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Posted on Sun, Jan. 30, 2005
Students learn to push agenda Veteran activist Spano heads new master's program
BY LIBBY GEORGE(click here for .pdf newspaper article)
Pioneer Press
In Minnesota, with its history of grass-roots activism, renegade politics and high civic participation, it would seem that all one needs to learn to shape the political agenda is a keen eye.
Not so, said Wy Spano, a veteran Minnesota political activist and director of the new master's degree program in advocacy and political leadership at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Since he began working on his Ph.D. nearly 10 years ago, he said, he came across "more and more young people asking, 'How do I do this?' "
"They were concerned with making a better life for the people they care about," Spano said. His program welcomes its second class this month with more than a dozen new students.
But some students, like Judy Hawley, already know a thing or two about getting results.
She's been a physical therapist for 15 years. Since 1999, she has directed the Minnesota chapter of the American Physical Therapists Association, where her job is to get bills important to the group's 1,500 members passed by the Legislature.
But Hawley, 50, said she has found that activism can be daunting.
"I knew we were trying hard, but I think we didn't have the right tools," Hawley said of her organization's activism efforts. "We were working hard but not smart."
So Hawley joined the program's inaugural class of 15 students in September.
Now, with the mixed group of political neophytes and seasoned professionals, with an average age of 28, Hawley spends her weekends in Duluth learning how to make her issues a priority in the state.
Spano and seven other UMD faculty members, with disciplines from women's studies to journalism, designed the two-year program with help from professionals in business and nonprofit sectors.
"Advocacy is a fairly rigorous process of figuring out how we think as a society," Spano said. It goes beyond lobbying the Legislature, and includes influencing how regular people think and how state organizations work, he said.
The program itself is intense, with classes starting Friday night and going until 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon. Most of the students also work full time and have to take a bus from the Twin Cities for class. In addition to the 27 classroom credits needed to finish the program, students also have to complete five internship credits, with each credit requiring at least 45 hours of work.
But Matt Wohlman, a 25-year-old student in the program and legislative assistant for state Sen. Yvonne Prettner Solon, DFL-Duluth, said the program's intensity is what drew him in.
"It brings together real-life policy and advocacy with political theory," Wolhman said. "Other grad programs focus more on political theory and less on how to get things done."
Spano is capitalizing on Minnesota experts to get the program going. Marcia Avner, public policy director for the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and Spano's wife, is teaching the course on nonprofits, and all the classes include frequent guest speakers like George Latimer, a former St. Paul mayor, and Jim Solem, a former commissioner of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.
Students can choose to specialize in nonprofits, labor or small communities. They also get to visit and meet face to face with professionals from state and local agencies, nonprofits and union offices, giving students a chance to glean knowledge as well as make important contacts.
"It opened some doors," Hawley said. "One of my goals is to be at the table when policy is made. I'm hoping that this program gives me the tools to do that."
With an emphasis on labor unions and grass-roots activism, most of the current students lean toward the left, Spano said. But Spano, who is writing a biography of Paul Wellstone, insisted that liberalism was not a goal, or a lasting feature, of the program.
"We're not telling you how the world's solutions come about. We're telling you how to make it come out the way you want it to," Spano said. "I'm not interested in creating clones."
Wohlman said he also found the classes unbiased and challenging to students of any political persuasion.
"It gives students a sense that there's not just one perspective out there," Wolhman said.