At the Heart of Grassroots Advocacy

What does it take to raise the level of grassroots efforts in a community? It takes leaders who are willing to go open their hearts and minds to the possibilities before them. In this episode, we chat with Tom Coale, J.D., Adjunct Faculty with UMBC's Community Leadership graduate program about the course he's teaching: Grassroots Community Advocacy. 

To learn more about UMBC's Community Leadership graduate program: 
https://leader.umbc.edu

Transcript

Dennise Cardona  0:00  
Welcome to this episode of UMBC Mic'd Up podcast. My name is Dennise Cardona from the Office of Professional Programs. We are joined by graduate instructor Tom Coale, an attorney with the law firm of Talkin and Oh, LLP. His practice concentrates on affordable housing, land use, and zoning. He teaches a course on grassroots community advocacy in the UMBC community leadership graduate program. We hope that you enjoy this episode. Well, it's wonderful to have you here with us today, I'm really glad that you are able to be with us to talk about the course that you're teaching for UMBC's Community Leadership graduate program. And also just to hear about your story and what brought you to UMBC. Thank you so much for being here, Tom.

Tom Coale  0:47  
Oh, yeah, it's an honor. And I love this course. So I'm happy to talk about it anytime.

Dennise Cardona  0:51  
Awesome. Well, first of all, it's always nice to be able to hear a little bit about your path to your career path. First of all, what brought you to community leadership and this grassroots course you're teaching? And what brought you here to UMBC? 

Tom Coale  1:08  
Yeah. Wow. I mean, ever since I was younger, like even in high school, I had always been interested in community leadership, I went to, you know, they have all these leadership camps, I went to all the leadership camps did leadership view, which is a program here in Maryland for and I think across the country for young adults who are interested in leadership. And so it's always been something that's been of interest to me and politics as it flows into that. But in terms of my own career path, I'm an attorney, I do land use and zoning work. And how that came to be was a lot of the work that I was already doing, flow into land use and zoning land use. And zoning is an area of law that's very much focused on community conversations about having people have a voice of what their community looks like. And I've been involved in that with regard to advocacy in the homeless arena advocating for a 10-yearplan to end homelessness, and the like, and housing. And so it all flowed together. And that's that's how my career path ended up what it ended up being.

Dennise Cardona  2:18  
Wow that is really a purposeful career path that you have there. And the whole housing, the helping the homeless is this in Baltimore, primarily that you're working.

Tom Coale  2:29  
So when I came out of law school, I started teaching a class called Street Law, which is a program that's in law schools across the country, where you how Street Law is commonly taught is either in high schools or in prisons, where the sentiment is if you make law accessible to those that are really bearing the brunt of that underprivileged high school students, and in my iteration, homeless men and women, that they can be more a part of it that that the idea is that the reason why many people struggle with the law is because it's seen as a foreign thing to them. And so if you can teach them that they have more ownership, so I started at our Daily Bread and Baltimore City, when my wife and I then fiance, lived in Baltimore City, when we moved down to Howard County, I started working with the group One Day Center and it was a different iteration of that it would be just in one on one conversations with people. And that's how my Homeless Advocacy sort of developed over time.

Dennise Cardona  3:37  
That is really powerful. Absolutely. Now, what led you to teach a course on grassroots community advocacy in the UMBC community leadership graduate program?

Tom Coale  3:48  
Well, I'm very fortunate to have as my podcast partner and very dear friend to me Candace Dodson-Reed, who work in the works in the administration at UMBC. And she's the one that came to me with this idea. We had been doing a podcast together called Elevate Maryland, and I believe even some of the other people that have been working with this curricula had heard of our podcast. And so she came to me with the idea, hey, would you want to teach this course. And we didn't really know what we wanted to teach at that time. But grassroots community advocacy is something that I sort of lived and breathed, both in terms of what my career is, and then in my individual advocacy, and I felt that many people have an idea of what it is, but are either intimidated by it or are doing it wrong. And those that are intimidated by it say it's way too complicated and scary. I don't want to do it. And those that are doing it wrong, think that advocacy is just yelling at elected officials, presuming they're going to be so scared and shamed that they're going to do what you want them to do. And so there is just some basic building blocks of advocacy and effective advocacy, that if you understood to end those building blocks, and it's not a right or left issue, it's just about understanding the mechanics of local and state government, you can really do amazing things for your community, and far too often people disempower themselves by just giving up. And so we've created this course around the idea of empowering people to affect positive change in their communities.

