further compounded in many ways by the stresses of navigating the systems that kept them afloat. If we were to truly create conditions of empowerment for the community, we serve to truly thrive.
The next step after addressing a problem or problems and their root causes is to identify and consider the barriers that may arise. Often, others are going to come back to us when we share our ideas with potential barriers, which at times, though not always, can be others giving us reasons why that, why what we are proposing may not work.
In our preparation, thinking back to last month's discussion about the champion mentality and the importance of leaning into the things that we can control while we cannot anticipate Every potential barrier. It is a helpful exercise to think about what barriers may exist. Sometimes we will come up with answers to questions folks have other times we will not yet may still find that the exercise of considering other barriers helps us consider and respond to others effectively as well.
This preparation style helped me in a recent meeting with a potential funder, when the executive director asked me what I would say to people with power who do not want for traditional systems to change, and I was able to calmly reflect back that while that is a potential barrier, I think it is much more likely that people in power will see that the greatest threat to their power is the system continuing to decline as it currently is, and the approaches that I am proposing would be more likely a sustainable infrastructure for them to continue living the lives they want while making others lives and the world around them better, which was a satisfying answer for her and something that I had thought about a lot before that conversation. Now, for the LOVE Act, a major barrier that will come up, as is the case with a lot of legislation, is where will the money come from?
There are multiple potential answers to this question that I have come up with, but it is an important barrier to be prepared to discuss. Additionally, there is generally a defense of downstream efforts that arises when we talk about prevention. Responses like this may be disappointing, but we can also choose to meet these responses with understanding and, while standing firm on the need to move toward social justice, support folks in engaging with these change efforts as we know that change is difficult for people, particularly when operating from a scarcity rather than abundance mindset.
Additionally, community led processes are not currently the norm for governments. We are not talking about community based approaches where an organization or system makes decisions for the community, but rather supporting processes where we create conditions for communities to make decisions for themselves.
For the Love Project at Northlight, this last point was also a potential barrier for the community center. Northlight is a community based organization, and creating methods for community leadership in decision making can seem risky, but also promotes community ownership over decisions and can create sustainability and trust building.
In addition, Building the capacity to be responsive to the community's wants is important when you give communities leadership so that we are not just asking for community engagement and doing nothing with what we learn. Being realistic with expectations is important, but can only go so far. The time that it would take to train staff, engage community members in this sort of discussion, are all important considerations as well.
Again, there are more potential barriers that we could identify for these, and soon you will have the opportunity to identify for your own work. And finally, we get to propose the solutions that we can, that we believe can address the problems that we've laid out. Too frequently, people stop at problem identification, and it is important to move beyond just this stage and ensure that we have some possible solutions.
It can be powerful to leave space for collaboration on coming up with solutions while simultaneously proposing some place for the discussion to jump off from. I have found that this is an important balance in building coalitions and momentum while providing opportunity for official buy in as well.
The solution for the LOVE Act, which I am proposing, has three main prongs. The first is a grant program for community led coalitions. The second is a broad education and engagement campaign that combines trauma informed care and systems thinking. And the third is coordination and alignment of government agencies and services.
One proposal for how this could be funded is through a relatively small portion of the decade and a half of opioid settlement funds remaining that could be used to reduce ACE prevalence across the population, supported by data indicating that the population attributable risk of ACEs on intravenous drug use is 78%.
And as we know, those with four or more ACEs are more than one thousand percent more likely to partake in intravenous drug use than those with zero ACEs. So any comprehensive approach to addressing the opioid crisis should include the prevention of ACEs and trauma. Long term, we can then sustain and scale these investments into community led systems change by capturing the cost avoidance that is realized through through improved outcomes and continue to exponentially increase the return on investment, which coordinating across government agencies can help to promote.
For the work at the community center, we came up with a plan to train all staff at the organization and had a vision of staff, volunteers, and constituents taking what we learned into the community like oxygen cells. And we envision the roads throughout the neighborhoods we served were like the blood vessels.
We could oxygenate the community with compassion and love, which would not just help individuals, families, and the community as a whole heal from the traumas it had experienced and were continuing to experience, but also support the delivery of better services from what the community center was already doing.
