Staff and clients from many diverse organizations showed up to rally against budget cuts to the District's social services. Among them were adult education staff and students. Photo credit: Save Our Safety Net
Our previous posts on this blog in April and May revolved around an advocacy campaign to prevent an adult education cut which culminated in getting funding fully restored. I’d like to outline how we did it because it really meant a lot to the adult education community here.
In early April we found out that Mayor Fenty’s proposed budget proposed a cut to adult education in the amount of $965,000. The District currently funds adult education at an amount less than 5 million, so this was going to be a very severe cut to the programs offering those services.
We quickly started to move on this by meeting with programs to get their ideas on what DC LEARNs talking points should be. We decided to come up with the message that the District would be abandoning adult education through this cut because it would only be funding these programs at the minimum level needed to get a federal matching grant.
We knew that staff at these programs were very busy because many of them were already understaffed, so we came up with guidelines for them to testify, and reached out to them and their students to see if they could come out to the budget hearing in late April and offered to help them compose testimony if they needed it. Many of the programs were able to prepare the students themselves using their staff to help them. The day of the hearing we had 24 staff and students show up for the hearing which Chairman Vincent Gray presided over.
Soon after the hearing, we launched a letter writing campaign in which we asked programs if their adult learners could write to their council members and to Chairman Gray. We estimate about 500 letters were sent in.
In addition, we launched an email campaign on this site in which we wanted people to email council members and Chairman Gray asking them to restore this funding. Many of our supporters as well as staff and volunteers at programs participated in this.
I and other staff and students from these programs also participated in a campaign called Save Our Safety Net which was advocating against many cuts to social service programs including adult education by proposing new tax brackets for the wealthiest in the District. We showed up to rallies and sent emails asking the council members to save these programs.
In the end adult education was fully restored and a staff member from Council Member Michael Brown’s office said we did a fantastic job. And although a proposal to increase taxes on the wealthy did not pass, many social service programs were saved through the advocacy work the Save the Safety Net campaign conducted.
Many people have told me how excited they were about the results of this campaign and I think that this is the first time, in a long time, that adult education programs, and especially adult learners, really felt empowered and felt that they could change things.
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I would like to exchange links with your site dclearns.org
Is this possible?
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