Presented by Tom Clancey-Burns, Executive Director
Community Action Partnership of Oregon
Region 8/10 Conference
May 13-15, 2014
Boise, ID

 Public Will, Public Action & The Role of Government
 Messaging Recommendation to CAPO

Public Will, Public Action &
The Role of Government
Community Action Partnership of Oregon
March 10, 2010
Patrick Bresette pbresette@demos.org
Public Works: the D ē mos Center for the Public Sector
D ē mos: A Network for Ideas & Action www.demos.org
• Understand how dominant cultural stories, perceptions and frames effect public will to address social problems
• Explore the dominant public attitudes toward government & poverty
• Learn key elements for creating a more productive public conversation about these issues
• Discuss and Practice new approaches and how to apply the lessons to your work.

We Need to Build Public Will
Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions
possible or impossible to be executed.“
- Abraham Lincoln

How Public Confusion Impedes Political Solutions to Some of
Our Biggest Problems
Condition #1: public cynicism, negativism, and skeptic ism about government . . . at the highest levels in 30 years of doing quantitative and qualitative research in Oregon.
Condition #2: decreasing awareness and knowledge about government . . . about 30% of the general public cannot name a single tax that is used to help pay for public services.
- Adam Davis, City Club Speech, May 12, 2006

The Triumphant Individual The Benevolent Community
“Self-Made Man” – Irene Ritter
Independence
Dave Kolpack / AP
Interdependence

•Each individual is responsible for his or her own success or failure;
•With hard work comes reward;
•The goal is equal opportunity, not equal outcome; and
•Anyone can achieve the “American Dream”.
Source: Meg Bostrom, For and Economy that Works for All

Some Public Beliefs work for
• Hard work should be valued and rewarded
• Working people are struggling
• The country needs to act to impact the economy
• People tend to judge the economy based on their perceptions of how they and people like
them are doing.
• We can all work together to find solutions

- Richard Rorty

Messaging Approved by CAPO Board of Directors
• We all want to live in communities where all people can be successful and families can thrive.
• We remove barriers to opportunity and build upon strengths so that families can succeed and lasting change is possible.
• We work with our communities to address common concerns, improve systems and influence policy for the benefit of all.
• We know that every life we impact improves our lives together.

 Theoretical Framework of Poverty
 OSU Project Update
 Next Steps
 Theory of Change Models

STRUCTURAL CAUSES OF POVERTY
Economic Growth: decrease is absolute poverty
Joblessness
Economic Processes
Economic Restructuring
E c o n o m i c I n e q u a l i t y : increase in relative poverty because only some to be better off
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S k i l l s m i s m a t c h
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T e c h n o l o g i c a l
C h a n g e s
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G l o b a l i z a t i o n
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D e p r e s s e d
W a g e s Jobs available to low skill workers do not support family above poverty line
P o v e r t y T y p o l o g i e s /
C o n d i t i o n s
T r a n s i t o r y : I n a n d O u t o f P o v e r t y
C h r o n i c : C o n t i n u a l s t a t e o f p o v e r t y
L i f e c y c l e : P o v e r t y D u e t o s t a g e o f l i f e
E x c l u s i o n / I n c l u s i o n :
Based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.
H i g h v u l n e r a b i l i t y t o u n a n t i c i p a t e d l i f e e v e n t s
Social Policies/Programs do not adequately address the needs of the poor
Social Stratification
L o w Political Capital:
Makes it difficult to influence policy that directly impacts them

Chronic:
Extended State of Poverty
This group includes individuals and households who are extremely marginalized and therefore often cannot or do not earn wages.
Examples include individuals with disabilities that prevent them from working, individuals with drug/alcohol addiction, individuals with mental health issues, or even individuals living in an area with scarce resources and limited access to low-skilled jobs.
TYPES OF POVERTY
Transitory:
In and Out of Poverty
This group includes individuals and households who occasionally dip below the poverty line. Examples include working families facing unanticipated events such as medical costs, households experiencing the loss of an income earner, households gaining an income earner, individuals who experience a decrease in pay, etc.
Lifecycle:
Poverty Due to Stage of Life
This group includes individuals and households who experience poverty during a certain stage of life and is usually connected to limited human capital and assets. Examples include young adults working in entry-level jobs, young adults still attending school, seniors with insufficient assets, new parents facing the increased costs associated with rearing children, etc.

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The proposed Theory of Change should more explicitly reflect
CAPO’s sphere of influence . Since Community Action Agencies are geared toward stabilizing and moving households out of poverty, emphasis should be placed in these areas (versus addressing structural causes of poverty).
While indicators should rise above the level of individual programs or funding sources--they should ideally be sensitive enough to capture client "progress" regardless of starting or exit points. For example, one idea was to employ a scale that would measure how much "better off" a household is as a result of
CAA services.

We continue to scour the national landscape for existing anti-poverty outcomes and indicators that could be incorporated into CAPO’s Theory of
Change. This includes paying special attention to indicators that might potentially measure the movement or progress of households receiving various Community Action services.

We are also spending time on the ground to investigate existing Community
Action Agency program reporting and data collection requirements. Using
Community Services Consortium (Albany) as our “home-base”--the goal of this research is:
• To assure that our recommended outcomes and indicators account for existing required reporting elements (in an effort to streamline data collection and reporting).
• To isolate common, cross-cutting outcomes among various programs.
• To identify what data are currently available, as well as areas where further data collection may be valuable.
• To better understand current data collection and reporting systems.

 Theory of Change Models

With gratitude to the Washington
Community Action Partnership and the Community Action
Partnership of Oregon, for providing inspiration and insight into this theory of change model