By Sam Daley-Harris
Everyone lies about their New Year’s resolutions.
Well, most of us do.
We know when we make them that we probably aren’t going to keep them. Maybe it’s because we set goals that are too modest and too easily forgotten and do so with too little help. So here’s a radical idea. Embrace a huge goal that lights you up, perhaps a goal like this one: I’m going to join a group focused on enacting climate change solutions or a group that works to (you can fill in the blanks here) and I’m going to stay with it for a year, no matter what, but only with an organization that will take me seriously and help me experience some serious success.
Then see what your life is like as a result. If you select something you truly care about and join an organization that really empowers its members (warning, those groups are hard to find, but I’ll list a few below), you’ll be surprised by your new sense of power.
You might think that goals like getting money out of politics or ending poverty are reserved for heroes or the foolhardy, but humans thrive on working toward a big vision. If that’s true, what are the barriers? Many think they’re too busy.
At a recent university lecture, one student said, “But what if we don’t have time to get involved in big issues?” I told her that if she was holding down two or three jobs just to put food on the table, I’d agree with the “not enough time” excuse. But in a country that binges on TV shows and spends hours on Facebook, I say most people do have enough time We just don’t have time for things we don’t think will make a difference. We’re not willing to play Don Quixote, dreaming the impossible dream, if we think we’ll wake up only to find it was a nightmare. What about the challenge of not knowing where to start?
David Katz, Founder and CEO of The Plastic Bank, said, “You and I see something happening in the world that doesn’t work and say to ourselves, ‘someone should do something about that.’ What we really mean is ‘I want to do something about that, but I don’t know how.’”
In my decades of leading and coaching successful advocacy organizations, I’ve learned that people come up with excuses to mask their real reason for avoiding commitment to a cause: they fear humiliation and failure. Easier to just find an excuse to look the other way than admit you can’t make a difference.
Author Frances Moore Lappé expressed it best when she wrote, “Our real problem is not a heating planet or rampant malnutrition….We only have one real problem, our own feelings of powerlessness to manifest the solutions right in front of our noses.” We must confront that powerlessness and find an organization that’s committed to dissolving it. Here are some examples.
Citizen’s Climate Lobby (CCL) played a major role in the introduction of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. This is the first bipartisan carbon pricing legislation to be introduced in the last decade and CCL’s major thrust in 2019. Empowerment clue: Their volunteers had 65 letters, op-eds and editorials published in 2010 and 4,288 pieces published in 2017 and, like you, almost all of those volunteers couldn’t have imagined having a piece of theirs published before they joined CCL.
The anti-poverty lobby results will focus on the three-year replenishment (2020-2022) of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria which happens at the end of 2019. The Global Fund and its partners have saved 27 million lives in the last 16 years. Empowerment clue: After President Trump called for a 31 percent cut to the Global Fund for 2019, RESULTS volunteers got 162 House Republicans and Democrats to sign a letter urging leaders of the Appropriations Committee to reject the cuts and the Committee agreed. Probably none of the volunteers had even heard of the Global Fund before they joined results.
American Promise expects a bipartisan bill to be introduced as a first step toward overturning Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that gave human constitutional rights to corporations and struck down a century of laws that provided limits on campaign spending. Empowerment clue: American Promise volunteers had 17 meetings with Congress or their staff in 2017, the year their first chapters were launched, and 138 meetings in 2018. Most of their volunteers didn’t even know the name of their member of Congress before they joined the organization.
Imagine contributing to enacting climate change solutions or to the elimination of AIDS, TB and Malaria, or to getting money out of politics. This leads us back to the radical idea for your New Year’s resolution this year: Join a group like one of these and stay with it for a year, no matter what. If you do, I bet your life will never be the same and the planet will be better off, too.
