I’d Rather Be Effective Than Righteous
Why Your "Other" Career Might Be Your Greatest Asset in Advocacy
There were days when I prepared a board packet for the CEO of a critical access hospital, and others when I discussed with a legislator's office why a single word in a statute matters. For a long time, I thought of those as two separate lives - the professional life, and the personal one.
I was wrong about that, and realizing why may be the most useful things I have learned.
Advocacy and institutional leadership are usually treated as opposing skill sets. Advocates are cast as the people with moral clarity and little patience for process. Executives are cast as the people with process and no urgency. Both caricatures are wrong, and both are expensive.
I have watched genuinely good policy die because no one advocating for it understood how the receiving institution would absorb it. I have also seen too many mandates create problems of their own - unintended consequences, competing priorities, and requirements that look reasonable on paper but are difficult or counterproductive in practice. And I have watched institutions absorb a mandate on paper and change nothing in practice because no one outside was tracking whether it took hold.
The answer is not fewer mandates or more mandates; it is understanding what it takes to make change work.
What I did in a hospital - board and medical staff governance, contract and lease administration, survey readiness - looked like a competent administrative career running parallel to my real work in advocacy. It was actually training in how institutions work, under leaders who understood that governance, compliance, and execution matter.
Here is what it taught me.
Find where the decision is actually made.
Nothing consequential is decided by the vote. It is decided when someone sets the agenda, when someone drafts the packet, when someone decides which item is discussion and which is consent. If you have ever assembled a board packet, you understand that the work is upstream of the room. That is equally true of a legislative committee, a school district, or a county prosecutor's office. New advocates spend enormous energy on the moment of decision and almost none on the process that shaped it. The people who change outcomes have usually done the opposite.
Learn the second language.
Institutions do not move on moral urgency alone. They move on mandate, liability, cost, and capacity. None of that is obvious from the outside, so when I do not understand how a process actually works, I ask. Asking has never cost me credibility in a room; assuming I already knew has. When I ask a system to do something differently, I bring the moral case - and I also bring what it will require of them, where the authority comes from, and what declining would mean for them. That is not a compromise of the moral case. It is the difference between being heard and being agreed with. I would rather be effective than righteous, and I have learned that translation is not the same thing as dilution.
Assume passage is the beginning.
This is one I feel most strongly about. In 2015, Oregon enacted Erin's Law, requiring age-appropriate abuse prevention education in schools. It works - I know that firsthand, in a way I did not choose to learn. But years later, districts across the state are out of compliance, and the statute itself has been amended in ways that soften what it was written to do.
A law on the books is not a law in practice. The signing photo is the easiest part of the entire enterprise, and it is the part that gets all the attention. Implementation is unglamorous, technical, and where the actual protection either happens or doesn't. That is compliance work.
It opened my eyes to a dual perspective - how change looks from the outside, where the need can feel urgent and obvious, and how it looks from the inside, where far fewer people are responsible for actually carrying it through. Because I have had the opportunity to learn how systems are governed, I can walk into a prosecutor's office or a legislative discussion without wasting time or feeling lost. I have also been trusted with rooms I would not otherwise have entered - helping raise more than $2 million for child safety and writing to oppose a prosecutorial appointment in terms specific enough that the letter was read on the floor of the Oregon House. Because I have sat with survivors and families, I do not mistake a policy for an outcome when I am inside an institution either.
If you are a woman building a career that seems to be running on two tracks, I would offer this: stop apologizing for the track that pays. The competence you are building there - how decisions actually get made, how money actually moves, how obligations actually get met - is not a detour from your purpose. It is the equipment.
The most effective people I have worked with are not the loudest voices in the room. They are the ones who know how the room works.
