The Roosevelt Institution's second conference in Hyde Park, NY: 2006. Photo by Nick Bradley. |
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The model > Roosevelt Home > About > The model
Campus chapters are divided into two sections, an administrative section and a policy section. The policy section is divided into between five and fifteen issue-focused centers, for example, the center on education, or the center on healthcare, or the center on international security. Each center has a broad-based student membership of between about fifteen and about a hundred students interested in that issue-area. As of March 2005, the largest center was Stanford's Center on International Democracy, Development, and Health, with just over eighty active members. The policy research process The core of the Roosevelt Institution model is the fellow doing policy research within a center. We have developed three research models. The first is a fellow-driven model, in which a fellow comes in with significant course work, extracurricular work, or expertise in their chosen issue-area. In this case, the goal is simply to prepare the work for presentation as policy and put it on the right person's desk. While fellows participating in this research model are encouraged to attend meetings to discuss their research and comment on others' work, this is a good way for people to participate who don't have time for another weekly meeting. The second research model is group-driven. The Roosevelt Institution brings together groups of people with similar interests but diverse backgrounds. When environmental engineers, conservation biologists, and environmental law students get together, we see new connections and the potential for group projects. Likewise, giving fellows access to a group and a discussion forum can allow us to see niches in the policy discourse that we can fill. In the demand-driven third research model, fellows turn to outside experts for advice on policy papers that will be effective and will find a market in the outside world. Advocacy organizations, policymakers, and fellows at other think tanks will have a strong sense of high-salience issues that are not being addressed. These research proposals are adopted or not by the fellows based on their salience and interest. We are working with our lawyers to develop a formal process for accepting research proposals. It is worth noting that we have accepted research projects from organizations that don't endorse candidates, organizations that endorse mostly Republicans, and organizations that endorse mostly Democrats. We expect that each center at each school will eventually participate in each of these types of research simultaneously, based on the interests of the center's membership. Groups composed mostly of underclassmen may lean toward the last two models, while groups with a high number of grad students or seniors may lean toward the first model due to greater existing expertise, but the key is flexibility so that each fellow or potential fellow can contribute in the best way they are equipped to. Center organization The centers are designed to facilitate the research process. Centers will have very different resources, needs, and memberships available to them, and so a one-size-fits-all approach is inappropriate. However, each center does have a similar set of functions it must fulfills for its members. As chapters organize, centers will be offered a menu of organizational ideas and options which they can adapt to best fit their needs. Each center has several functions:
- Centers recruit and maintain advisors within the specific issue-area of relevance. Advisors will typically be faculty members, though non-faculty specialist advisors from the community are also a great resource. Some centers which coordinate with multiple academic departments may wish to appoint liaison students within each major.
Centers are responsible for member recruitment. Though each member should be an evangelical for the entire organization, centers should make recruitment plans and be in contact with related student groups, academic departments, graduate programs, and so on.
Centers will play an active role in policy promotion by keeping track of the important media in the issue-area -- for example, magazines, popular blogs, important columnists, prominent think tanks and institutions, etc., and by keeping track of resources that will be useful to fellows studying this issue area.
Centers will coordinate fellow development activities with the rest of the chapter. Some things -- workshops on "what is policy" and "how do you write a policy paper" -- will probably be chapter-wide, but some will likely be more specific -- "framing foreign relations for the American public."
Centers will provide internal expertise to help guide student research. More senior center members may, for example, be organized into an initial advising board that will read draft policy proposals and steer more junior students toward resources they may not yet know about. This will also provide policy-promotion staff with a sense of where the work should be placed -- an interesting reframing of a well-known debate should go in a campus publication or a popular blog, while a genuinely new policy idea should be steered toward policymakers themselves.
Centers provide writing and research support, for example, peer editing or an audience for a presentation of student work.
Centers can create subcommittees and working groups for group projects or specific interests. For example, the center on science and technology might start a bioethics subgroup that meets regularly to talk about those issues, or the center on progressive religious perspectives might start a working group on faith-based initiatives to develop a positive set of policy proposals in that issue area.
Centers play a strong internal-education role. Educating different progressive constituency groups about each others' issues is a core goal. Centers may wish to produce collective backgrounders about the issues they are working on for the rest of the group to digest.
Centers maintain their area of the website. Technical skills beyond basic computer literacy are not required, but centers should have a point person who is responsible for ensuring that the center's web space accurately reflects what is going on. While this may seem like a task that can be saved for later, having up-to-date web space can be a great tool for bringing in new members and getting them up to speed.
