For those working in social justice advocacy, it can feel like the wins are few and far between. Right now is one of those times, with a Republican-controlled Congress poised to pass a budget bill that would include cuts to many services that American families, and especially low-income families, rely on.
One of those was federal funding for free school lunches, which lawmakers proposed cutting more than $3 billion in funding nationwide.
That’s where Zev comes in. He is an Avodah Jewish Service Corps Member in Washington D.C. serving as the Volunteer Network Coordinator at Food and Water Watch, a national organization that fights for safe food, clean water, and a livable climate.
Zev and his colleagues planned to combat the proposed cuts by mobilizing constituents in key districts to contact their representatives in the US House, urging them to oppose the cuts.
Zev’s role was to organize a large-scale texting campaign, a complex undertaking that involved identifying and segmenting target audiences. “My job was to figure out the list of people that we were going to reach out to,” he explained. This required navigating internal systems to create targeted lists of constituents whose elected officials represent swing districts and whose votes could, therefore, be swayed.
What made this campaign particularly impactful was its use of specific, localized data. “We had numbers on how many school lunches could have been cut in a given state based on the Republican proposal,” Zev noted.
This strategy of presenting concrete data had a “pretty profound impact”. By showing people the direct consequences of the proposed legislation on their own communities, the campaign was able to cut through the political noise and resonate on a deeply personal level. The texts not only informed constituents but also provided a clear call to action: to call their elected officials and voice their opposition.
The results of the campaign were a testament to its effectiveness. The proposal to cut the school lunch program was ultimately removed from the budget bill.
While acknowledging that the larger budget bill still will be catastrophic for working families across the US, Zev emphasized the significance of this specific victory. “We honed in on this particular program that we thought could be vulnerable since we had the numbers on exactly what kind of impact that was going to have state by state”.
This successful campaign reinforced for Zev a crucial lesson about advocacy in the current political climate. In a time when it’s easy to lose hope in the face of daunting political opposition, this experience demonstrated that progress is still possible.
“A campaign like this demonstrates to me pretty clearly that there still are circumstances where making our voices heard can be effective”. It showed that with strategic focus and compelling data, even in a challenging environment, “there is genuine room to push back on some of the key components of the Trump administration’s legislative agenda”.