Dennise Cardona  5:22  
There is a lot of power and knowledge. Absolutely. And has this is this the first time you're teaching this course, or has this course going on before?

Tom Coale  5:32  
Our first course was this past summer, we had our six week course. And we were blown away by the manner in which the students received that information, and then gave it back to us. You know, we have a capstone for this course called the Community Action Plan, where we asked them to take the principles that we've discussed over the course of the six weeks, and come up with a Community Action Plan for the issue that's most important to them. And I still am thinking and about all of the amazing things that we heard in those community action plans about how, you know, the little nuggets that we built up along the way were interpreted and applied by them.

Dennise Cardona  6:10  
And from a student perspective, I would imagine I'm a graduate student at UMBC, as well, in a different program, but the hands-on experience, that ability to be able to take what you're learning in the classroom and apply it directly, right after you've left that classroom, if you will, to be able to go into a community like this, and to be able to come up with ideas and think through them. And it's putting theory into action into practice, which is really powerful for a graduate student. And I'm assuming that that's really that was a really great benefit for the students of this course.

Tom Coale  6:45  
Yeah, I mean, we certainly experienced it. And oddly enough, I guess one of my biggest surprise surprises was that the to sort of open this up to let our students sort of feel the empowerment, the biggest and first thing we needed to overcome was imposter syndrome, that so many of them were being held back by themselves, because they sort of thought Who am I to do this thing. And our course kind of nudges them and says, You, it is you you are the person that you've been waiting for. And also balancing that by saying these communities, we call it Big Footing. So there's impostor syndrome and Big Footing, you don't want to big flip them, and sort of say, I'm your savior, there is this balance of taking the resources that you get from a course like this, taking your own privilege, which is a valuable resource that you can use to benefit those that do not have that privilege and access, and using those things to to create positive change. So, you know, once once we were able to tell our students like, don't hold yourself back, it was so inspiring to see them just charge into these spaces and figure out a plan for making their community better.

Dennise Cardona  8:01  
So what experiences and skills do you bring to teaching a community leadership skills course like this.

Tom Coale  8:07  
So in the grassroots community advocacy course, we break that up into two parts for each seminar and eight, our students were saying they wish they were longer. And this was a two hour course. But we wouldn't have a speaker come in, who has actually executed on creating positive change that has sort of can walk them through the biography of their initiative, and where it wound up. And we also wanted to make sure we found people that have made their career in this space. And then also people that did that, that were just engaged in involved, but went about their day to day and never sort of fully invested. And we need both those people. And then the second part of our course, would be more of the customary instruction, where we would talk about how do you manage public relations for a initiative like thi.? How do you manage what is effective lobbying? Because lobbying has this sort of nasty connotation to it? But lobbying is really just trying to affect the government process. And how can you do that most effectively? So we would go through just sort of a more robust discussion of these building blocks, and I called it the toolkit, each class put another tool in the toolkit. So by the end of it are the students of the grassroots community advocacy course would have the real life stories that they could say, Well, I remember when Ian Kennedy from Merriweather Post Pavilion did this in the Save Merryweather initiative or Erica Maria did this for Columbia Community Cares that created a food bank during the COVID times I remember those tactics and how they did it. And then I also remember what Tom and Candace walked me through how to use social media in the most effective way possible when social media might not be so effective, how to get butts in seats for a legislative hearing, so they can pair that There's two things to get.

Dennise Cardona  10:01  
So it's tangible takeaways. And isn't that the most powerful way to learn is being able to have these sort of tangible takeaways. And it sounds like that's what the students were given in this course.

