Democracy Is More Than a Ballot Box: A Note for Nonprofits and Movements

By Paul Taylor, Co-founder of Evenings & Weekends Consulting, and teacher at Simon Fraser University.

With municipal elections happening across the country, I’ve been thinking about how nonprofits and social movements work with politicians, and how much of that relationship has very little to do with election day.

I’ve spent most of my career in and around nonprofits and social movements, but I’ve also had the strange experience of running for federal office twice. I lost both times. The second time, I lost by 1,705 votes to someone who would later serve as Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General.

So I’ve seen at least some of this from both sides. I’ve been the nonprofit leader deciding whether to take the meeting, and I’ve been the candidate asking organizations for their time, their platform and, yes, sometimes the photo.

That experience has made me more skeptical about how our sector approaches political engagement.

We talk a lot about access. Getting the meeting. Having the mayor at the event. Getting a minister to visit a program. Inviting a councillor to tour the new space.

Access can matter, especially for communities that have historically been shut out of political spaces. Relationships matter too. Anyone who has done government relations for more than five minutes knows that sometimes having somebody answer your call is half the battle.

But access isn’t the same as power. And I think our sector sometimes forgets that politicians are getting something from these relationships too.

Your organization has something politicians want

Nonprofits and community organizations have relationships, trust and credibility. We often have deep connections to communities that politicians want to reach.

When a politician visits a food bank, shelter, youth program, community health centre or housing organization, they may learn something important. They may meet people whose experiences change how they understand an issue. They may also leave with photographs, stories and an association with an organization people trust. That’s an exchange. We should treat it like one.

This matters even more when a politician, or the party they represent, supports policies that hurt the same communities our organizations work alongside, or is proposing to do so.

Being nonpartisan doesn’t require us to forget that context when somebody asks to tour our organization, speak at our event or pose for a photograph.

We don’t have to pretend a voting record didn’t happen because somebody has arrived holding a giant cheque. We don’t need to provide applause because someone agreed to attend our gala. And we certainly don’t owe anybody a smiling photograph.

That photograph has value. Our credibility has value. Access to our communities has value. We should stop giving those things away without asking what our communities get in return.

Make the visit useful

I don’t think the answer is to only meet politicians we agree with. That would make for pretty bad advocacy.

Sometimes the person you most need to meet is the person whose position you’re trying to change. If someone has power over an issue affecting your community, there may be a very good reason to get them into a room.

Movement work has always required people to engage power without confusing engagement with agreement. But there should be a reason for the meeting beyond “it’s good to have a relationship.”

One simple practice I’d love to see more organizations try is a short pre-visit questionnaire for politicians and candidates. Nothing elaborate. Before confirming a visit, tour or speaking opportunity, send three or four questions about the issues that matter most to your organization and community.

Where do you stand on these issues? What have you done about them? What are you prepared to commit to? Can we share your responses with our community? Imagine how that changes the visit. Instead of a politician arriving, touring the program, shaking some hands, saying a few nice things and leaving with photos, they arrive knowing the community has questions for them. The organization also has a record of what they said.

There are other small ways we can change the usual script.

Politicians don’t automatically need speaking time because they attend our events. Sometimes their job can be to listen. The ED or CEO doesn’t have to lead every political visit either. Depending on the issue, maybe a frontline worker, tenant, youth organizer or community member should lead the conversation, with the right preparation and support. That last part matters. Nobody’s lived experience should become theatre for somebody else’s political communications.

We can set expectations around photography and social media before someone arrives. Who can appear in photographs? Who has actually consented? Can the politician use those images on their social channels? Can their party use them in campaign materials? Can they quote people they meet? These things are much easier to sort out before the cameras come out, and might be best confirmed via agreement in advance (another practice I recommend). 

And if several candidates want to visit during an election, develop a consistent process rather than figuring it out campaign by campaign. Decide what access looks like, what questions everyone will be asked, what your organization will and won’t promote, and how you’ll communicate the answers back to your community.

That isn’t bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. It protects the organization, but more importantly, it protects the people whose trust gives the organization its credibility in the first place.

