🌱 Building a Big Tent with Motivational Interviewing
Part I: The Heart & Science of Changing Minds
Table of Contents
Welcome Back! 👋🏼
How can we change minds to change societies? Today, we kickoff our September series on deep canvassing as GOTV season looms. One of the most successful persuasion campaigns came from a LGBTQ advocacy effort. Read on for more...
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Today's main story is from a piece I wrote in 2021 about motivational interviewing and extending empathy to a community that has only been more vilified and attacked since then: queer and trans people. This month, I'm offering ideas on changing minds and building bigger movements. We've been sucked into division from social media and other tactics, but that is not how we will create real change for the future.
Originally published: June 3, 2021
🌈 Happy Pride Month! 🌈
As we kick off a month of rainbow flags and Love Is Love salutes from major corporations (it’s called rainbow washing), this month is also a reminder that the LGBTQ+ community still has a ways to go.
- LGTBQ+ kids make up close to the majority (40%) of homeless youth.
- There are 69 countries in this world where it’s a crime to live your life authentically if you’re gay.
- Trans people are 4x as likely to be the victim of a violent crime simply for existing.
Even those in the community who live a privileged life, like myself, face homophobia from unexpected corners. Homophobia can come in many different forms. It can be as extreme as actual violence or as subtle as a cold, dismissive attitude towards a member of the LGBTQ+ community. And it’s even possible to be homophobic by not calling out or dismissing homophobic behavior (the same thing is true for not acknowledging the BLM movement).
There are many causes of homophobia including religious beliefs, but the most dominant is the cultural and institutional forces that dictate our society. We live in a patriarchal society. For many, homosexuality is a direct assault on those institutions. LGBTQ+ people don’t always follow clear-cut gender roles and so they are challenging the systems that dictate how a man and woman should behave. But the sad thing is, as with most bigotry, homophobia hurts everyone. It means children can’t grow and explore things they love if they fall out of their traditional gender roles (dolls for boys and spaceships for girls. Space is just cool!), it impacts same-sex friendships, and it limits people’s free expression of themselves.
And that pernicious fear and phobia bring us to our topic today: Motivational Interviewing!
If you are reading this, I assume you are at least socially liberal and want to see all people treated fairly. Maybe you even want to actively help make that change in society. But how do we do that when so much is polarized and everyone has retreated into their own camps? (hmm I wonder where I’m going with this…)
What is Motivational Interviewing?
Motivational interviewing is a more profound method of communicating that involves deeper conversations, a lot of listening, and reflection. In the political world, it’s a deeper form of canvassing. Motivational interviewing is just one powerful tool in the deep canvassing toolbelt. The idea is to elicit emotionally significant experiences and encourage reflection from the person who is set in their views to influence change.
Why Motivational Interviewing?
It actually works! The goal is to elicit behavioral change, which is not as easy as we’d all like. Have you ever tried to scare, blame, reason, or rant to change someone’s mind? How’d it work out for you? Probably not great.
The reason for that is because it’s usually a one-way conversation. It’s telling them how they should feel. As my good friend Isaac Newton said, “to any action, there is always an opposite and equal reaction.” That type of one-way communication usually puts people on the defensive, they lock up and are harder to change.
But motivational interviewing is less about talking and more about listening. When the Journal of Science evaluated an effort to reduce transphobia in South Florida, they found the very first case that actually reduced prejudice (the first-ever!) in a measurable and long-lasting way. And all they did was talk to people for 10 minutes! Check out the report, it is truly fascinating.
“What we’ve learned … is that a broad swath of voters are actually open to changing their mind. And that’s exciting, because it offers the possibility that we could get past the current paralysis on a wide variety of controversial issues.” - David Fleischer
Next week, we'll dive more deeply into the simple ways to think about motivational interviewing so that you may use it in your everyday life and on your canvassing shift!