We had began the training and received a grant for trauma informed parenting classes with travel stipends, child care, meals, and cash rewards at the end budgeted in for those who completed the entire course built in, as well as specialists who could support parents with substance use disorders, though that was not the only demographic of parents we were focused on reaching.
But, as I mentioned earlier, Thank you. When the pandemic hit and as with many foundations, the grant was then allowed to be used for general operating expenses to sustain the organization. And that first phase of the project never moved beyond some training for board members, staff and volunteers.
However, the solution was sound and some progress was undoubtedly made. In addition to discussing the agendas I am working on around love and creating space for you all to develop your own agendas, I want to take some time to highlight two policies that have been introduced in this Congress that promote cross sector community coalitions, which, as I mentioned earlier, can You can also use for your own advocacy agendas if you want to.
Section 101 of RISE creates a new grant program to fund community coalitions to address trauma. Beyond just this grant program, as you can see on the slide, there are a number of other important provisions in this bill that support trauma informed approaches, such as training for frontline service providers, work to reduce hospital readmission rates, and more.
In addition to RISE, the Community Mental Wellness and Resilience Act, which I may also refer to as the CMWRA, creates a smaller grant program to promote public health approaches to build population level mental wellness and resilience. What both of these bills do is build capacity within communities to organize around trauma informed and healing centered approaches.
And we will continue to work with growing numbers of advocates and offices to get this passed. and we will work from there to support communities as best we can. As has been our vision for a very long time, the power of a national organization promoting trauma informed care only matters insofar as those practices are embedded within the community fabric all across the country and we hope someday all around the world.
It is where the work must be done and it is the type of work that needs to be done. If you don't know what else to focus on, please know that your work and focus on this issue would be incredibly meaningful and important. And as I mentioned earlier, even if you are advocating for other things, it would be greatly appreciated for you all to take action on and spread the word about these pieces of legislation in the Congress ahead.
We'll have more information on that as we move forward in the year. You can find more information about these policies and opportunities to take action on the link that I believe Laura has already or is about to post in the chat. If this is something you feel you would like to build your agenda around, we will also post in the chat the link to our August C TIP CAN call, which goes deeper into trauma informed community change efforts.
You can watch through that call and look through the resources on the post to build out a strategy to advance these important pieces of legislation. Both are bipartisan, which with one exception that I will speak to momentarily for rise Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia and Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois are the two lead co sponsors of the bill on the Senate side with other Democrats and Republicans who have supported as well.
Neither of them are up for re election this election, so they will definitely be in the Congress ahead. On the House side, we will need to wait until after the election to know who will be in office to potentially introduce this bill. The lead co sponsor in the past for this bill on the Republican side is not running for office again this year, though there have been other Republican supporters in the past.
However, we are confident that the bill will be reintroduced early in the next Congress. As for the CMWRA, The Senate side does not have a Republican co sponsor because it was introduced in this last Congress as part of the Green New Deal, which kept Senate Republicans from co sponsoring. However, there is bipartisan support as on the House side, which was introduced as a standalone bill.
There are both Democratic and Republican co sponsors. Is that while this work to build population level resilience is not partisan, as communities across the country are being devastated with greater frequency and more severity of extreme weather and changing ecological systems, as we are all aware, conversations around climate change have become grounds for partisan battle.
We have used language around extreme weather events rather than climate change as to move this particular piece of legislation forward. We do not necessarily need to agree upon what the causes of these disasters are to build population level resilience to the impacts of them. I am just sharing this for consideration in case you take either or both of these pieces of legislation on for the activities you want to work on.
We are now about to go into breakout rooms or into independent reflection to do this issue solution tree activity. I know it's a little blurry on the page, but we're going to post it in the chat for you all to see the document. It's essentially what we just walked through together. You will see that there are prompts for consideration in the four boxes that will take us from problem identification to root cause driver, to a consideration of barriers that may come up, then to propose solutions.
We will also keep groups small, around three people per breakout room for those that want to do breakouts, so that folks have an opportunity to share and reflect on beginning to build out their problem solution tree. For those doing the independent reflection, and if it works for those in the breakout rooms during your conversations, you can fill in the boxes on the second page of this activity sheet as you move through the activity.