Tom Coale  10:11  
I mean, that was our goal, our goal was that they would almost in a way, have a manual or a recipe, and I described it at the beginning of the course, as a recipe that they can go and look at and say, well, I need a little bit more of this and a little bit less of that, and to be able to use that because, again, the number one thing we say in our first course is you need to be agile, you need to be able to move, and you need to be able to understand that whatever your 100% top goal might be, you need to figure out what your 80% goal is, what your 70% goal is, you need to know, sometimes you're gonna lose, and how can you take that loss and build it into something else? And the way you do that is through those sort of tangible discussions of what do I know is the base level for how to execute this idea when the outcome might be any number of things.

Dennise Cardona  11:02  
What did you enjoy most about teaching this course? And what? On the flip side of that? What did you find to be the most challenging part of teaching this course?

Tom Coale  11:11  
Yeah, I mean, what I loved most about it was just how engaged and committed the students were. I've been a student myself, you know, being an attorney and went through law school, and seeing how like, giving an idea and then seeing it come back. This is the first time I've taught in a university type setting, I taught high school students. But seeing that process, that magical process was just so inspiring. And excited. I'd say challenging is just really figuring out how to narrow it down and put it into six weeks, this is a course that very well could be extended over months. And, and doing it in a way that is not just talking at the students making sure that this is an engaging conversation. That related that is not too political. Because I don't want to alienate someone who has a different ideological perspective than I do. Or then cannabis does. I want them to have just as much access to the concepts that we're talking about. So making sure that despite we're talking about politics, that management of conflict, that's what politics is, despite the fact that we're talking about politics. I don't want to make it so political, that people get alienated. And then that is a that's a challenge. But I would, I mean, I would be hard pressed to say anything I didn't like about this class.

Dennise Cardona  12:49  
Oh, yeah. And that does sound like a challenge. But what a purpose, what a wonderful opportunity for students to be able to come to a classroom and learn and not worry about being having those biases and or having that sort of a conflict that could happen, potentially, with politics. So kudos to both of you for creating that safe environment for students to be able to learn that's part of that's paramount to learning really, is that safe environment? What kind of ideas and initiatives did your students develop over the time that they learned with you?

Tom Coale  13:26  
Wow, so, I would hate to let anyone down by not bringing their idea forward. But you know, one of them that I was really excited about was expanding access to doulas and women's health related to that just just because I loved it so much, because it is so foreign to my life, you know, it's so foreign to, you know, a white man's life, that, you know, seeing someone, go and take the tools that I've developed over the years working in this space, and execute them in an arena that I would never be able to touch that that was just really exciting. I mean, I hadn't we had another student who was pursuing an idea to establish a dog park in her community, because many of them had dogs. And that is another just great example of taking tools. And there really is no problem too small or too big. That, you know, you can really improve the lives of so many of your neighbors in ways that you have to have that lived experience to be able to know that would improve their lives. We had another instance where the retirement plans of educators has been sort of taken for granted that that there is this one way of doing it and and there are different stakeholders that are standing in the way of these educators getting a full discussion of what other retirement plans are available for What other retirement vehicles are available for them? So our one of our students was talking about how she was trying to pursue presenting these other options to educators and having them instead of that, I mean, I could go on and on. But, you know, the coolest thing is them learning from the obstacles, because that's what an obstacle is, it's a learning opportunity. Many people will see an obstacle and say, well, they blocked me, I'm done. But the people that are involved in community advocacy, they know that an obstacle is really just something that needs to be overcome. And the only way you're going to overcome it is from learning about it, and studying it and evaluating all the different avenues. And so seeing our students encounter those obstacles in real life, and then sort of say, and then I remembered so and so when they presented to us discuss they had a similar obstacle, and this is how they overcame that, and I did the same thing.

Dennise Cardona  16:01  
Absolutely. You know, it's peer to peer teaching in a way to get their learning from each other. And that's such a powerful way to learn. And did you feel like you and your students developed a kind of a learning community during the six weeks that you were together?

