Update from SOPHE President Michelle S. Williams
Last month a group of us walked the halls of Congress together, and I am grateful to everyone who made that trip. But what we started there was never meant to stay there, or to belong only to the people who could travel.
Advocacy is not a day on the calendar. It is a relationship, and every one of us can build one from exactly where we are.
The ask we carried was S. 4254, the Health Workforce Innovation Act, a bipartisan bill that would fund training pathways for allied health professionals in rural and underserved communities, and that names health education specialists in its text. Read it, then tell your senators you support it.
But I do not want this month’s column to be about one bill.
In January, a new Congress wil be seated. New members, new committee assignments, new staff learning their portfolios from scratch. Offices are never more open than in those first months, and the people who show up early become the ones they call later. That is the momentum I want us to use.
So between now and spring:
- Send the thank-you if you went and have not yet, and if you already have, great. Name the staffer, not just the member.
- Introduce yourself if you did not go. A ten-minute call to a district office is logged the same as a meeting in Washington.
- Put one date on your calendar today. A scheduled quarterly check-in beats good intentions in March.
- Send something useful, not something asking. Local data. A story from your community. One page a staffer can pass along.
- Bring your chapter in. A relationship held by one person ends when that person gets busy. A relationship held by a chapter lasts.
I will not pretend this has been an easy year for our field. But I have watched programs get defunded and rebuilt, and communities outlast every one of those cycles. Health education has never been sustained by favorable conditions. It has been sustained by people who kept showing up.
Keep showing up. Brighter days are ahead, and we will have had a hand in bringing them.