We are going to have 15 minutes to either converse with others or reflect as we move through these prompts. I encourage you all to think deeply about these prompts, and if you get through to the proposed solutions and there is still time remaining, I encourage you then to reflect back on the LASSO framework to see if there are opportunities to strengthen the problem statement or problem statements that we have come up with.
Are they limited? Are they actionable? Are they specific? Are others going to support this and who will own the solution? Someone I think Laura should have just popped, uh, in the link where you can download this activity as either a PDF or word document in the chat. And we will go ahead and open the breakout rooms for those who wish to join one.
And 15 minutes. Just to mention before we break here very quickly, please keep in mind that we want to support you all pursuing your areas of interest. I shared my lens and scope of work as an example, but if you are an education advocate, then focus on the part of education you care about. We may have early childhood advocates, K to 12 advocates and higher ed, higher education advocates.
in this session. So even within education, there are different lenses. And of course, even within those three buckets, there are different problems and solutions to define that. The same goes for issues surrounding healthcare, the environment, justice system, child and family serving systems, community organizations, and more follow your heart.
Please keep the community agreements we went over earlier in mind and hoping you all have a wonderful conversations and reflections. If you want to join a breakout room, you should be able to do so. And of course, if you prefer to do independent reflection, you can just stay in this main room. So I'm going to go ahead and try to open these breakout rooms that you can all choose to join.
Um, we'll try to keep it to three and we will learn, uh, where I think that y'all should have just seen something pop up on your screen to join a breakout room if that's what you want to do. I'm seeing, I'm seeing a nod of the head. That is wonderful. I think that I'm seeing some shaking of the head. We will figure this out.
But if you are seeing that, please go join a breakout room with the activity around the problem solution tree to discuss. If, if not, I'll go ahead and pause the recording and we can troubleshoot this together again. This is a learning process for all of us.
All right. Welcome back everyone. Uh, at least for those of you who were in the breakout rooms, obviously for those who were doing the process in the main room with us. Thank you for continuing to be here. We hope that it was a good time to connect and that the extra time supported greater integration and processing of developing, or at least beginning to develop our problem statements and our proposed solutions.
Please let us know in the chat, uh, if those 15 minutes were good. As I said at the beginning of the call, this change was the result of your feedback and our efforts to continue to make these sessions better for all of you. We will have one more breakout and independent reflection session during this call here in a bit and look forward to all of your thoughts about what worked well with this session and more ways that we can improve moving forward.
Can't promise we can make all of the changes, but we will do our best. If there were any profound realizations that occurred during the breakout rooms or independent reflection time or anything else from that time we just spent working on the problem solution tree, you want to highlight those. For the group, please feel free to put that in the chat.
We already started to discuss this in the first half of the call, but just want to pick up from there that it's important to understand when there are opportunities to build upon existing work, rather than needing to start from scratch. This does not mean that we change the problem and solution statement that we just wrote.
Worked on. I believe that it's important to start with our genuine ideas and seek ways for things to build upon existing structures and systems where possible, as this can better lead to transformation rather than just working within the existing systems. It is the literal idea to me of thinking outside the box.
Again, I do not want to cause analysis paralysis, so we do not need to exhaust fully every ounce of energy to answer these questions. But they are helpful in considering the pathway forward for the agendas we are developing. Having an understanding of the existing policy landscape, and in that both current and future, Gaps in policy as well as where existing policies are causing harm can be a helpful foundation, as well as the broader issues that are circulating in public life that leaders are responding to, which will impact the way they view related issues and what their focus is on.
Understanding who are advocates and potential advocates as well as those who may be against what we are proposing, while also understanding who our champions amongst leadership, so both internal and external analysis can be very helpful. Where do you notice alignment as another way to look at opportunities to build upon existing work and priorities?
And are there other places, even if not where you are advocating, that have done something similar to what you are advocating? For that you can draw upon for inspiration, knowing what is already happening across these and other dimensions can put us in a very good place to move our agenda forward. On the next slide, we are going to discuss what we need to advocate to who we need to advocate to rather.
