Roger Rickard’s Journey into Advocacy
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White. And today I’m talking with a dear friend, fellow speaker nationally, and we get to meet each other probably once every couple of months at the National Speakers Association. And I’m going to tell you a little bit about him because this episode is going to be so valuable. If you are in a drug prevention coalition, advocacy is a big marker on your annual board and things that you wanna do. So without any further ado, let me tell you about Roger. Our guest today is the guy organizations call when they need to advance their advocacy influence. He’s the founder and president of Voices in Advocacy. He’s the author of seven actions of highly effective advocates and the host of the Voices in Advocacy podcast. He’s the recipient of several International Association Awards, Successful Meetings Magazine named him one of six people worth watching. Wow, six. And Meeting Focus Magazine named him their inaugural list of meeting trendsetters in the educator category. And Connect Magazine named him in their inaugural list of 50 over 50. Overall, Roger’s a big man, a big thinker, and he has some big ideas for you today. So please help me welcome speaker, author, and advocacy consultant, casually known as the big guy with the bow tie, Mr. Roger Rickard. Yeah. I’m good, man. Dude, your bio’s got me pumped up.
Hey Jake, how are you? Good to see you!
Well, I don’t know what to say. know, mean, Roger’s very rarely at a loss for words. But before we go further, I want to take a second and commend you. I have watched you grow. I’ve watched you, as you indicated, that we’re part of National Speakers Association and located here in Arizona. And your growth and how you have taken your platform and engaged it and grown it and had made it nationwide. I am so proud of you. I’m impressed with you. I’m impressed with what you’re doing. And Vive 18 is just incredible stuff.
Thank you, Roger.
That means the world to me. Thank you so much. And you got to see it from the beginning. So that’s so special for me to have somebody like you that’s like, yeah, we talked years and years and years ago about challenges and struggles and how to grow this. And of course we still got them, but they’re bigger and we’ve grown. thank you, Roger. That’s awesome. My first question for you, Roger,
If you want to give any more info on who you are, I’d love to get to know you a little bit for the audience who, you know, doesn’t get to see you at meetings every month. And then I want to ask you, you know what, I’m just going to hold that. What do people need to know about you, Roger? Just right off the bat.
Well, the passion that I have for people to understand advocacy. And advocacy comes in many different forms. And when you define advocacy, it’s standing up for something, it’s fighting for a cause. It’s actually a very positive word. It is used to advance something. It’s not used in a negative context. Even though if you ask kind of the man on the street or the woman on the street, what do they think of advocacy? The first thing that comes to mind for them, probably, is government affairs. Yes, that’s very important. But they’ll then tie it together with lobbying, which kind of has a negative connotation. And there is a huge difference between kind of lobbying and advocacy and definitely a huge difference when it comes to self-advocacy. But we’ll get into that.
What I do is I help organizations grow their community of advocates. And they’re called grassroots advocates. People within an organization that stand up for the values, the principles, the mission of their particular organization. You know, I think some that would relate to you would be sad. Students against drunk driving or drugs any of the other intervention groups that try to help people along the way. And in fact, one of the great examples I always use when I speak is Mothers Against Drunk Driving. know, Candy Leitner, who founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving, of course, was not the first mother to have ever lost a child to a drunk driver.
And a little side note here for some people, mothers against drunk driving or MAD actually has two meanings. One is the mothers against drunk driving. The second one is that when the police came, they knew who the guy was that had killed her daughter. And they kept telling her, so mad. And there was a rule and I won’t get into that, law and they couldn’t do anything more then. And so Candy Leitner began Mothers Against Drunk Driving with the goal to change one law. And she did that, and one thing led to another, led to another, led to another, and look at the size and scope and the offshoots that have come from that, including SAD. So you can make a huge difference if you focus on the things that you can make a difference about.
