Get Some Help - Build A Coalition
Whether you are trying to add land to a national forest, get funds for a local trail, or lobby elected officials to increase overall LWCF/UPARR funding, the steps that will help you succeed are similar. To begin, you must organize LWCF/UPARR champions to serve as ambassadors who can approach elected officials, agency decisionmakers, newspaper editors and the public at-large. A well-organized network of community leaders will also help you create a power base to implement the campaign in an effective manner. Where to begin?
Network!
The key to a successful grassroots public education and awareness campaign is an effective network of individuals and groups that conveys the depth of support for your project and for LWCF and UPARR funding This network can be used to strengthen campaign resources and develop spokespeople and organizers for site tours, editorial board visits, and meetings with elected officials and agency leaders.
1. Research and identify community members who may already be involved in
LWCF and UPARR activities or projects. Attend the meetings of local conservation or recreation groups to probe their interest in joining a larger campaign. Take the initiative to set up an introductory meeting with three or four individuals in your community who have demonstrated an interest in land conservation and recreation. Organize a core group that can serve as the catalyst for creating a larger network of people to help organize a grassroots constituency for your project.
2. Use this core group to increase participation in your network by having them identify the "stakeholders" in the community. To identify more people who are likely to care about your project, hold a well-publicized network-building meeting. Set the meeting date well in advance so that as many interested parties as possible can attend and participate in the discussion.
Stakeholders for LWCF and UPARR projects vary but can include the
following:
Local landowners
Local businesses, including outdoor recreation retailers and other
companies
Park "friends" groups
Local historians and historic preservation groups
Hiking societies, bicycle groups and other trail and park users
Local civic groups
Environmental and conservation advocates
Sportsmen and fish and wildlife groups
Local parent-teacher associations
Urban renewal advocates
Religious organizations
Sports clubs
Law enforcement groups
Recreation specialists
Local newspaper or journal reporters
Municipal leaders, including elected officials
"Smart Growth" leaders
Youth sports advocates
The individuals and groups that comprise your network should be involved
in all facets of the campaign Remember that your ultimate goal is to build
champions among elected officials and key agency decisionmakers at the local,
state and national levels. Make sure the most eloquent spokesperson meets with
local reporters and editorial boards, and invite the individual with the most
clout to meet with elected officials or agency leaders. Other network members
can organize phone trees, activist "hot line" listservs or a Web site, as
well as participate in LWCF and UPARR site visits by elected officials.
Make Politics Part of the Process -
Involve Your Elected Officials
Meet with Your Elected Officials
You cannot hope to secure LWCF or UPARR funding without involving your elected
officials - and that means sitting down with them face-to-face at some point to
discuss your ideas. You don't have to travel to Washington to meet with your
congressional representatives - you can set up appointments in their district
offices (which may be within easy driving distance from where you live). To meet
with other elected leaders look in your phone book under the appropriate
government listing and call that office. Here are a few other guidelines, which
apply when meeting with key agency leaders, as well.
Getting Started
Gather the support of a diverse group of constituents from the elected official's
district: Include local and state park directors, park and recreation advocates,
conservation organizations and land trusts, representatives from the governor's
office, local business owners, local landowners and youth sports advocates. Make
an appointment: Be persistent. Call back every few days until you get a meeting
scheduled.
Pull together your delegation: The most effective meeting involves no more than five
people, with each attendee representing a different constituency group. There
should be a group leader, ideally someone who knows the elected official
personally. The leader will serve as a moderator for the group, take notes and follow up with the official's
staff.
Prepare:
Develop specific goals and an agenda for the meeting. Do you want funding for a
particular project, or overall support for LWCF or UPARR? Don't lump your
funding goals in with other programs. Do your homework on the official's record
as it relates to LWCF or UPARR funding and projects. Also, try to determine your
elected official's strengths and weaknesses as a legislator. Whose opinion does
she respect? Is he a leader?
Bring an information packet: Include a list of projects funded through LWCF and UPARR;
letters of support from other elected officials, smart-growth leaders,
recreation businesses and youth sports advocates; a general fact sheet about
LWCF and UPARR; relevant newspaper clippings; and other materials that will make
it easy for the official to act in support of LWCF and UPARR, such as draft
letters, community petitions, legislative proposals, pictures and other
pertinent information. Use local examples of LWCF and UPARR initiatives and
local people to describe them.
What to Ask For
During the meeting, specifically ask the official to:
Support your project and funding request: Be specific about what you want and what you
want the official to do about it.