Centers are responsible for their own leadership and succession planning. In addition to a director with general responsibility and a policy promotion representative to liaise with the communications part of the organization, centers should make sure to appoint other officers and distribute responsibility. The specific organizational needs of each center will differ, but each will benefit from broad buy-in, diffuse responsibility, and smooth succession in an environment where each individual is transient. Directors are elected by the center membership; other officers may be elected or appointed by the director at her or his discretion.
Centers are responsible for proposing appropriate events to their campus events teams. For example, if a prominent policymaker is visiting campus or is local to the area, the center may wish to host an event with the speaker. Policymakers' time is a scarce resource and it's very important to use it as is best for the group. Rather than bringing the person to speak to a campus-public audience and have the group's name listed as the sponsor, better to have the fellows of one or two pertinent centers read the expert's work, put together a policy proposal, email it to her or him in advance, and then have a small-group discussion about the work.
In a typical center meeting, fellows might go around and talk about new projects they were thinking of working on, talk about what other campus groups and departments are up to (e.g. event announcements), see a brief presentation of ongoing research by an undergraduate, grad student, or faculty member and discuss it, bring in a news article or pertinent issue for the members to comment on, peer edit papers or coordinate group work, meet with an outside specialist or expert, have a discussion about some problem and talk about progressive positioning on the issue, or talk about unsolved niches in the field that the center might occupy. Depending on the relative composition of the three research models, some fellows may not need to come to meetings at all, whereas some will have meetings that are vital to coordinating ongoing group work. It's important to balance the meetings being useful to the fellows and the organization with making them not feel like another class the students are taking. If the school allows it, making academic credit available for active participation and research (e.g. through student initiated courses) may make seminar-style work more palatable. The directors of each center together form the leadership of the policy section of the chapter. They are assisted by a policy director or center development director. This person shares best-practices among the centers, helps ensure that centers always have successful leadership, coordinates projects that have interdisciplinary interest, helps plan fellow development activities, and helps coordinate center activities with the administrative section of the organization. The administrative section The administrative section serves the centers and helps them to fulfill their mission. Each chapter's administrative needs will be different, but there will be some commonalities. Administrative needs are fulfilled by committees, each led by a director -- for example, an events committee and an events director. Here are each organization's potential administrative needs:
- Events: Chapters will need to plan two types of events: institution-driven events such as a launch event or a presentation about the organization to new or potential members, and center-driven events such as policy presentations or speaker events. In new chapters the former will be dominant, while in established chapters the latter will start to take over.
An events director should be above all a perfectionist who can keep a lot of balls in the air at one time. Events fail because one part of them fail -- the speaker didn't get directions, the room reservation never got confirmed, the food arrived two hours late, the adapter for the projector wasn't compatible with the DVD player, not enough cars were available to get people to the site. It is absolutely critical to take photos at every event. On many campuses, only one or two group members will be permitted to reserve space on campus. It is essential that this person be the events director, even if that means making the events director the nominal head of the organization as far as the university administration is concerned.
Finance: Keeping the books, making sure the budget is balanced, authorizing expenditures, writing checks and coordinating reimbursements. This will typically be one hyper-anal, firm, and rule-oriented person.
Fundraising: Chapter financial needs will typically be modest but significant. The main four sources of funding will be student-group money, faculty and community donations, traditional fundraising such as house parties, and grants from the national organization. Fundraising is important because it raises community awareness of your group and builds a base of supporters who have a vested interest. Financial support is an important byproduct of fundraising, but is certainly not the only goal. The fundraising team will work with events to plan donor events and with communications to keep up relationships with supporters. Asking for checks is a very specialized skill and takes time to become comfortable with. If you can find someone with fundraising experience for this position, it will be to your advantage.
Development: Ties to outside institutions such as local think tanks or well-respected advocacy groups can be very advantageous to your chapter. The development person or group makes the pitch to outside groups to develop ties useful to the organization. Besides being professional and making a good pitch, a good development person must be a clear organizational team player, who is clearly promoting the group rather than its development director and is eager to share contacts. Development and fundraising are at times indistinguishable tasks, but the group will want to develop some relationships that are primarily for money and some that are primarily for other things. One of the main functions of this group will be to develop and maintain relations with the group's advisory board, locally-prominent individuals who have agreed to be helpful to the group and lend their public support and legitimacy. Good advisory board members include elected representatives from the campus area and prominent faculty members.