Wow. Dang. Yes. And I don’t know how you would answer this, Roger. So I’m to ask you out of all the things that you could do, you’re a great speaker, you’re smart, like you have a great business acumen. Like, that’s what I would say, right? Maybe you wouldn’t, but I would. Why did you choose advocacy? Like you are an expert in advocacy. I appreciate it. Why did you choose that?
Understanding Advocacy and Its Impact
Well, you know, sometimes in life, you don’t choose things, things choose you. You know, I got involved in politics at age 13. I learned how to work on campaigns. You know, I walked door to door, I assisted candidates. I got to know a lot of them. I realized at a very young age how much they really do want to make a difference.
And particularly when you’re looking at local politics at the forefront, they really want to help their community. And they don’t have the massive egos that we see with some of the politicians that are out there. But at any rate, my education came in that. I got involved. I decided to run for office at 18 and a half years old. So as you’re talking about empowering youth, and giving them the power to have their own voice and to say what matters to them and to speak out and have their own self-awareness. You know, when I was 18 and a half, I ran against a guy from a small local office that had been in office longer than I had been on Earth. And, you know, I did all the hard things that I’d already learned how to do. I walked door to door, I knocked on doors, I told people who I was, I told them how old I was, I told them what I wanted to do, why I wanted to be there, how I wanted to help the community. And at the end of the day, Roger won by five votes out of about 3,000. Five votes?
In fact, this is old school now. In fact, to get the results, they always used to put a big, massive paper ballot outside of the polling precinct with the results. They would fill in all the numbers at the end of the night. And of course, we were running around with flashlights trying to work out the numbers, and I’m trying to add them all up, and I’m adding them, and I’m going, what if I screwed up? And we went back and did it again, and then we did it a third time. And no, I won by five votes. And in fact, I must have done something right because he ran against me two years later and I beat him by a much larger margin. But I realized at that point in time. I don’t think my calling was to be the elected official.
I got involved in some other areas and some other businesses and ended up growing that business and was actually in the meetings industry, working as a supplier to the meetings industry when there was an issue that happened here in Arizona in the early 1990s, Martin Luther King Day holiday debate and the governor did not want to support it as a paid holiday. There was a boycott then put on people traveling, tourists, and people holding meetings in Arizona. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as the NFL pulled a Super Bowl from Arizona because of that. And I sit back and said, well, I know better. We need to speak up about the value of what we do with meetings, how people learn how it’s adult education and the creation of that. We need to stand up for that. And we helped form a group in which they then decided that I should be the spokesperson when it dealt with the governor, a new governor, because the other one had been ousted, and the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate. And I got involved in that, was involved in that trade organization and sat on their government affairs committee and we tried to hire somebody to go out and teach our people how to be better advocates. story short, we couldn’t find what we wanted and I said, you know, I think I can do this. Let me create a program. Let’s do a series of focus groups with our members and if they like what I have to say, well then let’s continue to do that organization then hire me. did about 175 events in the next three years for them.
Wow. Okay. I love that. Yeah. You got, you, you found you. You’re, you’re trying to find somebody to do this and it turns out it was you. That right. Hey, good for us though. Right. Good for us. We get Roger, the guy with the bow tie, you know, so that’s, that’s awesome. I, I want to dive in because our, listeners are oftentimes, they’re drug prevention coalitions. And just to give you a little background on them, they bring in 12 sectors of the community, know, businesses, churches, schools, organizations, all that kind of stuff. And they’re wanting to advocate to better protect young people from drug misuse and addiction, but also the continuum of care. Like, you know, they’ve got their hands into intervention and treatment so that make sure that nobody gets like slips through the cracks, that the town has good resources and part of their job is advocacy. And they’re wanting to get appointments with their legislators and really educate people in their community and their legislators on what’s the reality of laws that are being affected, different, I guess, codes in the community of what’s allowed and what’s not. But when you think about we’ll do two episodes here, I guess, or two sessions. When you think of adults advocating for what they believe in and their professional roles, and an example like that, what advice would you give to someone who’s in that role to do advocacy a little bit better or to, yeah, to improve?
