August Caucus 2023
I've enjoying getting to know many of you over the last few months. We're all seeking the community of women in advocacy to grow with, learn from, and tackle challenges and opportunities together. Today's call was no different.
As a reminder, we're opening a Voxer Channel for the Advocacy Caucus on September 5. Sign up here to receive your invitation.
This time of year many of you are happy in your legislative interim, focusing on other things. Here in North Carolina, leaders are still in the midst of budget negotiations, there are veto overrides expected and a lot of major issues still expected to be debated. Thanks to a decade of continual lawsuits, we'll have another round of legislative and congressional redistricting this fall as well. There's no end in sight! This after a 15-month legislative session in 2021 that only adjourned in order to reconvene for the 2022 short session immediately. All this with what's supposed to be (and are paid to be) a part-time legislature. I hope you're enjoying more stable legislative sessions!
Today's call brought forth some excellent discussion around veteran and tribal affairs, mental health, adult ADHD, and career changes. We also started some conversations I expect we'll continue in the coming months including:
Overcoming major loss of institutional knowledge in legislatures with high-turnover elections, candidate education ideas, and scenario planning.
Our role as advocacy professionals (in-house and contract) in finding creative solutions for our clients by using our collective knowledge and relationships.
Making programs better that already exists rather than advancing legislation to create duplicative and overlapping programs.
How we can bring our institutional knowledge to bear in doing things the right way or in service of better government stewardship, community service, and advocacy.
When to turn away clients because of personal conviction, ethical concerns, or misalignment on how to get things done even when you agree with the outcome they're pushing.
What else is on your mind, are you struggling with or challenged by, or what successes have you had in conquering challenges that the rest of us can learn from? Share here for now and sign-up to get on Voxer so we can learn faster together.