Asking for help is essential for successful advocates
Getting help is a learnable skill that allows you to radically amplify your impact
Winning a change in your community– whether it’s a few speed bumps on your street, millions of dollars for bike & street safety improvements, or a car-free plaza— takes a lot. It takes a lot of political power, time, effort, and skills. It is ok to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the effort needed to win the changes you want.
In fact, if you are not at least a little intimidated by your dream, you might be doing something wrong. You might not be aiming high enough and are therefore leaving a potential larger victory on the table. Or you might not have a realistic understanding of what it takes to win that change and are therefore setting yourself up for a rude awakening. (Or you might be intentionally aiming for a small & easy win. I’m a big fan of those too!)
I believe one reason a person can be intimidated by the scale of change they want is that they recognize that they are just one person. You, as one person, have finite energy and time. There is only so much one person can do, and as many have pointed out (including Hopper and Bruce Wayne) one person can be easily stopped.
One way to increase your capacity to get things done and scale-up your impact is by getting good at getting help. There are so many things that go into a successful campaign and your role is not to do all the things, your role is to make sure all the things that need doing get done. In other words, you don’t have to peel 50lbs of potatoes yourself when you host a Hanukkah party–you just need to make sure there are enough latkes to go around. If you want to win big, you need to get good at recruiting help, empowering volunteers, delegating, and managing people.
For some, asking for help is terrifying. For others, they are discouraged because they feel like they ask for help but never get it. And for others, it feels like a weird thing to do. The good news is that knowing how to overcome that successfully ask for help is a learnable skill.
Want to scale-up your ability to win changes and better recruit the help you need? Click here to schedule a free half-hour initial consult.
And in the spirit of asking for help, I need your help on two things:
Do you know someone who wants to help make their community easier to bike, bus, or get around? Please forward this to them!
Do you know anyone in Southern California who might be interested in a free session? A donor has generously covered the cost for me to provide 1 free training session to someone who is/wants to work on a transportation campaign in SoCal– but I don’t know that many Southern Californians (yet!) so I need your help to meet SoCal transportation advocates.
How I’m walking the talk these days:
To help get the word deeper into the community about the demand for more funds to improve street safety in Oakland, I recently made a flyer in Spanish about the proposal and had a lot of conversations with folks around Fruitvale BART. However, Kelly B. pointed out that the grammar on the flyers needed some improvements and they (alongside some friends of theirs) generously provided edits & translation support. Their help was an amazing gift that I gleefully & gratefully received! I then collaborated with other allies to distribute 200 of the improved flyers. Check out the updated flyer here and You can sign the petition here.
(Does the idea of flyering get you nervous or do you think it’s a waste of time? It’s a foundational tactic and when strategically used can be an extremely time & resource efficient tool for making a lot of impact. Want to learn more? Book a training session!)
Upcoming Free Training-- “How to Overcome the Opposition and Win a Bike Lane.” Tuesday February 28th @ 5:30pm PT on Zoom. Register here.
Action/activist of note: Connor Descheemaker and Chris Giuliano are pushing for better bus services as part of the regional bus operators “Bus Revolution Project” and Transit Forward Philadelphia. They wrote a really solid op-ed which got picked up by in the regional NPR station today. Good job getting the word out there!
Meet your fellow transportation advocates at the February Open Discussion Zoom Happy Hour! Next Thursday February 23rd @ 5:30pm PT on Zoom.
This month’s topic: Organizing riders while on transit -- is it effective, weird, rude, smart, fun? Come share your thoughts, hear from allies, and make some friends. RSVP here to join the conversation on February 23rd.
Correction/lesson learned: This post is all about getting help so you can do better and I linked to the improved Spanish flyer. For context, here is what the first version looked like. I handed out about 30 of these on my first day flyering in Fruitvale– remember to print your materials in batches so you can iterate & improve!
Culture Corner: I’ve been revisiting the folktales about “The Wise Men of Chelm” – a community of Eastern European Jews who are brilliant fools and/or foolish geniuses. They famously captured the moon (temporarily)-- and if that’s your sense of humor, I recommend it. I also realized that the story of “the enchanted goat” has a nice trans-inclusive message. Got any recommendation to send my way for things to read/watch/hear?
Thanks for reading, thanks for forwarding this along, and most importantly– thanks for working to make the world better!
Sincerely,
Carter Lavin