Session Voices: Grace Decker - How (and Why) to Engage

In this episode of "Session Voices" we chat with Grace Decker, coordinator of Montana Advocates for Children (MAC). We'll talk about how to engage with the legislative process, the unusual but necessary guidelines around clothing and decorum, and the value of building relationships with lawmakers year-round.

Links and Show Notes: 

Montana Advocates for Children

MT Legislature Livestream

Public Participation Link (requires account set-up)

Guide to making public comment (from Zero to Five Montana).

gdecker@montanabudget.org

Host: Emily Freeman, HMHB Storytelling Coordinator
Music by Caroline Keys

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Transcript

The Montana Legislative Session is underway, and we're diving in to learn more about how it all works and why it's worth paying attention to. We'll connect with experts, advocates, parents, lawmakers, and other champions of Montana families. I'm Emily, and you're listening to Session Voices, a special Mother Love series. 

In today's episode, we'll talk to Grace Decker from Montana Advocates for Children. Grace builds statewide connections around issues of child care and is passionate about helping people to navigate the process of communicating with their elected officials.

My name is Grace Decker, and I coordinate a statewide child care coalition, the Montana Advocates for Children.

What is an average day, maybe not during the legislative session? What does that kind of work mean in really plain language?

I connect with a lot of people. So I do a lot of emailing, and I talk to people on the phone, and sometimes get together in person. What I'm trying to do is connect with people who have different perspectives on child care, to get all of those folks to understand each other and understand the problem the same way. So I'm trying to get people to spend enough time wrestling with things together that they have some trust and some shared understanding of problems, so that when it's time to move forward together, like around a policy, they can do that more quickly. Now that the session is here, part of what I'm doing is trying to take all of this understanding and trust in what's been built with the coalition, and now we're moving to talk to people who really maybe don't share this assumption that we have that child care matters. Now we're talking to folks who maybe haven't thought about child care much, maybe they're 70 and child care wasn't part of their life ever, because that's not how the world worked when they had little kids.

You right now, you're kind of embedded in Helena during the legislative session?

Yeah, my home's in Missoula, and now I'm here in Helena. I spend some time in the capital talking to legislators more, talking again with the coalition, and then doing a lot of work to make sure that when it's time to talk to legislators about child care, that people like child care providers and parents and people who care, that they are feeling comfortable and ready and supported to be able to come and tell their stories.

It sounds to me like these stories really matter and they really are heard. Can you speak to that? How somebody who maybe wants to share their story, wants to have their voice heard, what's the best way? What have you found legislators really respond to?

I've made testimony before, which is what they call it, when you tell your story. I've called in and I've also come over to Helena and gone into a hearing and testified. But what I'm learning, and I'm trying to watch a lot of hearings right now and sort of see how testimony goes. And it's so cool that it's so easy to watch. Like, it's sort of my Netflix.

It's not only interesting and so easy, and I will put a link to the live stream in the show notes for this episode, but it's really empowering because you watch other people talking and you get the sense of, oh, wait, I could do that. Some of them have prepared really elaborate speeches, but some of them just get up and they just kind of talk about their personal experience, and it's so moving.

I would totally agree. People from across the state, they'll drive here, they'll come into the room so they can go up to the podium, and you literally, at the most, get three minutes. Sometimes it's even less. Sometimes the head of the committee, the chair, they call them, will limit it to even two minutes. And then you get up and you say your thing, and it's like, you might have driven two hours. You might have driven four hours. And so it's easy to wonder, is this worth it? And what I would say is that it totally is worth it. The legislators in that room, they don't know about child care much, or they don't know about the thing that you care about in the way that you know about it. And they do need to hear from people who say, like, this is real for me. This is a big deal in my life. This is why this is a struggle that I'm having that I think we can do something about. You don't have to know everything. There's people who have jobs like mine, and it's my job to know a lot of data about child care. You know that this is a thing that matters to you, and that's the part they need to hear.

That's such a great point, because the solutions are big and complicated, and you're not expected to know the solution. You're not getting up there to say, here's an issue that's of concern to me and my family, and here's how I think you should solve it. You're in no way expected to be a subject expert in this. You're just there to share, this is my story, and thank you for paying attention to this issue, and thinking it's important enough to keep working on finding some positive movement towards legislation. You don't have to know everything, because they don't even know. How are individual legislators put in the committees that they're in?