Effective Advocacy Strategies
Well, I wrote the pocket guide called The Seven Actions of Highly Effective Advocates. And I made it a pocket guide because according to the American Library Association, the average American reader only gets to page 50 of a nonfiction book. It’s my 46 pages. There we go. Yeah.
And in there, within those seven actions, and they’re actions, not steps. Meaning, you can take any one of them. You can look at number one, you can look at five, number seven, number three. You can do one, two, three of them, or all of them. But it will make you better when you use any of them. I think the first thing that people need, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s adults or whether it’s youth. There really is no distinction.
And in fact, in some cases, I would argue that youth are even much more powerful for a multitude of reasons, one of which is they walk in not being jaded. You know, when you become old and grisly and set in your ways and you have certain preconceived notions about way things run and operate, you go in with those preconceived notions, which then affect your ability to be as effective as you can be in a situation like that where youth go in and say, listen, this is what I’ve been told how to do this. I’m going to do it this way. And they usually get a much better reaction. The first thing that people have to do, the first action, and I think you’ll find this one fascinating, is that you’ve got to believe you can make a difference.
You know, if you walk in there kind of with the heavy burden on your shoulders of saying, well, what we’re doing really doesn’t matter, is you’re going to come across that way. They talk about this an awful lot in athletics, where if you don’t think you can win, you probably won’t win because you didn’t come with the right mental attitude. So the right mental attitude here is that you’ve got to believe that what you’re doing can make a difference and it does. Then you got to be informed. You can’t walk in ignorant of the reality of what’s going on. So do your research and understand. And this is where these coalitions and their leadership can be so very helpful to people because they can help educate them on the reality of what’s going on. And a little bit of maybe the history and the backstory and how things got started or what caused what and what they have to fix. Oftentimes it comes down to protecting or defending what you have.
Becoming a Resource for Elected Officials
And so don’t be afraid to discuss those issues. And then when you go to meet with the legislator, don’t be afraid to be on the record with them. Tell them exactly what you want. If we need more funding for this because the community funded it or it’s a public-private partnership that’s funding this and we need more money because we’ve got people on the private sector that’ll give us more money if we can get matching money, whatever the case may be, is that you have a wonderful opportunity to go in and be able to tell that story and it’s called the ask. What do you want? And you’ve got to tell them this is what we want you to do so that there’s clarity there. And I think one of the most important things, Jake, is there are a ton of people that can be a resource to elected officials and their staff.
So you, well, what I mean by that is, okay, so if you’ve got drug prevention experts and they know and understand what happens in the community and they know what happens, you know, in looking around and looking at your website, I saw that you posted a fact that 15,000 people try to commit suicide through drug-related attempts per year. I’m willing to bet that there are a large number of elected officials that had no clue that that many young people attempted suicide. And by being able to use facts and data that you can prove and show, you can be the resource to the elected official to say, I’m the local expert.
Come to me when there’s a bill that you think will affect this community. Come to me when you may want to help us in the right legislation and to get us more money or help defend what were the programs that already exist. Tell them I’m the resource for you. You don’t have to be the expert. And I often say this to people. An elected official knows about this much about a whole lot of issues all across the board. Where you, as the expert in your given field, you know one vertical market. You know so much about it. And you can provide them with more information.
Yeah, like a whole well, a whole well of information. very deep. Yeah and you can be that great resource for them and you need to go out and do that.
Empowering Local Experts
That’s really encouraging that when I think of elected officials, the fear is that, why would they want to talk to me? And you just gave me permission to say to all of my clients and partners, no, you’re the local expert. You have the data. You’re in with the schools. You’re focusing on this issue is you’re that subject matter expert who can talk about it for hours, probably. They just need to know you. They don’t need to know everything, but they need to know you. And maybe there’s something that’s coming up on a bill. So I love that. That’s super empowering.