Institutionalization: Campuses have many available administrative resources to organizations that can take advantage of them. Registering with the student government or the student activities office for funding, with a community service or public service or public policy school or center for access to photocopying, office space, and meeting space, with academic institutions for student-initiated courses, etc., can help empower the group dramatically. Typically this will be the responsibility of one or two people who can be counted on to give a really good pitch to an administrator.
Communications: Communications will be one of the largest responsibilities of the organization. It can be divided into two tasks, institutional promotion and policy promotion. Institutional promotion is important especially during the early stages, as the group establishes itself on campus and builds a name in the community. The institutional promotion group will write press releases, produce fliers and documents about the group, and attempt to legitimize the group itself in the media. The audiences for this group are threefold: the student body (potential members), faculty and community members (potential supporters), and the members of the group itself who will want to stay up-to-date on the exciting things the organization is doing -- for example, through a weekly digest email. The policy promotion administrative unit will work with the policy promotion representatives within each center to place center pieces in the media or policy world. As the group develops, this will become the largest administrative function the organization performs. It is of absolute importance to maintain tight control of message. A typical strategy in other organizations is to fire someone on the spot if they talk to the press without talking to the communications director. While we aren't like that, it's very important that there be one control-point for message. In one case, a campus conservative publication asked dozens of members individually whether progressive was basically a synonym for liberal and Democrat, until the reporter got the answer he wanted. Subtle deviations from message can really hurt the organization, especially because press sources typically refer to past press coverage in writing their reports. What you say to your campus paper could end up in the New York Times. Because of this tight control, a media or communications director will need above all to be a team player. The press contact is not the person who answers the questions and gets their name in the paper, but the person who coordinates media to make sure everyone shares the limelight and is on message. This committee may also want to hold media trainings and bring in experts to help people learn how to be effective media spokespeople, and hold message sessions and collect talking points and answers to common questions to help spokespeople better promote the organization.
Design: This will probably be just one or two people. The organization will need to produce attractive flyers, web documents, graphics, letterhead, t-shirts, etc.
Writing: A writing team (e.g. English or Journalism majors) will edit documents for style once their content has been approved by the centers can improve the quality and professionalism of each chapter's products. Not all products will be written, by the way -- thinking outside the box and to produce new types of products will help your group get extra access. Think video and radio pieces, exhibits and installations, cartoons, poems and songs.
Internal communication: As a large group of transient folks, regular updates and good archives are key to organizational unity, continuity, and success. The internal coordination administrative unit will be the person or people who keep track of exactly what each part of the chapter is doing, and who sends everyone a weekly update. As your organization grows, it is important to make sure that it does not begin to spiral into several loosely connected groups, and to find ways for the promote synergy between the research committees. This group will also keep the archives, make sure notes are taken at meetings, and make sure group membership is kept in a central database or spreadsheet in a way that is continuous and accessible. After a major organizational event -- a big press hit, a successful donor pitch, a great launch event, or a failed speaker series -- this person will make sure a "lessons learned" document is produced to keep that intellectual capital within the organization even after the people involved have left.
Technology: The group will need someone to maintain the group's web space on rooseveltinstitution.org in coordination with the communications team. Basic HTML is the only skill required, but it's very important since web presence is one of the main ways to promote the group.
Professional development: A key purpose of the group is to expand fellows' knowledge and future efficacy in the policy process. Outside groups will often solicit interns or people for summer jobs or offer training courses. This person or group will coordinate that.
Publications: Chapters may want to build a publication to showcase their work. We feel that it is typically stronger to publish campus-audience articles in existing publications rather than to run one in-house, but for an external audience (e.g. those interested in progressive policy at the state level), it might be worthwhile in the long term to put together an in-house publication team to coordinate the printing and distribution of such a document.