That's a great question. They do get to make some requests about where they'll be placed, and they make those requests based on what they're interested in. For example, on the Health and Human Services Committee, there tend to be folks who've chosen to be there who have some background in health, but not everyone on those committees is going to have that background. There might be somebody from your town who's on a certain committee, and that's a really useful thing to know, because the people from your own town are probably going to be more likely to want to hear from people in their community. It's not all about coming to Helena and showing up at the podium and saying something either. You can e-mail, you can call. There's actually this really cool thing you can do, which is call the capital switchboard. There are very nice people on the end of that phone line who will give a message from you to anybody you want.

You leave a voicemail and it gets transcribed and printed out and put on their desk. Is that how that works? So you don't actually have a conversation with them.

Well, you can actually sometimes talk to a person, but there's an option for leave a message for a legislator. If you don't know who your legislator is, you can talk to the switchboard operator and they will tell you and then send you to their voicemail. So then they will transcribe it and they'll put it on their desk.

I'm so glad you shared that because the website where you go to even find your legislator, it's a little confusing. I can see people giving up. But if you can just call and there's a friendly voice on the other end of the line and you say, look, I don't really know what I'm doing here. I just want to say something to someone about this topic. There's a warm hand there to kind of guide you through the process. That's really, it's very human. I appreciate that.

Yeah, definitely. And it does feel like a pretty intimidating website because there's a lot of information there and it's not necessarily as user friendly, but there's one particular portal that you go to to create your own account for public participation. And once you've made that account, then if you're interested in a certain topic or thing or committee, then there are links for like email this committee, but you have to actually create an account first. So it does feel a little challenging on the front end, but there are people like me. There's a lot of organizations who are there to try to help you and hold your hand a little bit to figure it out. I'm just like one step further along, so I want to help other people who haven't figured it out also figure it out. I love that.

I mean, I think that's what we're all doing is, every time you engage, you learn a little bit more. And then if you can sort of turn around and offer a hand to the person who's behind you still learning and say, hey, here's something I've learned that helped clarify the process or helped make it seem not so intimidating. Let me show you what I found to make the session not only more accessible, but more interesting. Like the more you know, the more interesting it is. And the more you realize, oh my gosh, this is like fascinating human drama playing out around the table. Like day after day. It's like the most boring reality show that like you never realized you should have been watching all the time.

And what's so cool is that you can watch what's happening like right now, right this minute, but you can go back to any day, even in past years. I'm not necessarily recommending that people become that much of a legislature geek, but if you want to, it's totally available.

Do you have any recommendations for like relationship building outside of the session, whether it's in interim years where there's not a session or even after, after the 90 days have ended? You know, what can people do in their own communities outside of these 90 days?

One of the reasons why I love that question so much is that it's so important that people who are making decisions for our communities and our state, that they're connected to people with life experiences different than their own. Because if they mostly interact with people who are like them, they think they know what's going on in their community. Our Montana Legislature is super cool because it is a citizen legislature, which means that it's not full-time politicians. Like it meets for 90 working days every other year, and then people go back to their lives, and that's super cool. But it's also kind of weird because who can do that? It's not mostly young families, it's not mostly people who don't have a lot of resources, right? So how do you go have a second place to live in Hellenel? How does that work when you have to go out of town for all this time? How do you leave a job if you're needing to work and have income? How do you leave that behind to go do this? So the slice of who can actually participate in the legislature, so it skews like kind of older, you know, kind of more male than the split of our population in general. More people who are retired or own property and don't work at jobs. So it skews in a particular way. So it's really important that people do think about building those relationships with legislators because our legislature in general may or may not have the breadth of life experience that's going to be impacted when they actually make their decisions. So I love that you're asking the question basically. And I think that what people can do is to first and foremost recognize that their perspective is enough. You don't have to earn the opportunity to talk to a legislator. It's actually their job to talk to you. So I think people should know that. And when there's an election happening in particular, legislators get really interested in talking to people because they want to go meet people and they go knock on people's doors and all that kind of stuff. But if you want to talk to a legislator, you could email them or call them and say, hey, I want to talk with you about what our state is doing around young families like mine. What are the things that are happening to support young families? And can we talk on the phone about that? I want to talk to you about this thing that I care about. And I know that takes a tremendous amount of courage to do, just call somebody out of the blue. So, the other thing is to get connected to something in your community where more people are coming together. Maybe there's an early childhood coalition in your community where people are coming together. Maybe there's a civic club or a group of families who are coming together to do some community-oriented things together. And in those spaces, you can have a conversation like, hey, do you think we'd ever want to have a legislator come talk to us? Sometimes it can feel better to do something in a group, right? Because it takes a lot of courage to just reach out.