Well, it is empowering and in fact, that’s one of the biggest reasons people don’t participate in advocacy is fear. They fear that they don’t know as much as the elected official. They fear that they will be talked down to. know, listen, like life and human nature, every once in a while that’s gonna happen.
There’s going to be somebody that thinks that they’re bigger, badder, and more powerful, and they’re going to try to treat you rotten. But I will tell you that 99.9 % of the time, they want to know. They want to know what’s going on in their community. even if we strip this down to its most basic factors, the reason why they want to know is they want to know what’s going on in the community because they get one grade. Every election they get a grade. And if they don’t know what’s going on in the community, if they don’t care about the community, if enough people have gone to see them, talk to them, and get turned off by them, then they will go tell 20 other people, 30 other people how bad they think that person is. And before you know it, they’re not re-elected. And great, great elected officials and politicians know exactly what’s going on in their community and can address it. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to side with you all the time. But if they listen, if they care, if they show empathy to what’s happening, you know, we don’t always have to agree. But if we can agree to disagree, without being disagreeable, then we’ve moved ahead some.
Yeah. And that’s the part that’s in all of advocacy, right? It’s like we are in control of what we do, we say, the impact we want to make. So hey, as long as we’re out there doing the work, standing up for what we believe in, we don’t have the power to change them, only they can. Or we don’t have the power to make them believe what we believe, but you can, like you said, you can believe come up with a posture of confidence because you know you can do it and it matters. You can prepare, you can tell them what you want and you can be a resource for them. And I love that. We got through four of them. I can already see this like fitting in to if you showed up to an elected official’s office with even just those four steps or these actions, why wouldn’t they want to listen and learn from you? Whether they agree right now or not, they’re gonna take the information, feel well cared for because you prepared and you showed up to help them with their job.
Inviting Elected Officials to Engage
So this is the drug prevention power out. So here’s one of the things that I would highly recommend people that are running drug prevention programs. If you have a facility that you manage, invite the elected official to the facility.
Let them see firsthand exactly what you do. If you go in and you have a meeting and you say, listen, we’d love you to come down at any given time. by the way, we’re going to have other community leaders there on a given date. We’d love you to be there. And they show up and you treat them with respect and you get an opportunity to educate them. They’re kind of called site visits. Come see my location. Come see exactly what we’re doing. And that works across many industries and many different areas of influence. And one of the things that is, I think, really important is I think people have to be self-aware.
Understanding Self-Awareness in Advocacy
And that’s part of self-advocacy. Self-aware of know what your strengths are, know what your weaknesses, you know, what’s SWOT? What’s the old SWOT? S-W-O-T. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are your opportunities? And what are your threats?
What do mean by that?
And every organization should know what those are because things that they may believe don’t ever really affect them can come back and haunt them big time if they’re ignorant of what their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are.
Hmm. Okay. That’s good. Because then when you’re in, when you’re inviting or putting your advocacy forward, inviting the legislator or using your voice to, you know, speak about, about the things you care about is you want to put your best foot forward, display your strengths, and then bring those partners to supplement those maybe you don’t have. and what’s cool too is I think that what I’m learning from you is every legislator and professional, whether they’re one person or a whole organization, they have a SWOT. Like your elected official knows what their strengths and weaknesses are, and you might fit into one of those missing gaps.
So here’s an example that I think is probably prevalent in this area. If they give any type of public funding in any way, shape or form, a threat to them could be that there is not a balanced budget within the government. Meaning, we have a shortfall of revenue within the government. We have to cut our budget somewhere. And they start looking around at where do we give money away and all of sudden your head could be on the chopping block because you weren’t paying attention to the big issue because it wasn’t your issue. You you’re not the person responsible for balancing the budget at a state government or a city. But you are the person that can be threatened by that because when they look to cut things, there are two things they will never cut.
