It’s appalling that that just weeks after the press turned a spotlight on poverty of victims of Hurricane Katrina, we are engaged in a losing battle over whether the federal government will provide a measly few months of health insurance to victims of the storm. It’s outrageous that, after a temporary postponement, Congressional leadership continues to call for deeper cuts in federal funding for assistance to poor and working class families. Our progressive community blew it after Katrina and now we are on the losing side of these debates over cuts to safety-net services. How did it happen? We don’t have a plan, message, or infrastructure. We need all three. Conservatives have a set of policy recommendations to address poverty, all wrapped up in a carefully developed message. Within days, they polished and pitched proposals for school vouchers, reemployment accounts, enterprise zones, and urban homesteading. But, progressives do not have a five-point plan to distribute. Nor do we have the infrastructure to promote a five-point plan and build public support for it. We need: 1) A long-term plan of bold ideas that go well beyond things like “regulatory changes in ‘Section 8’ regs that make them easier to use”. It’s not important to me that 10 DC groups or 150 state and local groups sign on to a plan. That would be fine – but the compromises likely to be necessary to reach consensus would render the list too long, cautious, and generic to be useful. Instead, if each group developed its own plan – something most don’t have now – we could begin to fill the huge void that conservatives were able to fill after Katrina. A few of us started a conversation about such a list. Not surprisingly, we had trouble with the balance between our desire to say what’s REALLY necessary, and listing what’s reasonably possible in the short term. My view is that we need to do both. We should have a bold vision that includes better wages/income, health care, child care and early ed, housing, transportation, access to banks/credit (home loans, car loans, savings accounts). Within each goal, short term strategies are welcome – increase and index minimum wage, maintain and expand Medicaid and SCHIP, increase funding for Head Start and CCDBG, fund incremental housing choice vouchers every year, create a fund for car ownership programs, provide funding for free tax prep, etc. 2) A message/frame that wraps the policy ideas together. The days of describing our goal as poverty reduction and alleviation are over. We need to come up with some new language/frame. Recently, I’ve sensed some support for using “upward mobility” – replacing poverty with mobility. It’s more consistent with our values – focusing on individual responsibility (whatever one thinks of it, Americans value it). We need to build understanding that it’s actually quite unlikely for someone born into poverty to move out of poverty, that even as the income gap/inequality widens, it’s becoming even more unlikely for people to move into the higher income group, for children born into poor families to do better than their parents. It’s likely that many of the policy proposals we advocate for poverty alleviation will also fit in the mobility frame. Poverty seems tainted with fault and individual failure, while supporting mobility seems consistent with American values. And we can SUPPORT mobility, instead of OPPOSING poverty. But, that’s just one idea and we should explore other alternatives like inclusion and security and safety and equality….etc. 3) Infrastructure to support work on the long-term goals. The progressive community lacks the infrastructure to support this work. Many groups work on issues narrower than poverty/mobility/inclusion. Even those organizations with a broader portfolio usually work on the day-to-day federal legislative issues. It will be quite difficult for these groups to maintain a focus on the longer-term goals without undercutting those goals, or undermining their ability to impact today’s national policy. We also need new means of communication with the “field” of interested state and local groups. It’s critical to provide more transparency about policy options and political strategy so state and local groups have a place to discuss the risks and opportunities presented by action requests from national policy groups. A new website and a place for dialogue (like dailykos or TPM on poverty/mobility/inclusion), updates on policy, sharing information and thoughts on strategy, the latest research reports, calls for action, etc. But that’s just the beginning. We’ll eventually need a way to influence more traditional media outlets like radio and TV.