By Eugene Lewit, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
A new report by the New England Alliance for Children Health (NEACH) tells an impressive advocacy success story. More importantly, it draws practical ideas from the advocates who made it happen, serving as a guide to advocacy strategies that work.
As most regular Say Ahhh! readers know, the uninsurance rate for children in the United States is at the lowest level ever despite continued deterioration of employer-sponsored insurance and a very weak economy. The gains in children’s coverage have been due in large part to actions taken by states to expand eligibility for and cut the red tape in their Medicaid and CHIP programs. The New England states (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine) have led the nation in covering uninsured children. The rate of uninsurance among New England’s children is half the national rate (9.3%) and all 6 New England states rank in the top 10 for the lowest child uninsurance rates.
New England advocates played important roles in spurring and supporting progress in their states. These organizations are likely to continue to be important players in the implementation of CHIPRA and broader health care reform. Insuring New England’s Children: An Advocacy Success Story a newly released publication from NEACH, an initiative of Community Catalyst, examines how state-based advocates in the New England states have been successful in working to ensure that each state provides its children with high-quality, affordable health coverage.
To compile the report, NEACH staff conducted 35 interviews with individuals from the 6 New England states that work on children’s health care. The interviews showed that advocates from across the region employ similar strategies to achieve gains in children’s health coverage. The strategies include: assembling a core group of dedicated advocates and building a coalition; collecting personal stories and data; fostering champions in state government; focusing on coverage, not coverage policy; not giving up when the going gets tough; and reaping the benefits of regional collaboration.
NEACH’s findings may seem familiar to Say Ahhh! readers. My colleague Liane Wong and I wrote this past summer about issue briefs from the on-going evaluation of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Insuring America’s Children: States Leading the Way (IAC) grantmaking strategy, which highlighted similar strategies. Both independently conducted studies emphasize the importance of coalition-building, fostering champions, and using credible data as central components of successful child health advocacy. Even the NEACH publication’s last lesson–that regional collaboration can enhance efforts underway in individual states by generating economies of scale and promoting cross-state learning and communication–is reflected in the way that the IAC work uses Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families and Spitfire Strategies to promote cross-state learning and communication.
Thus the new NEACH report provides additional evidence validating many of the advocacy strategies and tactical innovations employed by veteran advocates throughout the country. Importantly, it also reminds us of the value of learning from and in turn supporting others working to obtain similar goals in different venues. Those eager to strengthen their advocacy efforts can take it as a guide to practical and field-tested ideas for ways to accelerate the pace of change.