They will never cut police and fire because that affects everybody in a community. So they will always fund those first and then they will look at everything else that doesn’t affect and they will try to look and see, well, if we have to cut, where are places are we gonna cut? And that’s always a concern.
Building Relationships for Advocacy Success
Right. And yeah. I’m just knowing from doing life for 33 years, relationships are everything. If you don’t have a relationship with that person, it’s so easy. I mean, I can imagine it would be a lot easier to get cut. They have no idea who you are. Maybe they don’t know what you do. And that line item now, that state funding or whatever that could be, could go a little easier for that person.
You make a great point. Everything here is relationships. Everything is relationships. And let me give you an example. It’s too late to call the insurance company when the fire truck’s at the door.
So what that means is that if the house is on fire, you cannot call and say, hey, I need more homeowners insurance. You can’t do it. It’s too late. So when there’s a fire in your industry, so when there is a threat potentially of cutting revenue and you then getting cut with the amount of money that you get, it’s too late when that’s already happening if you don’t have any relationships.
The Pyramid of Influence in Advocacy
If you’ve gone in and if you’ve talked positively about with this amount of money, this is what impact we have on a community. Here are the data points. Here are the people that we’ve affected. This is the change that’s helping, you know, a given group of people or an age group of people. These are the positive things. And by the way, if we had more, here’s what we know we could do and you’re being very positive and you create the relationship and you invite them to your facility and you support them. And I don’t mean that you have to be gung-ho politically to support them, but you respect what they do and how they do it. then you developing that relationship that you can pick up the phone and you can call and they will know who you are and they will return a call. I almost hesitate to get into this, let me give me one second to explain kind of the pyramid of influence. You have, let’s take it by congressional district. Right now in America, about 720,000 people live in each congressional district. And at the bottom, if you’re building a pyramid, the bottom floor of that pyramid is the 720,000 people in the district. Then you have the people that are eligible to vote. Over 18 US citizens, non-felon, et cetera, et cetera. Then you have those that are registered to vote. Then you have those that show up and actually vote. And then the next there are those that vote and maybe volunteer on campaign a little bit. And then you have those that vote, volunteer, and contribute, and they’re the pinnacle. They’re the top of that pyramid. Out of 720,000 people, on average, how many people do you think sit at the top of that pyramid?
Okay. gosh. Maybe like 5,000. How about 150 people? Wow.
Okay, so you’re more than the one tenth of one percent of the people. And you don’t, you know, people freak out when you say, well, volunteer. Well, volunteers show up once, know, lick stamps, put mailing labels on, spend two hours walking the community with them, going door to door, you know, how many? How many presidential candidates in this last cycle asked for $1? Can you send me $5? You know, so you don’t have to contribute thousands of dollars to a campaign, but if you contribute, if you volunteer just a little, and you vote, you are their best customer. So if you think about it from a business standpoint, if I have a potential of 720,000 customers in my database,
And I know that 150 of them, when one of those 150 asked for a meeting, when one of those 150 asked for me to return their phone call, I would be really foolish not to return their call or have a meeting.
Okay, Roger, is there gold right there? Because what I’m thinking is if you volunteered, if you donated, if you voted for this person, you would want to say that when you ask for the meeting. Or is that too much? Is that like you owe me a meeting?
You never want to put them in a box where they feel they’re being held hostage for anything. I don’t think it hurts that you can say, listen, you know, I enjoyed spending that Saturday in October with you walking around the community and I wondered if you had a few minutes of your time that we could set up a meeting. I need to talk to you about an issue.
I think that’s fine. I think nobody ever knows how you voted. In other words, they don’t know whether you marked a D, an R, or an independent, or the Green Party, or anything like that. All they would ever know is you voted. And if you voted and they didn’t have your vote, by having the meeting with you, they may get your vote.
The worst thing to do is to call and say, I voted for you and I need to have a meeting and their staff take a quick look and find out that Jake did not vote. Jake won’t get that meeting because one, Jake’s already lied and Jake doesn’t really matter if he’s not going to vote.