And keep the damn spreadsheet

I’d also love to see more organizations maintain a simple political commitments tracker.

This doesn’t need to become a partisan scorecard or an endorsement exercise. It can simply be institutional memory: you met with us on this date, our community raised these issues, and you said you would do these things. Then follow up. And keep the damn spreadsheet!

I’ve seen versions of this happen too many times in our sector: we have a great meeting with a politician, everyone feels heard, somebody sends a lovely thank-you email, we post the photo and then, six months later, nobody can quite remember what the politician actually committed to.

Meanwhile, their office is keeping notes on us. We should probably keep notes too. And when they come back three years later asking to tour the organization again, pull up the spreadsheet.

Last time you were here, you told us you would do this. What happened?

That turns political engagement from a series of pleasant encounters into an ongoing relationship with some accountability attached.

Learn how your municipality actually works

The same thinking needs to extend beyond individual politicians.

Map council. Know which committees actually deal with your issues. Figure out which municipal staff have influence over the files you care about. Know who has formal authority and who quietly has the ability to move something forward or stop it dead. Learn the budget cycle before budget season.

Pay attention to staff reports while there is still time to change what they recommend. Understand when consultations happen and who designs them. Know when a decision is still open and when the public process is mostly confirming something that has already taken shape.

Anyone who has spent time doing government relations knows that the public council vote is often only the visible end of a much longer process. If we start organizing when something reaches the council floor, we have likely arrived months too late.

And this is one place where I think nonprofits can learn a lot from movements. Movements tend to ask: Where is the decision actually being made? Who can move it? Who can block it? Who is affected? Who is organized? What pressure can we build? What relationships do we have, and which ones do we need?

Those are useful questions for nonprofits too. Government relations can’t just mean knowing people at City Hall. It should mean understanding how power moves through City Hall and building enough power outside of it to affect what happens inside.

Are we building access, or are we building power?

For me, this is the bigger question. The people nonprofits work alongside aren’t simply clients, service users or beneficiaries. They’re residents, neighbours, organizers, rights holders and voters. Some aren’t eligible to vote at all, but municipal decisions about housing, transit, policing, libraries, recreation, public space and dozens of other things still shape huge parts of their lives.

Our job shouldn’t always be to become the bridge between those communities and political power. Sometimes our job should be to use our resources, relationships and institutional access to help people build their own power and need that bridge a little less.

That can mean bringing community members into meetings rather than speaking for them. It can mean helping people understand a municipal budget, supporting residents to make deputations, sharing information about how a decision actually gets made, paying community members for their time and expertise, or opening doors to relationships that have traditionally belonged to EDs, CEOs and professional government-relations people.

It also means being willing to ask harder questions about our own political relationships. What are we actually trying to move? How does it connect to our vision? Who should be in the room? Who gets to speak? What does the community want from this politician? What are we asking them to commit to?

What happens if they say no? And are we building influence for the organization, or are we helping communities build power for themselves? Those aren’t the same thing.

There will always be some tension here. Nonprofits have funding relationships to manage. Boards have different levels of comfort with advocacy. Charities have rules to follow. Organizations sometimes need to work closely with governments whose decisions they also need to challenge. I know that isn’t simple, but navigating those tensions is part of leadership. Pretending they don’t exist isn’t.

The election is the beginning, not the end

So yes, I hope nonprofits and social movements are paying close attention to the municipal elections happening across the country.

Ask candidates hard questions. Organize community conversations in place of boring debates where candidates spew predetermined talking points. Help people understand what’s at stake. Push issues onto the agenda. Help people vote.

Think carefully about who gets your platform, your microphone, your logo, your community’s stories and your photograph. And then pay just as much attention to what happens the week after the election.

Who are we meeting with then? What are we asking for? What promises are we tracking? Do community members have direct relationships with decision-makers, or does everything still have to flow through us? Do we know when the next budget process starts? Are we organizing early enough to shape decisions rather than simply reacting to them?

And when a politician comes knocking for another photo four years from now, will we remember what they told us the last time? Because it's important to remember that the most impactful work or advocacy often happens between elections.