Storming the Hill

FoodService Director - What I Learned - John Martin - Edwardsville Community School District 7

“I was introduced to the whole lobbying concept last summer at our state conference. I was totally unaware of any lobbying efforts on behalf of school nutrition. We were sitting in one of the seminars and the state’s representative gave a spiel on the whole process, and at the end of the meeting I met her. There was this list and I put my name on the list and I ended up in Washington D.C.

We had a trial meeting here in the state to talk about what to expect, but that gave me no indication of what it was going to be like. We also set up most of the appointments with the congressmen’s offices.

The first day in D.C. we had a meeting that explained how the whole process works. Then we went to a first timers meeting where they talk about what you do when you get into the office. We talked about how the information that you wanted to present needed to be brief. They wanted all of us to have kind of the same pitch, so we spent a lot of time talking about that whole process. It was a really informative day and told us what to expect and what our game plan was for going in and speaking with these congressmen.

The second day was more meat and potatoes. We talked about the national nutritional standards; right now there aren’t any and SNA is trying to get a country-wide standard. We heard about President Obama’s goal to rid the US of hunger by 2015. At the end of the day, we met with our rep to go over our game plan and we had a practice run before we went into the offices. We had teams of three people and each person had a role—an opener, a person who talked about the issues and a closer.

The third day we visited our Illinois congressmen’s offices—Shimkus, Costello and Halverson. For the first two we met aides, but the aides were really intently listening, asked us intelligent questions and gave us really good feedback on our issues. When we got to Congress-woman Halverson’s office we actually got to meet her. We were sitting and talking to her aide and she came out of her office and she spent about 10 minutes talking to us. We invited her to join us for a school lunch and she said she would. It was a really neat day.

Day four we were able to get up and talk about our interactions at the congressmen’s offices. SNA’s president, Katie Wilson, also presented in Congress and a bunch of us got to go over and watch that.

The biggest thing I learned was that someone really is listening. As I started this I wondered if anyone really cared about child nutrition. The biggest takeaway was that someone in Congress actually cares. We are at least on the radar.

I think I will do this again. Before I didn’t think so, but I really felt like someone was listening and I believe in this issue. We have to affect change and we have to do this early enough that children will take this into their adulthood. I don’t think I would do anything different next time. I wish we had more time with them, but they are getting lobbyists from all sides, so the fact that they even took time to listen to us was much appreciated.

My advice for first timers is to keep an open mind. I think that we, as a society, have gotten kind of jaded to politics. Also, you can affect a change. If not you, then who? If you leave it to the person next to you, then perhaps it doesn’t get done. We all have a stake in this.

The one thing that surprised me was really how easy it was. I thought it was going to be more difficult to sit down and talk to a congressman or his representative. Once we were armed with the information that we needed in terms of the talking points, it was relatively easy because these are things that we do every day.”