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💰 Set Yourself Up | Fundraising Strategy
Fundraising headwinds seem especially gusty this year with over $10 billion in political ads flooding in, changing fundraising behavior, and AI uncertainty. Join Brit Holmes and I next Wednesday to discuss fundraising strategies for 2024’s giving season. Topics we will cover include:
- Optimizing strategies for an election year
- Leveraging audience and marketing insights to grow fundraising
- Tips on establishing your strategy
- Funding consideration per channel
What: a free 30-minute lunch & learn to support continued learning for social change communicators
When: Wednesday, September 11 @12:30pm EST/9:30 AM PST
Last Week's Flowering Deep-Dive
📚 Troubleshooting the Tactical in Google Ads
Att: ENGOs
Hire Below the Poverty Line
I’ve recently been researching the history of the non-profit industry to help explain the gap between the promises of the non-profit world and its real impact to create systemic change. So I was extra impacted when I stumbled on Elizabeth Silleck La Rue’s piece about classism in the ENGO World. As I’ve written about before, climate colonialism means that poor communities are facing the worst of the climate crisis, while billionaires build walls. Elizabeth illustrates how hiring folks who've experienced poverty will build a stronger organization and allow us to come closer to achieving systemic change. I encourage you to read the full piece, but here are a few excerpts:
- “What I learned from being poor, though, was a level of resourcefulness, efficiency, creativity, and pragmatism that our world, and the Environmental Non-Governmental Organization (ENGO) sector, seriously needs”
- “The sort of efficiency that poor people know how to leverage implicitly is also a dire need as it relates to our cascading environmental crises — materials circularity, reduction of emissions and materials associated with manufacturing, packaging, shipping, etc. — doing more with LESS rather than buying more with MORE, is something humans must implement if we have any chance of saving ourselves from the excessive pressure we are putting on the planet’s systems.”
- “Creativity and frugality are more imperative now, however, as global inequity is pushing more and more people to the margins and absorbing more of our collective resources into private corporate mechanisms”
- 📚 Oligarchy In the U.S. Elections - Just 50 billionaire families have already injected more than $600 million collectively into the 2024 elections as of May. This number will grow as we inch closer to November. (source: americansfortaxfairness.org)
- 🤓 The Root 🌱 - We cannot live in a country where the wealthiest can buy elections (ahem, Jamal Bowman would like a word). The right-wing justices of the Supreme Court used Citizens United to let money pour into politics. Harlan Crow got a good return on his investment. This election is also about SCOTUS reform!
- 📚 Judge Absolves Officer Who Shot Breonna Taylor, Blames Boyfriend - In the middle of the night on March 13, 2020, police raided the home of Breonna Taylor without any warning. Her boyfriend reacted to protect them from the strange men with guns invading their home. A judge has now ruled that the police officer who shot Breonna Taylor while she was still laying in bed was not at fault. Instead the judge blamed the boyfriend for having a gun. (Also, support Black journalism! This piece was from Capital B)
- 🤓 The Root 🌱 - May there still be Justice for Breonna Taylor someday. 💔 Her story is the story of so many Black people. How would you have reacted in this situation? The simple truth is that police and our criminal justice system rewards police violence, because the system is designed to protect the state, not the people.
- 🎬 The FTC Gets Non-Compete Clauses Banned - Last month, the courts upheld the FTC’s ban on non-compete clauses from new job contracts starting on September 4th. The Head of the FTC, Lina Kahn, speaks to More Perfect Union about its implications for workers. (source: @perfectunion)
- 🤓 The Root 🌱 - If you can’t tell, I like Lina Kahn. More importantly, a Harris win means that she can keep fighting against corporate profiteering and greed. Billionaire’s are literally funding Trump’s campaign because they want to oust Lina Kahn.
- 🎬 Stopping Settler Violence with the International Solidarity Movement - Dottie Lux, a Jewish American activist from San Francisco, spoke with 48 Hills SF about being in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). The group documents and reports human rights abuses from Israeli settlers destroying and displacing Palestinian (source: @48HillsSF)
- 🤓 The Root 🌱 - Most folks in the U.S. are not fully aware of how Israeli citizens and the IDF work together to kick out Palestinians living in the West Bank. This is not unlike the settler violence that occurred in the Western U.S. against indigenous people, except they're using bulldozers and machine guns now.
And that's a wrap on this week’s newsletter! We hope you found this helpful in your work to cultivate lasting social change. Forward this to a friend and help democratize communications!
If you have any topics you want covered or have any questions, please reach out and let me know.
In Solidarity,
Sam Chavez
Roots of Change Founder
🌱 Seedling Member Zone
I'm opening up access to the Seedling Member Zone this week to give a shoutout to Poverty Sucks! writer, Robin Divine. Upgrade today to get future Seedling-only videos and podcasts. Find our latest videos on our 🎬 Quick Bites page.
Mutual aid and community care are often just buzzwords thrown around in activist spaces. This week, I wanted to highlight my friend, Robin Divine’s mutual aid efforts as an example of cool and creative ways folks are thinking of community care. I’m unboxing all of the amazing radical books I received from Robin’s Book Fair! Browse the Book Fair and support Robin.
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