Welcome to Problem Solved

A Substack devoted to building a better world

Me (left) with Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) outside the U.S. Capitol on the morning when Deutch introduced legislation to price carbon and give the revenue to households.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve had a strong desire to fix the things that are broken in our world, things that cause great suffering and prevent humanity from reaching its full potential — hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, lack of education… The list is endless.

I saw that being a problem-solver was my calling, and early on I latched on to a simple concept: We could solve our most vexing problems by getting the right information to the right people at the right time. In other words, identify a problem with a promising solution and shed enough light on it so the people in a position to implement that solution would know about it and be moved to take action.

In this quest to lift solutions over the past half century, I’ve learned much through my work and volunteer activities:

• Working at a daily newspaper for 30+ years — nearly all of it at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — taught me how decisions are made in mass media to gather information and disseminate it to the public.

• Volunteering with the advocacy group RESULTS, which I did for 25 years, taught me how a relatively small group of people, organized and focused, can have a huge influence on national policies that affect the lives of millions of people.

• Being communications director for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, I was part of a team that built from scratch a non-partisan advocacy organization devoted to solving climate change.

Initially, I assumed that shining a light on solutions meant working in mass media. With that in mind, I enrolled in the College of Journalism at the University of South Carolina. Ideally, the best position to strive for would be editorial writer at a major newspaper. Getting to a major daily was the surprisingly easy part. Upon graduating, I went straight to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi and a year later found myself at the Atlanta Constitution at the age of 23. Getting into the editorial department, however, was a goal I never achieved. My forté was layout and design, something I did very well, and there was never much thought given to me doing something else.

A few years went by and it dawned on me that the purpose of a newspaper is not to change the world. The purpose of a newspaper is to make money for the people who own the newspaper. Yes, those purposes cross paths sometimes, but not as often as I hoped.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved working at the newspaper. Few jobs match the excitement and adrenaline rush of creating what I referred to as the daily miracle, but I had a nagging sense that I was not fulfilling my purpose.

In 1984 I started seeing a young woman who later became my wife. Sara introduced me to an organization called RESULTS, which advocates to end hunger and poverty. Initially, I was skeptical any group could have an impact on such intractable problems, but their approach — training and educating volunteers in congressional districts to lobby Congress for effective solutions — seemed promising. It wasn’t long before successes accumulated, like increasing funding for child survival programs in U.S. foreign aid. Ramping up measles vaccinations around the world, for example, saved tens of millions of children’s lives in subsequent decades.

One of the more effective tools for volunteers was to engage editorial boards at local newspapers and provide informational packets on issues RESULTS lobbied for. The aim was to get newspapers to endorse solutions to save and improve people’s lives. RESULTS would generate dozens of editorials from across the country and deliver them to members of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee on Appropriations, the congressional panel that decides how we prioritize our foreign aid dollars. Those endorsements proved very effective, and over the course of several years, child survival funding went from $50 million a year to $600 million a year.

In the late ‘80s, I started writing the editorial packets that RESULTS volunteers shared with local newspapers. It turned out that what I was doing had a far greater impact than being an editorial writer — my dream job when I graduated from J-school — because instead of getting the word out through one newspaper, I had a hand in promoting solutions in many newspapers.

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution told news staff it would have to downsize, they offered employees a buyout, which I took in 2009 at the height of the recession. I often tell people that “somebody up there must like me,” because within a month of leaving the paper I became the second full-time hire of a new organization, Citizens’ Climate Lobby. CCL was started by a RESULTS volunteer, Marshall Saunders, who wanted to use its method of citizen advocacy to address climate change. I knew Marshall from RESULTS’ lobbying conferences in Washington, and I had ghost-written a couple of op-eds for him on micro-lending that were published in the San Diego Union-Tribune. I called Marshall and asked if he needed someone to do media work. He said, “Yeah, I do,” and that was it.

The next 15 years were an exciting and challenging time, and I’ll share more about that in future posts, but for now, let me cut to the chase…

This year, at the age of 70, I retired from CCL and spent a few well-earned months goofing off — lots of crossword puzzles and Netflix. But since I’m reasonably healthy and still possess most of my marbles, I thought it was time to return to the passion that started in my youth — identifying the vexing problems that plague us and lifting up the solutions to those problems.

And so, on the occasion of my 71st birthday, I’m launching Problem Solved, featuring weekly posts to explore the many ways we can create a better world and offering suggestions for how people can be effective advocates. If you’re looking for a little hope and optimism in a seemingly harsh world, subscribe now.

---