Building Your Advocacy Voice: Recognizing Your Organization’s Readiness and Tooling Up for Policy Work

Note: Registration fees for this workshop have been generously underwritten by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The Santa Fe Community Foundation invites community groups to share and learn from the collective experiences of some of our leading organizations working to advance policy change.

For the first hour, Carmen Lopez-Wilson, Policy Officer for Good Government Reform at the Thornburg Foundation, will moderate a panel of community organizations deeply involved in policy-advocacy work.

Nonprofit Panel

Carmen Lopez-Wilson – Policy Officer for Good Government, Thornburg Foundation – Panel Moderator

Andrea Serrano – Executive Director, OLÉ

Tomás Rivera, Chainbreaker Collective

Kay Bounkeua – Executive Director, New Mexico Asian Family Center

Panelists will discuss their organization’s history of policy and advocacy work and share their best practices and strategies for:

Recognizing organizational readiness and critical infrastructure needs;
Building strong partnerships for policy change;
Working with funders, including new messaging for existing donors;
Long-term strategies and evolution of this work;
Red flags and thoughts on what they’d do differently from their current perspective.
Following the panel discussion, attendees will work in small groups to discuss both the above as well as:

Where you are now in this work;
What barriers you experience, both internally and externally;
Current strategies;
Implementing best practices;
Operationalizing some of the ideas you’ve heard today;
Next steps for your organization.

Panelists
Carmen López-Wilson is the Good Government Reforms Policy Officer at the Thornburg Foundation, which seeks to reduce the influence of money in politics. She is works with nonprofit organizations across the state to increase the transparency of political spending, accelerate ethics reform, increase the viability and availability of public financing and expand the use of ranked choice voting.

Ms. Lopez-Wilson formerly served as the Data, Research and Policy Director for America Votes-NM. She convened the election administration coalition, which sought common ground and forward movement on election modernization, and provided expertise to issue and electoral campaigns.

She previously worked for the NM Legislature, the Lujan Leadership and Public Policy Institute, and worked on issue campaigns at the state and national level.

Ms. Lopez-Wilson earned a MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a BA in Political Science from Mount Holyoke College. Her thesis was entitled, “Wealth, Influence and Democracy: An Analysis of Campaign Financing in the United States.”

Santa Fe Community Foundation
501 Halona St., Santa Fe (Map)
Fees: No charge. Register below.
Contact: amclaughlin@santafecf.org; 505.988.9715
Calendar: Nonprofit Events and Technical Assistance
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