During the election season, everyone gets much more partisan, and they feel less approachable during that time if you don't necessarily align with their election year performance for, I mean, not to diminish it, but you know what I mean, everyone sort of dials up their party line identity during an election season. And then everyone chills out a little bit, right? And so almost like the value of letting everyone return to the time when they're just that person in your community. And what a great time to do that kind of relationship building and trust building and inviting them in and not saying, what are you going to do for me? Here's what I need you to do for me. But to just say, hey, let me pick your brain. Like what's going on in a state level? Like what are you hearing about? What are you interested in? And not expecting them to have all the answers and just say, hey, this is something that's of real interest to me. Would you find out more and report back?

I also really think that when you hear of something that your person did that you like, I think thanking them for that is actually really a huge thing to do too. When legislators have good ideas about things that they want to do and you like it, even if it doesn't go all the way along or something, I think about it sometimes like they're over here in Helena living in some new place and trying to do a good job and meeting a lot of new people. I learned this year that 40% of the legislators who are here this year, it's their first time.

That's a lot.

Yeah, it's a lot of new people. And so they're really busy in there and meetings all the time. They're here because they want to try to do a good thing on some level, right? Even if people have different core values about what that good thing is, but people do, they come here to try to do some work. And if you hear of something that a legislator has done that you were like, oh, that was cool. It's great to just let them know, like, that was cool. They get a lot of mad emails, I bet, more so than they get thankful ones.

If you're a legislator coming from a small community in Montana, Helena can feel like a different world. And don't underestimate the value of a friendly face from back home.

Totally.

They're human too, underneath those fancy suits that they've figured out a way to squeeze into for 90 days.

Can we talk about the clothes for a minute? I have thought about clothes so much. It is wild. Because I'm a preschool teacher, right? That was my background from a long time ago. I have always been a believer in wearing clothes that you could get on the floor in and do whatever you need to do. And working from home and facilitating a coalition remotely, that works out pretty well. Realizing I was going to spend time in the Capitol, I have thought a lot about what was going to be the right sort of things to wear. But like, that's not to say that everybody who comes to the Capitol has to get dressed up to that sort of a level, right? In my job, I'm not just there representing me, Grace. Like, I really feel this, like, responsibility to represent child care as a whole concern. I want to make sure that when I'm interacting with someone who's a legislator, I want to look like I belong at that table. Having said that, if I'm going to just testify and I'm going to represent myself, I'm going to go speak to my own personal experience, I want to wear something that puts me in my confidence. I want to dress in a way that I feel good about me because I'm representing me in that moment.

Sure. But yes, when you're there representing an organization or a group of people with shared concerns, you know, that decorum piece, I think it can feel so odd and so sort of like phony and weird. And, you know, what is your pleasure, Representative So-and-so?

Madam Chair.

Right, right. And yet, as I was watching a sort of back and forth on the house floor on a rather contentious topic, and I realized what a beautiful thing that this decorum, these rules of decorum and expectations of behavior, as odd as they may seem, they allow conversation to take place. You're not interrupting. You're not raising your voice. And there's so few spaces outside of something like this, where you could talk on a heated topic across lines of belief or passions or whatever, and nobody would get elevated or fists wouldn't be thrown, or nobody's storming out of a room or swearing. And it's almost like the decorum allows that space to be held for productive, measured conversation and for listening.

Totally. I think that's a really great point. There's this ritualistic, theatrical nature to it. But all of that is really just like the wire hangers that the actual conversation can hang on it. Because you have that structure for a conversation, then even really difficult conversations, there's an understanding that we're not going to yell and lose our tempers too much and all that stuff. I also think that that wire hanger nature can, unfortunately, serve to limit who feels welcome in those spaces. And I think it's really important that what you're doing and what other folks are doing to try to break down that facade that makes people feel like this is not for me. Because truly, this democratic process, there's a couple of different kinds of power that are at play in a democratic process, one of which is money, unfortunately, and one of which is people. And the more that people understand how this process works and how they can get inside of it, then the more we're really powering those conversations with people, and people who understand and feel like this is about them and it's for them and that they can participate the way they want to.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for doing this. I think it's really super cool. And if folks want to like talk more about this, they should just feel free to reach out to me because I'm just a real person on this M2.

Mother Love is a project of Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies, the Montana Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the health, safety and well-being of Montana families in the zero to three years of parenting. Visit us at hmhbmt.org to learn more about who we are and what we do. Views and opinions expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent HMHB as an organization. If you have feedback on the podcast or an idea for a future episode, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at stories at hmhbmt.org. Thanks for listening.