Become
an LWCF and UPARR champion in Congress, the state legislature, or county or city
councils: Let the official know how important his or her leadership could be,
not just to LWCF and UPARR, but to land conservation nationally and to the
quality of life in your community specifically.
Encourage other members of Congress, the state legislature and county or city councils to support LWCF and UPARR: Urge the official to engage his or her colleagues in
endorsing these valuable land conservation funding programs.
Follow Up
Send a thank you letter to the official: Reiterate your message and any commitment
the official made. Keep in touch with the official's staff to ensure that
commitments are kept.
Let the World Know! - Publicize Your Campaign
Going
after LWCF or UPARR funding should not be the world's best-kept secret. Indeed,
if you don't use the media to let others know about your campaign, you'll be
missing a tremendous opportunity to mobilize the public, put pressure on
decisionmakers and let others know how they can help. Here are a few ideas to
help you publicize your campaign:
Organize an IWCT or UPARR Project Site Tour, Dedication
or Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony
One of the best ways to gain the support of decisionmakers and the attention of the
media is to get them out of the office and onto your proposed project site or to
another park, playground, wildlife refuge, trail or other place that has already
benefited from LWCF or UPARR. Here's how:
- Select a date: Find out when your elected official is going to be in town. Members of Congress are usually in their home districts or states around federal or religious holidays, including Presidents Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. They also have an extended recess that lasts most of the month of August. Contact the lawmaker's scheduler for details of his or her district working agenda. Mayors and other local officials are generally available and willing to attend community events. Call their office and work with their scheduler to set an appropriate date.
- Choose your site: Your chosen site should be significant or symbolic, such as a children's playground, recreation areas that bring money to the community, cultural sites that teach the history of a local town or state, or projects that have a supportive and organized constituency. The site can either already have received LWCF or UPARR funding or be the site you are proposing for land acquisition or recreation monies. Visit and research the site you choose ahead of time, so that someone within the group will be able to answer any questions that arise.
- Recruit
key participants: Try to get a variety of stakeholders to co-sponsor the event.
Include businesses, local conservation groups, state and local officials, school
children, contributors, police chiefs and other prominent citizens within the
community or state. Decide ahead of time who will have a formal speaking role
and what they will say.
- Invite your elected officials: Ask someone who has an established relationship with the
elected official or with the official's staff to make the formal invitation.You
will probably have to submit something in writing and do a lot of logistical
planning on the telephone. Be sure to use the prospect of media coverage as a
major hook for getting your official interested.
- Plan the event: Do you want to host a giant picnic in the park with fifty people or
do you want a small group of VIPs to sponsor a hike? Do you want to get your
representative in a canoe, your mayor on a bicycle or your governor in hiking
boots? Is it a place where you'll have kids playing on a playground or ballfield?
Do you want to host formal speeches or focus instead on informal discussions?
Try to create an event the official will enjoy, the media will find newsworthy
and your supporters will find inspiring.
- Secure media coverage: Develop a database of reporters, selecting either those whose "beat" is conservation or recreation, or those who do "general assignments" but who have an interest in environmental protection. Include newspaper, magazine, television, cable and radio reporters, as well as
photographers. Send them an advisory in advance to let them know the event is
happening, then follow up with a telephone call to make sure they plan to
attend. Give them a news release and briefing packet with photos and fact sheets
at the event. Set up interviews with your spokespeople, and follow up with the
reporters afterwards to make sure they've gotten the facts straight.
- Follow up: Thank the officials for their participation, both informally when the event
concludes and afterwards through a written letter. Make sure the staff receive
an information packet about the site. Evaluate the event with the other
participants and make sure they all follow up individually.
Organize an LWCF Editorial Meeting
The editorial page is one of the most important sections of any newspaper.
Editorials educate the newspaper's readers on important topics of the day, shape
public attitudes, make or break electoral candidates, and affect key policy
decisions at the local, state and national levels.
Meeting with your local editorial board is an important strategy in any campaign.
Providing your editorial writers with information on LWCF and UPARR will help
those in your community learn about these important programs. Getting editorial
support for your project will help sway decisionmakers in your favor.
You will generally find editors interested in your viewpoint, even if they disagree
with it. And they are always looking for ideas and facts. Meeting with editorial
writers may be easier than you think, and it's the surest way to educate them on
your issue. Here's how it's done:
- Write to request a meeting: Contact the editorial page editor and ask for the name of
the editorial writer most likely to cover land conservation or civic issues
(larger newspapers will have a specific person assigned to environmental or
health issues, while smaller ones may have only a few people who write on a
variety of subjects). Send a short cover letter or e-mail detailing the
importance of LWCF and UPARR and how these programs affect the readers of the
editor's newspaper. Include supporting information in your packet, but limit the
number of articles to three or four, as editors are busy and will not read more
than a few pages.