Chapters are probably best served by about five administrative committees, which means some different responsibilities will be grouped under one collection of people. The groupings will be different from campus to campus depending on needs and on individual strengths -- for example, fundraising and finance might be a logical pair, but one chapter decided to put relations with the administration with finance instead because the chapter wanted the organized and professional finance folks to soothe prickly rule-oriented administrators at that school. Each committee has a director elected by its members. These directors answer to an executive director, who is responsible for the function of the administrative portion of the organization as a whole. There will typically be overlap among the members of the administrative committees. The directors of the administrative committees and the policy centers together form the group's board, which collectively has final decision-making power over that chapter. The board may meet weekly or less often. Day-to-day decision-making power is delegated to an executive committee named by the board, of typically three people, the policy/center development director, the administrative/executive director, and typically one other person. Some chapters have found it useful to have this person be a trusted go-between for administrative and policy parts; in some chapters this person is called president or campus coordinator and is basically a cheerleader for the organization as a whole, both on campus, off campus, and within the group. Each of these people is appointed by the board and serves at their pleasure. In addition to formal decision-making, board meetings serve as an important way for the group to stay updated on each part's activities and to deliberate on organizational vision. Board meetings should therefore be open to the group's membership, with open participation and a norm of consensus where possible. People who show up at board meetings despite not having a role are typically potential leaders who have not yet been given a title. A national network Chapters are autonomous in their decision-making, but gain a lot from affiliation with the national network, which exists solely to serve their needs. The student think tank is an idea shared by many. As we integrate with others who had the same or a similar idea at the same time, we expect that our organizational model will adapt to reflect the diversity of groups operating under the Roosevelt Institution banner, both in sharing best practices and in offering a broader menu of choices for center and chapter organization. We believe that we are stronger united. This does not mean we intend to enforce national positions on issues. This means only that a national brand will be more successful in building the reputation, networks, and recognition that will make us successful than a collection of university groups could alone. The Roosevelt Institution currently represents students on 30 campuses from California to Maine to Illinois to Texas. We have established a strong and well-respected brand. On one day we got 1,000 hits to our website from Capitol Hill. We do not expect the exact same model to work at private research universities, liberal arts colleges, big state schools, and commuter colleges, and so we're offering the model but not imposing it. Beyond maintaining the national brand, some administrative functions are best fulfilled by the national organization:
- Legal: We are legally incorporated as a non-profit organization and are in the process of filing for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. We are also a pro bono client of the law firm Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe.
Development: The national organization is best positioned to contact national foundations and angel investors to provide sustainable resources for the organization and to help it grow. The development group will also work with the national advisory board to help place policy and provide legitimacy. These established networks will make it easier for campus chapters to start up.
Finance: The national organization can help fund chapter-level activities through startup support and grants for special projects and chapter maintenance.
Technology: Most of our technological needs are identical between chapters. The national organization can coordinate the development of a national website that can serve the needs of all the chapters.
Publications: We're going to edit an annual and eventually quarterly publication, the Roosevelt Review, which will collect the best of our work and put in the hands of key policymakers at the national and state level.
Events: Certain national organizations coordinate national speaker or event series. The national events network will partner with these groups to help bring more events to campus for Roosevelt.
Conferences: Getting students together on a national level...
Organizing: So far, our organizing strategy has been "answer the phone" -- we haven't actually done any outreach because we wanted to focus on making our organization excellent rather than trying to mass-produce a product we hadn't yet perfected. In the coming months as the chapter model and national structure stabilize we expect to have a much stronger national organizing presence.
Best practices: The national organization will include an officer similar to the center development director who will share best practices among the chapters and develop the refine the model with a menu of options suitable for a broad range of campuses.
Policy promotion coordination: When we can coordinate on policy promotion, we believe this will be particularly effective. Introducing students in different parts of the country working on a similar project, and putting one joint document on the desks of Congress members, will make our voice more powerful. When presented with this opportunity, chapters have been eager to work on joint projects.
Communications: As a national organization, we want national press. We are more likely to get this speaking as a national group, and we want the press to focus not just on the most-developed chapters but also up-and-coming efforts and on the organization's diversity.
Fundamentally, we are a service organization: the national administration exists to serve the chapters, which exist to serve the centers, which exist to serve their fellows. Our goal is to empower students to realize their ideas and develop themselves as policy agents. Though we have national administrative committees with defined portfolios, we have not yet developed a formal national decision-making structure. We expect to formalize this at a national conference this summer. The policy-promotion process Quick overview of how an idea gets out into the world: - Students in the course of their studies accumulate intellectual capital
- An idea is developed by a fellow or a center's working group
- Center members offer commentary, resources, and support in developing a written product, and review the draft document
- The writing team revises the document for style and presentation
- Center faculty advisors or other experts are invited to comment on the document and further advise the author
- The center's policy promotion representative, based on the advice of center members, recommends a type of outlet for the document (specialized blog, interest magazine, think tank or institution, campus media, local or student hometown media, state, local, or national policymaker)
- The national policy-promotion contact for that policy area makes the author aware of other similar efforts where applicable
- Communications or development at the chapter or national level leverage our network of contacts to gain trusted access the target audience
- The design team puts together a final presentation of the document
- The policy promotion contact lobbies for the idea and puts the student in contact with the relevant policymakers.
By the end of the process, the idea has been connected with the right audience and the world becomes a slightly better place; the student has access to a new network and new skills; and Roosevelt's reputation for a high-quality and innovative product has been reinforced.
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