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My name is Susan Freund, and I am the President and Executive
Director of
thinkmarriage.org, an organization I started up in May of 2005.
Back then, it was me and my computer in a home office along with a limited
guarantee of modest financial support from a donor. As of today, we are
eighteen employees operating in six counties scattered around the state of
Wisconsin, with a budget of $1.5 M. We are funded by the US Government, by
private foundations, and by modest financial support from donors.
All of this is to say, I am rather new at this game. I have
only four years of experience in building community initiatives, and my
distinguished colleague, Julie Baumgardner, whom you have just heard, is
much more experienced than me. I only have a few modest successes to report,
and I do not know whether the things I have done in Wisconsin will be
transferrable to your communities. Nevertheless, I have been asked to share
with you what I have been doing, and I do so in a spirit of humility, hoping
that you may find something of use, even if it’s only proof of what won’t
work in your community.
When we began our efforts to build a grassroots marriage
movement in Wisconsin, we recognized what a monumental task was facing us.
In some ways, what we were hoping to accomplish required a change, not just
in behavior or choices, but a change in public sentiment – a culture shift,
if you will. So I began to ponder the question, “How does a culture change?”
Is it possible to set out with the intention of having broad impact on
cultural norms of the family, and if so, what competencies might be
necessary to achieve such a lofty (some might say foolhardy) goal? As I
reflected on recent social changes such as the environmental movement and
the American civil rights movement, I looked for experts who had studied the
topic and had published the “How To” manuals. I quickly discovered that,
though there were a number of theoretical works, the “Creating Social Change
for Dummies” guide was not to be found.
So I began to develop a working model for affecting social
change. I realized that I would need to put particular focus on two things:
networking and social marketing. Networking is important because of what I
call “the four degrees of normalization”. You’ve heard of the “six degrees
of separation” theory – it postulates that an interpersonal chain of
relationships will need no more than six links to connect anyone on the
planet with anyone else on the planet. My theory of four degrees of
normalization is this – it takes no more than four people to confirm an
opinion before you believe that you’ve encountered a social norm. So, for
example, if I ask my colleague at work, “What do you think, should we try to
encourage more marriages in society,” and she answers, “Of course!
Absolutely,” then I may think I have found an anomaly. So I will naturally
seek a second opinion. This leads me to pose my question to the fruit seller
on my way home that evening. He gives me a similar answer. Now I am
intrigued, so I decide to test it again. I ask my son’s teacher in the
morning, and again, the same reaction. I am now beginning to wonder – does
everyone think this way?
So now I go looking for someone that I suspect may not have
such a supportive view. I don’t want to ask someone whom I know has a
political agenda against marriage, because I will discount his answer for
perceived bias. So I decide to ask my friend, the EU MP. Surely, I think, he
will not be inclined to agree. But if he does, he can probably give me good
reasons why. To my surprise, he also supports the idea. I am now convinced
that “everyone” thinks this. I feel it is a social norm.
In actual fact, my sample size is statistically invalid. I
have only gathered the opinion of four individuals. But because I asked what
I considered to be random group, and I received 100% agreement, I feel that
I have uncovered “the accepted view”. And now I am predisposed to accept new
information in the future that confirms the importance of marriage, and to
interpret future information unsupportive of marriage as anomalous.
What does all this have to do with collaborations at the
community level? Well, I thought that if we could succeed in getting every
sector of society that influences marriages and families to agree with our
mission and to be informed of the research which supports what we do, then I
would maximize the chance of achieving the four degrees of normalization for
any given individual. So I set about identifying what these community
sectors were, and produced the map on the following page. This map
represents the marching orders for all of our staff in the field. Because
Wisconsin is geographically about half the size of the reunified Germany, we
have local directors for each of the counties in which we are operating. The
charter of our County Directors is to actively network with as many
organizations as possible within each of the community sectors. The
networking and collaboration take many forms, and it isn’t possible to cover
all of them in such a short presentation. But I will discuss some of the
things we’ve done as I review the chart, and I have summarized in the
community sector map the kinds of activities it is important for each sector
to engage in if we are to achieve the social change we seek.
So how are we at thinkmarriage doing at achieving our
grand vision, four years down the road? We have chosen to use the metrics of
divorce, marriage, unwed childbirth and public opinion to measure our
effectiveness as an organization. I will share with you our best county and
our worst county from that perspective. They are represented by the
following two charts. Chart #1:
Chart #2:
I would be interested now to hear from the audience. Did you
see any sectors on the map that would not be applicable in your community? What
are they? Are there important sectors in your community that are not on
this map? What kinds of activities could they engage in to strengthen marriage?
Which sectors have the biggest leverage in your community, in terms of their
ability to influence norms of opinion and behavior? If you had to choose just
one sector to collaborate with, which one would it be and why? |
