Pulling the Cart Before the Horse?

So, it is looking like our effort to get a housing trust fund passed in Waukesha County might stall due to internal strategy disputes. The problem: Some of us want to focus on pushing through a housing trust fund, but the problem with this strategy is that no one can agree on the policy details and others just want to push for affordable housing and once we have public traction then focus on the policy details. Personally, I favor the latter because to me it doesn't make sense to focus on the details of a housing trust fund policy if we don't even know that we have enough public support for it. Moreover, I think we may never get our grassroots effort underway if we keep constantly bickering over the specifics of a policy (which they have for about a year and a half now) that the politicians/public will eventually alter once we do cultivate the public support. Lesson for activists: Do not pull the cart (policy proposals) before the horse (needed public support) if you want to be successful.

The A-Student Mentality and How It Kills

So we had a meeting with the county executive and not so surprisingly he shot down our proposal for a housing trust fund. However, the surprising part was how quick our task force members went into "A-student" mode:

Task Force Member: "Well, what can we do to improve our proposal?"
County Executive: "You need to find better funding sources."
TFM: "OK, we will find more funding sources and then schedule a follow up meeting with you."

Although this conversation might seem OK, when you consider that the task force has been working on this issue for over two years and had several meetings with both the county executive as well as other county supervisors, this reaction is inexcusable. Unfortunately, too many people were brought up in a school system that says, "if you work hard enough on your homework then you will get the results you want from your teacher" which is not necessarily true (and at times can be debilitating) in the real world. In this case, we could bring a perfect proposal to him and he still would reject it because of his politics. So, we have to seek to change something outside of the classic "teacher-student" dynamic in order to change his behavior. But our task force seems a little cool to the idea of mounting an aggressive and serious grassroots campaign to place external pressure on our elected officials.