Who Makes the
Decisions that Effect You?(from The Change Agent September 1996)
by Alex Levin
Most people go to workshops to get answers. Maybe it's because they want to get more healthy, more skilled, more informed, or more organized. But getting answers isn't always the answer, not according to The Right Question Project.
The project was created by a few people working together in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They felt that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to people taking control of their lives was that, when faced with a problem, people simply did not ask the right questions. Sometimes people didn't even know they had the right to ask questions. The project started by offering training for parents that would help them get involved in improving their children's chances of getting a better education. And according to The Right Question Project, it all naturally starts with questions like these:
What should my child be learning?
Is the teacher teaching what my child should be learning?
Is my child learning what he or she should be learning?
If not, what can I do?
"In our workshops, parents discover the great power of questions," says Dan Rothstein, the project's executive director. "They use them as a tool to support their children's education and when necessary, to speak on behalf of them and to advocate for their needs."The project also designs trainings that help communities to take action. In Hawaii, the project worked with a community of workers on a sugar cane plantation that was about to move their jobs overseas. For close to a hundred years, the lives of those families revolved around the plantation which, in addition to jobs, had also provided housing and health care.
"We could not help them get the sugar company to stay," says Rothstein, "But after two days of The Right Question Project training, the residents of that Hawaiian community knew what and whom they needed to ask." The workers asked:
What kind of jobs would replace the plantation work?
How could the land of the plantation be used so they could still live there?
Who is eligible to get company-owned housing?
This process of asking questions helped them see that they needed to be involved in all these decisions. The training also helped them come up with a plan for getting involved. By the end of the training, the workers knew they had the skill to keep on asking the "right" questions.
Most of The Right Question Project's original work took place in Massachusetts with various school systems. Through private and federal grants, they moved on to work with groups from Providence to Chicago and now beyond to Kentucky. Currently, they are working on a project to get people thinking about how candidates get elected to office.
Who pays for their campaign?
Who has influence over the candidates after they are elected?
What decisions do they make?
How are we affected by those decisions?
Can we have influence on those decisions, if we did not pay for the campaigns?
"We are designing this workshop," says Rothstein, "because we believe more people need to have a chance to influence how decisions are made in government. We especially want to see more people participate who may have never even voted before."Questions deserve answers. If you do not ask questions, you may never get the answers you need. Asking questions is not the final step, but it is the most important step people should take when first facing a problem, and a valuable tool that they can return to again and again, until that problem is solved.
This page was redesigned 9/25/01