Systemic change is not meant to be examined under a microscope. It is intended to be viewed through the zoom-out lens.
Don’t examine the ant that is part of the anthill. Be the hawk flying above that is spending years surveying the changing landscape.
If you want to see if the needle has moved, the smallest time period I would recommend would be a 10-year comparison period.
And really the best view would be 40-50 years.
What has changed in the last 40 years?
Are we getting somewhere?
What issues have changed? Which ones are persistent and have remained?
If you are going to judge your systemic advocacy progress on the last 6 months of your work, you will absolutely frustrate yourself. You will feel like you have gotten nowhere. Which will not necessarily be true.
Systemic work is about seed planting. Things grow over time.
Creating a new normal that society just accepts. Raising the bar. Changing expectations.
Micro level advocacy progress: you can see the steps. You can see the incline or decline.
Macro level advocacy progress: the steps are invisible. They are forever moving and floating around, changing levels and going up and down. Constantly taking steps forward, one step back.
Save yourself the mental anguish. You are torturing yourself with your own mental framework. This is where we can become our own mountain. We all have our moments of frustration and wanting to scream from a mountain top. After we wake up everyone on the mountain top, we need to walk down off the mountain.
I highly suggest you save yourself and don’t apply the micro-level view to a macro-level problem. You will get bitter, burn out and weed yourself out unnecessarily.
Keep yourself in the game and change your lens. Examining ants = burnout = risk of health problems.
Understand systemic change = be the hawk.
All the little things add up over time.
Systemic advocacy involves multiple approaches from multiple groups. Which is why we need everyone. We need the legal route; we the community building route. We need the loud advocates, and we need the behind the scenes quiet advocates. We launch litigation and build case law, and different groups collaborate and pull people closer to us. We build. Slowly. One shovel at a time. Taking legal advancements and APPLYING it. Because laws are nothing unless they are used by the people who need them, especially when the system would prefer for them not to exist.
Systemic change takes teams, sustained over long periods of time.
It is hopeful to see so many people eager to engage with the process.