isaac holeman

The interim steering committee of the Archimedes Movement has been hard at work defining an operating structure for our Movement. For the last few days they have been busy gathering feedback from chapter leaders and other Archimedes members, and discussing the merits of many comments and concerns. Several times I have heard people express concern that our mission statement is not clear enough to really engage people. The mission statement really shouldn’t be part of the operating structure document, but it is so important and so up in the air right now that I think people are craving to find direction even in unlikely places.

I think we have a brilliant mission statement:

The mission of the Archimedes Movement is to create a new space for civic engagement outside our traditional legislative and governance structures to advance solutions to the common problems we face – starting with the crisis in the U.S. health care system.

But it doesn’t say what we actually do. It is the kind of visionary, 30,000 foot high mission statement that always makes people ask “so what are you doing to achieve that mission, what is it that you guys actually do?” This doesn’t mean it is a bad mission statement, it means we need a mission execution statement to explain exactly how we will execute our visionary mission statement. Last June our mission execution statement was as simple and persuasive as our mission statement:

In an extensive grass-roots process that has engaged thousands of Oregonians, we created Senate Bill 27, the Oregon Better Health Act. This bill contains a blue print for national health care reform, starting here in Oregon. We are currently working with legislators and special interest groups to rally the votes we need in the Oregon legislature to pass this awesome bill.

When SB 27 didn’t pass during the summer legislative session, our mission execution statement deflated in a big way, and we haven’t developed a very good one to replace it.

We have a speaker training soon, and a member meeting scheduled for May. We have set the goal of having a concrete mission execution statement ready for speakers before the upcoming speaker training. I would like to help speed that effort along, so I offer a few potential mission execution statements that we can all discuss.

When people get sick and die because they don’t have health care, they are the victims of a moral crisis in our nation. What most people don’t realize is that these sick people are only a fraction of the victims; we are also victimizing our children and their children because our health care system has such an inefficient structure that it is bankrupting our entire nation.

Right now our members are meeting up with local chapters, speaking in their communities, canvassing, tabling at public events, writing and engaging their legislators, and knocking on doors to educate people about these future victims. We are not doomed to ignorance or shortsightedness, we can do better. We can fix the sad structure of our health care system if we work together.

Or this mission execution statement:

When people get sick and die because they don’t have health care, they are the victims of a moral crisis in our nation. What most people don’t realize is that these sick people are only a fraction of the victims, we are also victimizing our children and their children because our health care system has such an inefficient structure that it is bankrupting our entire nation.

We are currently lobbying Oregon State Representative Mitch Greenlick, asking him to make modest changes in his proposed Hope Initiative so that we as an organization can support it. If we are successful, we will engage Representative Greenlick, other legislators, and thousands of Oregonians to pass this initiative in Oregon, and lay the foundation for health care reform in Oregon and the nation.

I think the first part is true to the Archimedes Movement, and to Dr. Kitzhabers most recent video “The Unfinished Business of the Baby Boom Generation.” I also think it is necessary to highlight the plight of future generations, because if we only care about offering our current broken system to more people, then it be more logical to just campaign for Senators Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both of whom intend to institute universal access to some kind of health care in the US. This frame of caring for future Americans, this perspective is what makes AM very important and very, very unique as a health care reform effort.

The second part is way more up in the air, and will change more as we go along.

Please discuss. Tell us all what you think.