And for many of us doing legislative advocacy, we will likely not know until next month who exactly it is that we will need to advocate to before we get to that. I just want to acknowledge that there is a lot of stress surrounding the elections next month. Within our own network, there is a diversity of political identity, and we continue to work hard to build a non partisan movement.
Though we are, of course, political, we aim to raise above traditional partisan fights as we work toward a truly united country. So this is not to speak to any particular feelings about individual candidates, though given the political divide in our country as discussed during last month's CTIPP CAN call, people's feelings about the upcoming election are intense and validly so.
I wish there was more that I could do to help make this time easier, but can say that if you feel this way, you are not alone. I will be taking many deep breaths in the week ahead. Weeks ahead, as I know many of you and others will as well. With that said, as it pertains to today's conversation, some of the people that we want to advocate to may not be known until after the election, depending on what level we are advocating at.
For example, while we may be able to make educated guesses in some districts, every seat in the U. S. House of Representatives is on the ballot. Even in the districts that we feel certain of who will win office, we do not know which party will be in power during the next Congress, which has an impact on the committees that we advocate to, particularly as it pertains to its leadership and therefore its priorities.
Please note that as we get into this conversation, it is never too early to engage with external partners in this work, and we can still look into the communities, or committees rather, to engage even if we don't know its leadership yet. I just wanted to make sure that we didn't skirt by this as we move forward discussing strategy.
Knowing who to meet with and approach is critically important. We will get back to this in a bit, but I wanted to address, given the current election cycle, the elephant in our virtual room right now talking about political strategy. There are some things that we can control and others that we cannot. We alone cannot control who is elected, but we can control our agendas.
I will reiterate this again, but I have found incredible regulation in having an agenda that I believe in to move forward no matter the result of the elections next month. In addition to the prior considerations, as we move our agenda forward, we need to know who the right people and, in a legislative context, the committees that we need to reach out to are in order to move forward with our advocacy.
During the next session, we will work to create a narrative, both elevator speech and longer form, to drive our agenda forward in meetings. As a constituent by the duty of the role, our elected officials are there to serve us in these politically polarized times. I know many advocates may not feel like if or may feel like if one person wins or the other, we may or may not take action.
I encourage in this politically divisive or diverse movement that we are building together, everyone to plan to reach out to their elected officials, regardless of who wins in their political positions to discuss the importance of the issues you care about, at least to give it a shot. You may be surprised.
We should do research to understand or at least make our best guess which committees to start reaching out to elected officials to advance the policies we are advocating for. Note, if you are advocating for policies and practices not to elected officials, Or if you are advocating at a level that is up for election that is not up for election this year, while what I am sharing may be interesting, it may not impact you in this process.
And a piggyback note that even if we are advocating to folks who are not up for election, their planning may be dependent upon the election itself. That doesn't mean not to approach folks in the interim if we can, but we want to be mindful of what is impacting them. Finding the right committees or groups to advocate to can be found by looking up on Google the various committees in whatever area you are advocating in.
Trying to avoid analysis paralysis and engaging in an ongoing process of learning and growth, I have found that you don't need to be exactly right the first time. If you have a well thought out idea, People generally want to help you. As I got into this work at the federal level, the Senate HELP Committee, which stands for Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, was very easy for me to guess correctly.
On the House side, however, one of the core committees that we work with is the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which was not even close to what I originally would have thought. The first meeting I had on the house side helped direct me in the right direction, and I developed a relationship with the staffer I did meet with, and then got to where I needed to go.
In this ongoing process of learning and growth, my misstep got me to the right place faster than I otherwise would have if I didn't take any step at all. In addition to the committees we have been discussing, it is also important to remember caucuses that meet with legislators with a particular interest as well.
Caucuses have the powerful opportunity to educate and rally multiple legislators and staffers around issues that they care about, which can help begin to build momentum across a variety of committees. For the Love Act, my best guess going in was that the Committee of Jurisdiction would be the Public Safety Committee, and I am working to have a meeting set up with the chair of that committee's office, and have also learned that perhaps the Public Health Committee will be the right one.
As I continue to explore this, I have found in my meetings that Thus far that the Kensington caucus is a powerful group of legislators in Philadelphia who care very much about the issues that the Love Act is working to address. And I have been able to uplift the preexisting work of a community led coalition that has built the co creating Kensington plan as a beautiful example of the work that this could enhance and we are trying to spread throughout the city.
