How To Turn Endorsements Into Action

Getting the "Nurturing is the Foundation" resolution passed by your school or learning community.


Step 1: Get Endorsements.

Start your campaign by finding out who else is interested in pursuing the passage of the endorsement in your school or organization.

Start asking around and sharing one of the endorsement forms (below) with other members of your community.

Ask them for permission to include them on a local contact list for the school or organization.

(We will gladly share the names of everyone who has named a particular school or organization.

We will not share their contact information with you, so use your network of fellow community members within the school or organization to make connections.)


Step 2: Form A Team.

Talk with others who want to see your school or organization adopt the resolution to come up with a plan for campaigning the decision makers who have the power to pass the resolution or organizing the decision makers.

Please, count us as part of your team, we will do our best to provide support whenever we can.

Consider creating a Facebook page, a twitter handle, an email list, a Google hangout, or other means of sharing amongst your team.

Be respectful of other people's time and whatever limitations on their involvement they set.


Step 3: Know The Process.

Investigate and report back to your team about the proper process that your school or organization must go through to enact the resolution.

Figure out who has the legal power to enact policy and find out exactly what they must do in order to enact a resolution.

Identify all the individuals who have the voting power.


Step 4: Build Support.

Verify with those individuals that they know and understand the process for enacting a resolution and what their role is in making it happen.

Ask them if they support the resolution.

If so, ask them if they would sign an endorsement at Schools-of-conscience.org and/or an online petition to make their support public.

If not, find out what concerns they have about it. Listen to their concerns and then take time to address them.

Share the concerns you hear with other team members and think about what experiences might have contributed to the existence of that concern.

(Do not dismiss any concerns too soon, there is much to be gained by seeking to understand the ones that may seem unreasonable at first.)

When power is concentrated in a small number of people it is usually preferable to get a sense of how much support you have before the invocation of the official decision making process (such as a vote).


Step 5: (If necessary) Apply Pressure.

Start an online petition to target specific decision makers within a school or organization (iPetitions.com, Change.org, or ThePetitionSite.com).

If you find that a person in power is recalcitrant then it might be helpful to take your issue into a more public forum, such as an online petition.

We are collecting endorsements to ensure that we have broad support for the issue, so our endorsement process is not set up to apply pressure.

The petition sites can help you direct communications with specific decision makers and provide services such as producing printouts that can be delivered at an appropriate time.

Media attention might help, too.

The petition sites all have excellent guides to taking your concerns to a public audience.


Step 6: Share.

Communicate with your team and your supporters about each step in the official decision making process.

Make sure you celebrate victories, share outcomes, and plan next steps, even when things don't go your way.

Our campaign is ultimately aimed at large-scale systemic change, so we would appreciate your support over the long-term.

And we know you are a human being who has needs (it would be a tragic irony if we didn't).

We hope you will see how getting nurturing policies to become a pervasive feature of organizational life will better support all of us to live rich lives without burning ourselves out.

In this case the means and the ends must align or we will not get to the end we want.


Step 7: Repeat until your school or organization (and the rest of the world) is overwhelmed by nurturing.

After the resolution is passed you should keep an eye out for opportunities to use the same process to get legally binding policies that are consistent with either promoting nurturing or opposing the policies and behaviors that undermine nurturing.


Printer Ready Support Materials:

Resolution text and Fact Sheet Endorsement Form- 1-page, 2-sided, 1-fold, pdf, 2Mb

"Nurturing is the Foundation" Team Sign-up (for gathering e-mails & phone numbers from your school or learning community.) pdf, 30k

(Coming Soon) Annotated Findings of Fact- ?? pages, pdf, ?? Mb

Thank you for your support!