By Shel Gross
Kevin is his real name. This is a true story. I’m not omitting his last name to avoid a slander lawsuit; there is no slander in this story. It is possible that someone reading this will figure out to whom I am referring. Fine. The point is that I don’t want to personalize it too much. While what Kevin did was exceptional to me, I don’t want to portray it as an exceptional occurrence. The point is that the relationships you develop with legislative staff can deliver. Big time.
At the April MOSES General Meeting, two things rose up that, together, led me to share this story. In introducing his discussion of our Disciplines and Attitudes, James Morgan noted that a number of people had expressed frustration about when we were going to get some “wins,” that is, some victories on our issues. Later, during a breakout processing our experiences from Madison Action Day, someone expressed disappointment that they had not been able to meet with their elected representative, only with a staff person. I think my experience as a lobbyist brings some perspective to these comments.
First, let me say that it is great if you get to meet with your elected representatives and develop a relationship with them, especially if their interests intersect with yours and they sit on committees that hear bills of importance to you. If you’re part of MOSES and your legislator sits on the committee dealing with Corrections, you want to leverage that relationship as best you can. But that will not always be the case. If your legislator’s interests are in banking or agriculture, they may have little real knowledge about corrections. They will often leave those details to one of their staff people. Just sayin’.
And there is the reality that your visit may end up conflicting with something else your legislator has to do, like attend that committee meeting, or maybe meet with someone who they decide is more important to meet with than you (although no one will say that). And that someone may be someone who can actually advance the issue you are concerned about. You may not know. But you’re left with meeting with the staff person. Maybe that’s okay.
Kevin worked in the office of a Joint Finance Committee member. As a member of the Wisconsin Council on Mental Health (WCMH), we had a statutory responsibility to report to the governor, the legislature, and state agencies on mental health concerns. So that gave us access to Joint Finance Committee members — a real plus for a registered lobbyist! We did, on occasion, meet with Kevin’s boss, who was supportive of some of our issues. I would note that at the time there was a fair amount of bipartisan support for mental health issues in the legislature. But often we met with Kevin. He clearly resonated with our concerns and developed a strong relationship with the leader of our statewide mental health consumer group (a person who, herself, was living with mental illness).
But this is actually not the story of what the legislature did while Kevin worked there. I think we got some wins, but nothing earth-changing from our perspective. It is the story of what happened after 2011, when Scott Walker was elected Governor and appointed Kevin’s boss to be Secretary of the Department of Health Services (DHS) – and she brought Kevin along as her executive assistant. DHS was the focus of our advocacy work. While there were important mental health issues addressed by other departments, like Corrections and Public Instruction, DHS had responsibility for overseeing Wisconsin’s county-based system of services for adults with serious mental illnesses and children with serious emotional disorders, which were a core focus for the WCMH.
And so, of course, we used our relationship with Kevin to continue our advocacy. And an amazing thing happened. You may or may not remember that December 2012 was when the Sandy Hook shootings occurred. I do, because that is when the Governor was finalizing plans for the 2013-2015 state budget, and he wanted to do something in response to those shootings. But he didn’t want to address gun control or gun safety. So, he decided to roll out a major mental health funding package. (Note: Mental health advocates do not like it when politicians respond to mass violence by addressing mental illness, because it draws an incorrect connection between mental illness and violence, but, to his credit, Gov. Walker did not play this up.) I still clearly remember the day Kevin got a bunch of us on a conference call to give us a sneak preview of what was to come. The Governor’s package was going to include six of the top items we had been advocating for, some for over a decade. Any one or two of them would have been enough for crazy celebration — would have been big wins — but this was almost surreal.
Now, I don’t really know what role Kevin played in this, but it is not hard to imagine that the Governor shared his wish with the Secretary and that she talked with Kevin. How else do all our priorities show up in one package? Kevin never denied it.
Relationships matter in politics. You just don’t always know which ones. You know which seat someone is sitting in right now; you don’t know where they’ll be sitting in five years. So if it is staff you are talking with, then use that time to gain that person as an ally.
Politics, as most of you know, is a marathon, not a sprint. We do ourselves a disservice if we reduce our idea of a win to “what did you do for me today”. We do not know, we cannot know, which conversations that we are having today will become the seeds for our future victory. Many of the conversations we had with politicians over the years about mental health issues impacted their understanding of those concerns, changed the way they thought about mental health services, and helped lay the groundwork for “wins” that may have only come many years later. Our job is to have those conversations, advocate as best we can, and remember that this is a long game.