Lessons Learned While Lobbying for College Students Aid Education Advocate Today

ENTRY LEVEL

Kati Haycock

Age: 51

First job: Co-director, University of California Student Lobby, Sacramento

Current job: Director, Education Trust, Washington, D.C.

I was one of those student-government people from elementary school on, so it’s probably not surprising that my first nonprofit job involved politics. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1971 with a degree in political science, I spent the following year as one of two founding co-directors of the University of California Student Lobby, the first of its kind in the country.

It was an interesting time, to say the least, to be representing students in the State Legislature. We began our work right after the Vietnam War-related riots in California, when the Legislature was considering some incredibly punitive laws, including one bill that would have put big brick walls around UC campuses to keep the students in. Lawmakers considered students to be dangerous and out of control, and neither they nor the university thought we had any business in Sacramento. Consequently, a large part of our job as lobbyists was just trying to get students to be accepted as human and worthy of being heard.

During that year in Sacramento, I learned an awful lot that hadn’t been covered in my college textbooks. But among all the many lessons, perhaps two continue to exert the greatest influence on my work today.

The first was about the critical importance of advocacy in moving institutions to do right by the disenfranchised. One of the issues that we worked hard on during my student-lobby days — and the issue about which I continue to be most passionate today — involves the enormous inequities in our educational system and the lopsided outcomes that those inequities produce. In this case, of course, the outcome we were focused on was the underrepresentation of poor students and students of color in UC’s undergraduate population. At the time, only about 4 to 5 percent of the university system’s students were African-Americans and a similar percent were Latinos, compared to more than twice those numbers in the high-school graduating classes from which those students were drawn.

Even in those days, when it was pretty easy to vilify university administrators, though, it was clear to me that the root problem here wasn’t that the university’s leaders simply didn’t give a hoot about minority enrollments. Indeed, while not all of them were committed to increasing those enrollments, there were many leaders on the campuses and in the system office who actually cared quite deeply about this issue. What I quickly came to understand, however, is that those leaders could move much more aggressively when they had an outside force pressing them to act.

Interestingly, when the president of the university system put me in charge of the system’s new “student affirmative action” effort at the ripe old age of 24, I found myself on the receiving end of such outside pressure myself. And frankly, I didn’t always enjoy it. In fact, my initial reaction bordered on outrage: “How can you do this — I’m one of you, don’t you remember?” But as my perspective grew clearer, I realized that we accomplished so much more, so much faster in the times when we were under pressure to do so.

Advocacy, in other words, does make a difference — perhaps especially for those inside institutions who are trying to bring about change.

The second important thing I learned from the student-lobby experience — a lesson that I still live by today — is that underneath the political labels, legislators are mostly decent people who want to do the right thing. I began to learn then exactly what I try to do now in my work at the Education Trust, where we push for much-needed educational reforms, kindergarten through college. We avoid getting into bed with one party or another or making assumptions about a policymaker based on his or her party affiliation.

Even though we at the Student Lobby experienced hostility from many lawmakers, there were also quite a number of members willing to take us under their wing and help introduce us to the political system. And these were not all Democrats, even in those very fractious years. Today in Washington, I know a lot of people who haven’t learned that lesson. There’s a tendency of education groups to ally themselves entirely with one party or another. There are huge drawbacks to doing this, not the least of which is that it suggests you can’t do math very well.

So, while it is not always easy, we have worked hard at the Education Trust to figure out ways to connect our agenda even to those whose political beliefs on other issues sometimes send shivers up our spines. If you can get underneath the surface, and if you can try to understand their motivations and hopes and dreams, you can start connecting your agenda to those. So much of effective lobbying is really effective listening.

Do we have it all figured out? Hardly. In fact, on many days it simply feels like we’re slamming our heads against brick walls. But in the end, I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve spent my entire professional life working with smart and caring colleagues, always in the nonprofit sector, but in wonderfully — indeed, wildly — different settings, from the University of California to the Children’s Defense Fund to the Education Trust. I’ve never stopped learning. And someday, I hope to have figured out enough to drive some real changes for the children that I care so much about.

How did your first job in the nonprofit world influence your current career? Tell us about it at entrylevel@philanthropy.com