In(c)ights | When Talking Heads Talk, Nonprofits Should Be Talking Back
Barack Obama’s comments about the supposed bitterness of small-town, impoverished Americans who he said cling to religion and firearms because they have nothing else left is by far his worst misstep during the presidential campaign. That speech has been dissected in countless ways, almost always with an eye toward its effect among voters. Given less scrutiny is the whether Senator Obama’s words were accurate — and what impelled him to utter them in the first place.
Leave it to a nonprofit to go beyond the headlines and examine the substance of the senator’s speech. Writing on the blog the Daily Yonder, Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, pointed out that what matters is not how Obama described small-town residents but that the economic conditions where they live ain’t so great:
The real challenge is to follow up on Senator Obama’s earlier candid moment. Rural life is threatened by economic policy that perpetually fails rural communities.
There are sixty million of us in rural America. The poverty rates are substantially higher, as are rates of unemployment, substance abuse, diagnosed clinical depression, and deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. The way we have come to address these specific issues is that every four years presidential candidates come to Iowa and take a stand on ethanol subsidies. As if it mattered. That so many small-town voters are not embittered by a national political process that ignores them may be a more unflattering testament than the annotated list of Senator Obama’s stereotypes.
Sadly, what is missing from the political debate are speeches about how robust rural economies lift national prospects, fill the coffers, expand opportunities. And in a time when the world is struggling to re-imagine how it will feed, fuel, and heal a damaged planet, a full-throated oratory on where rural fits in may find surprisingly attentive audiences both back home and in parlors beyond.
Davis’s extraordinarily perceptive post is an illustration of how nonprofits can use current events to advance their mission: Know what people are talking about and tie it into what your organization is trying to do. | 501(c)
(Hat tip to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Tags: Barack Obama, Dee Davis, Center for Rural Strategies
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POSTED IN: Politics, Worth a look
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