Tom Coale  16:16  
No, yeah, absolutely. I think that's the nature of the community leadership courses. I mean, there there is, it is based off of a principle of feedback and communication and interaction. And I certainly learned so much from them. And the best parts are when the students challenge the professor, the teacher on the concepts that are being put forward, because then it helps us rethink what we're presenting to say, all right, was the manner in which I was presenting this concept? Was that flawed? Or is the concept itself flawed? And so that was, was obviously fulfilling and provided educational opportunities for me as well?

Dennise Cardona  17:12  
How would you say students can get the most out of a course like this?

Tom Coale  17:18  
So, I mean, that's, that's hard to say. Just because our first, you know, our inaugural class was so stellar that, you know, we that these were very motivated people. And it's partly because they were in canvasses network, and they had heard about the course that way. But I'd say the way that they could get the most out of it, is just coming with an intention, and coming with it with an idea for what they want to execute on.

Dennise Cardona  17:51  
Intention is really powerful, it's very important tool, when you're trying to advance anything in this world. And knowing what you intend to do is well, that's more than half the battle. Yes. What is your ultimate goal for students who take your course? What do you want them to take away from it?

Tom Coale  18:10  
Yeah, I mean, I just want everybody that comes anywhere near this course, I want them to have that toolkit to be a, a super powered citizen that can hear a community proud problem and design solutions. Because I do think of every person that goes into this course as being out there for the service of others, because it's not just for your personal issue, it could be that you are at a cocktail party, you're at a PTA meeting, you're at a sporting event, and someone says, I have this issue. And they can then bring the things that they learned in our course, to that person's issue. Because we have an absence of engaged empathetic people in our public sphere, all too often it is people that are motivated by their own personal interests. And that's it. And we need people that just care about the process and that care about looking out for one another. And all of the good things that I know, a highly educated person is and aspires to be. And the more of those people that know how to make the process work better, the better.

Dennise Cardona  19:24  
We say that it's so much more joy when you're working for others and rather than for yourself in terms of the service to others, versus a service to yourself. It means so much more when you are bringing other people into the mix and helping them to solve problems. And when you have that skill set that toolkit that's being provided in this course, then you are armed to go out there and really make a difference in the world. And really, isn't that what the whole point is? Right?

Tom Coale  19:51  
Yeah. And really our tactics don't work for people that are just looking out for themselves. You cannot execute the grassroots community advocate See a lesson plan for someone that just has a personal interest. It needs to be a community grassroots issue. And anything short of that, and that you are doomed for failure.

Dennise Cardona  20:15  
One last burning question, do you want to teach this course again?

Tom Coale  20:20  
And we're already signed up? I think, you know, the summer was a little bit difficult. And it was hard to get our critical mass of students for the summer. And I think that's because people are just they're taking off the summer. So we're excited to be doing this in the fall of 2023. It's possible, we might do it in the spring of 2023, depending on whether or not that they are already filled up. But we we intend for this course to continue on for as long as you have the see what happens.

Dennise Cardona  20:51  
Awesome. Do you have any last thoughts that you want to share with our listeners and our viewers who are viewing this on YouTube?

Tom Coale  20:57  
I mean, the biggest thing is just to how fortunate is to have an institution like UMBC, that cares about this type of education that cares about this type of enrichment. Because these are things that canvass and I both had to learn in the school of hard knocks. I mean, we just had to go through attempted failure. And for us to have the opportunity as two people who are very much engaged in the process of community advocacy, to be able to take our skill set and our knowledge and convey it in this process is just such a huge benefit not only to the UMBC community but to the entire state. And so I just think it's amazing that UMBC has taken the initiative to make a course like this available.

Dennise Cardona  21:44  
Well, I want to thank you so much for sharing this story with us today on UMBC's Mic'd Up Podcast. It's really been inspiring to listen to. And I just I wish there were more people like you in the world who had that heart and that desire to make the community in the world a better place. And thank God there are people like you out there doing this good work, you and Candace and a lot of a lot of us at UMBC. Just we're really grateful for that. So thank you.

Tom Coale  22:08  
Thank you.

Dennise Cardona  22:12  
Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of UMBC Mic'd Up podcast. We hope that you enjoyed it. If you would like to learn more about UMBC's graduate program in community leadership, please click on the link in the show notes.