- Call to confirm the meeting: Follow up your correspondence with a telephone call to
make sure the editor has received your request. Leave as many messages as it
takes to set up the meeting. Be persistent, but courteous. Newspaper editors are
very busy people, so it may take some time to get an nswer. Make sure you have
crafted a succinct explanation for LWCF and UPARR and your specific project that
you can use in your voicemail messages.
- Make a professional presentation: Thoroughly prepare yourself and other colleagues
for the meeting. You will want to limit the number of participants to no more
than five local leaders, including yourself. Include landowners, business
experts, historians, recreation specialists, elected and non-elected officials,
smart-growth proponents and youth sports leaders among those you invite to
attend. The participants should be well-versed in the issue. It is important to
note that newspapers look at themselves as local entities and are therefore more
apt to support issues that have positive effects on the municipalities in which
their newspapers are sold. Make sure you come to the meeting prepared to answer
questions about how these conservation programs have benefited the local
community. Also, be aware of both the current federal and state LWCF and UPARR needs for the area. If you are
seeking support for a particular initiative, discuss that initiative
specifically and include a fact sheet and photographs about it in the materials
you leave behind. Before the meeting ends, ask the editor to run an editorial
favoring your position.
- Follow up: Always send a handwritten note of appreciation to the editor if a favorable
editorial appears. If the editorial that appears is unfavorable, respond quickly
with a telephone call to the writer to try to clear up any misconceptions the
writer may have, and send the paper a polite, but convincing, letter to the
editor. If an editorial hasn't appeared within a week or two of your meeting,
prompt the editor with a gentle voicemail or e-mail to inquire if you can
provide further information. Send copies of favorable editorials to your partner
groups and targeted lawmakers.
A Champion is Born - On-site!
After thirty-five years and $3.3 billion in federal funding, the stateside grant program of LWCF had been zeroed out by Congress. Even though the stateside
program had been the focus of the LWCF at its inception, by 1996 putting money into land conservation grants for states had lost most of the Congressional support the program originally enjoyed. By the time 1998 rolled around, activists knew they needed to make a concerted effort to revitalize support for this critical initiative.
In March 1998, The Wilderness Society and the Appalachian Mountain Club decided to take action. The groups spearheaded a Congressional tour of three LWCF-funded sites in Massachusetts. Grassroots activists ferried Representative Jim McGovern (D-2nd), local media and park directors in Worcester and surrounding towns to a traditional ball field, a small urban wilderness and Green Hill Park in downtown Worcester, a park Rep. Govern remembered playing in as a child. Back in Washington, D.C., Sue Gunn, The Wilderness Society's director of budget and appropriations, met with four congressional representatives to discuss the possibility of offering an amendment to the Interior appropriations bill that would breathe life into the stateside portion
of LWCF by providing $30 million of funding. Though staff representing the
various members seemed interested in the concept at the time, three days later
it became apparent that their interest was not going to translate into action.
The congressman's recent visit to Green Hill Park helped convince him of the importance of re-funding the stateside LWCF program.
With no support appearing from other members of Congress, Sue made her last
telephone call to McGovern's office, the most junior congressman she had
approached, expecting to hear the worst - that the congressman would like to
help but had other priorities. Instead, she was told that the congressman's
recent visit to Green Hill Park had helped convince him of the importance of
re-funding the stateside LWCF program. Rep. McGovern agreed to take the lead in
offering an amendment to fund the program.
Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation, a national campaign organized to restore full funding to the LWCF, worked tirelessly with its coalition members to mobilize support for the amendment across the nation. The amendment came to the floor in July, but was narrowly defeated. Although a statistical loss, the vote represented a solid victory for activists across the country as
stateside LWCF jumped back on the national radar screen.
The following year, conservation activists spoke to more than thirty congressional offices in an effort to understand why their representatives had opposed the amendment the previous year, and to explain the benefits of stateside funding for their districts. That outreach, in conjunction with the newly developed skills of the AHR coalition, positioned Rep. McGovern for victory. He returned to the House floor in July 1999 and secured $40 million for the stateside program with a 213-202 vote on his amendment. More than forty votes had moved from "no" to "yes" in one year, a testimony to a broad coalition that made stateside funding a national issue and the leadership of our champion in Congress, Rep. Jim McGovern - leadership that was nurtured by that first site visit in 1998.
For more information, contact The Wilderness Society
or Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation.