Folks I met with and continue to meet with have informed this approach and will undoubtedly continue to moving forward. This type of thinking helped create an initial path for me to go informing who I should reach out to and following the line from there. While I have focused heavily on how we move forward to approach those within the government or decision making bodies we are advocating to, I also want to make sure we touch on how important it is to meet with external stakeholders as well.
This critical to building coalitions and can also help open doors to those inside the government. Doing a resource map, finding others who are interested or may be interested in what we are advocating for is incredibly important and can build support when we go into legislative meetings. For Love, I have met with a lot of people, and there are still so many more people and organizations that I will continue to engage with and meet as time moves forward.
First, I am doing this work in partnership with Healing Cities, and I am also learning from Baltimore's lessons and how a team doing similar work in Cincinnati is moving comparable efforts forward, as well as learning from CTIPP's network, as I always do. Internal to the city, I have met with more than a dozen organizations from those working at a city and state level to those working in specific neighborhoods to build coalition in support of this legislation.
Know that as all of you move forward, CTIPP is here to support questions that come up along the way. As in our office hours, or you can reach out via email to help be thought partners. As you continue moving forward, we will continue to build our capacity to be able to provide more support, but we promise to continue doing the best we can.
We will continue to build this movement together. As time moves forward for our second breakout room or independent, uh, reflection activity, we will be discussing questions from our establishing policy priorities activities, which is being posted in the chat. Now, this is a longer activity. I encourage folks to focus on, let me make sure it's posted in chat.
So Laura just posted that in the chat. This is a longer activity. So I encourage folks to focus on a few questions, particularly in breakout rooms. You can come back to this worksheet as well as the problem solution tree so that you can get through all the questions. But a few that I think are helpful to consider during this time together, though you are of course welcome to focus on whatever you think is most important, range from the last question on the first page of that sheet to the first question on the third page of the sheet.
The first several questions were likely already answered, at least to some extent, during the first breakout activity, and the ranking priorities area later on in the sheet is great to compare multiple priorities, but I think for the sake of this activity and conversation, we can start by just practicing with one.
Different individuals and groups will take this in different directions, but I just wanted to provide an area to focus as I know this document can be overwhelming at first glance. Again, I would focus from the last question on the first page to the third to the to the first question on the third page, remembering that we can and should come back to these resources over time.
Please keep our community agreements in mind in our breakout sessions, and we will come back together again in 15 minutes. We're going to try the same breakout activity as before. We'll go through the same, uh, the same process, but we'll go ahead and open those now for. All right. Welcome back. I hope you had another good time processing, integrating, reflecting, learning, connecting, and whether independently or with others.
If you have any particular thoughts you would like to share, please do so in the chat as we get to wrapping up today's call. Before we end today's meeting, Having mentioned my love for Ted Lasso earlier, I thought it would be appropriate to finish with a quick statement of, uh, of how much I believe in each of you and this movement we are building as a whole, what we are advocating for, and the ways in which we are going about said advocacy powerfully promote a multi-layered approach to promoting such needed transformation in this society and world of ours.
Things will not be easy every step of the way, but I trust in our individual and collective abilities to continue to grow through the adversities that we face. And when things get hard, remember that you have this network to lean on if you ever need. And I have so much hope for the work that we are doing.
Next month, our session will focus on creating a narrative, both elevator speech and longer form narrative, as discussed earlier, to advance our agenda and build power with others. And then in December, we will wrap up this mini series by bringing all of what we worked on into a plan of action for 2025.
You can register for these sessions as well as our office hours in between sessions at this QR code and bit. ly link. I know we shared it earlier, but here is the feedback form again and my email if you prefer to communicate that way with any feedback or questions. Please know how much it means to us that you spend your time with us during these C TIP CAN calls and the actions you take to big and small to advance this movement.
We look forward to seeing you again and to your feedback and wish you all well before we see you again next month. Thanks so much. I'm happy to stay on if there are things that we want to discuss, but know that it's been a long session. And so for those of you that need to leave, thank you for spending your time with us.
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