Right, you’re not on the influencer list for them. Okay, so that’s funny. I’m always looking for like practical tools to pull from stuff. So I’m glad that I clarified. You’re not supposed to send an email saying, hey, here’s why you should pay attention to me because I’m your biggest fan. It’s like, no, here’s our connection if we have one. I would love to sit down and discuss this topic with you. Do you have 15 minutes? Do you have 30 minutes?
Practical Tools for Effective Advocacy
Hey, we met at the fundraiser. I mean, it could be raising funds for drug prevention. And they had a fundraiser and they were there. And hey, I come over and I introduced myself to you last Thursday evening at this event. I had said to you then that I wanted to have a few minutes of your time to talk about an issue. I’m following up with you. That’s a reminder because they’re busy and they meet a lot of people.
And that’s a good thing to do is, you know, always reinforce how you met. I mean, I’ve done it. I have done it to where I have, and this has happened. I’ve sat on an airplane beside a congressman wasn’t going to bother them the whole flight. At end of the flight, I thanked them for their service. And then I said, hey, I’m going to be in DC in two weeks. Would love to set up a time. Who in your office should I contact? And they’ll tell me. And then when I contact that person in the office, I’ll say, I was with Congress person so and so on Monday morning on flight from here to here and he had told me to call you to set up an appointment. Boom. It’s that simple. It’s common courtesies. It’s courtesies that we would want to extend to our friends and family. You should extend those courtesies to people that you want to try to influence.
That’s perfect. That’s perfect. Well, we’re coming up on time, Roger. Is there any last-minute advice or things that you didn’t get to say that you would give to people in a couple minutes, right? Or we can do another episode later, but any piece of advice on what we’ve talked about that you’re like, hey, before we leave, I want to share this piece of advice with you to become a better advocate for the topic you care about. And then we’ll learn a little bit more about you and how to stay in touch.
Well, I think, let’s go back to how we started. The great work that you’re doing, in helping to educate people that they don’t need to participate in drugs and alcohol to have a good time and to be a part of the community and to grow their own community. I think it’s everybody that is in that arena needs to be their own advocate.
They need to feel comfortable standing up for themselves. They need to be self-aware of what they want or don’t want. They need to build and nurture those relationships with others that are in the same, just like you did when you started off in college with what you did and nurtured the relationships with the people that were participating with you and communicate that and share that. People want to have a sense of home.
They want to have a sense of being a part of a community. And if that community, you know, fits, then great. So that’s the self-advocacy side of things. From the political advocacy side of things is that build those relationships, nurture those relationships, do what you say you’re going to do.
Live up to your word. Never lie. Never lie. If you lie to an elected official about a fact that is not a fact, and they use it, and they get caught in that lie, you’re done. You’re out. You’ve thrown them under the bus. So you have plenty of ways of making your argument make that argument and nurture the people within your organization to help you advocate for the things that everyone in that organization cares about. So grow your community of advocates.
Nurturing Relationships and Self-Advocacy
Yeah. Well, that’s the perfect lead in Roger is I’ve seen the organizations that you work with and the things that they care about and you’re going in and doing trainings. Maybe you’re doing keynote speeches for their conference and industry meetings. If people are thinking, hey, this was really cool. I want to learn more. I want to see what Roger has to offer. Where can they go and what things would you recommend that they check out that you do?
Well, they can go easily to, and thank you for that opportunity, to go to VoicesInAdvocacy.com. And if you can’t remember that, you’ve got my name here on the screen. It’s RogerRickard.com. And you can find out more information about what we do. You’re right. We do trainings, we do breakout sessions, we do keynotes. Our goal is to help inspire, educate, engage and activate your supporters on your behalf.
Okay. That’s cool. It’s we’re not in this work alone. We got it. We got to help each other bring the team up and, and you’re the master of advocacy. and for people listening that you’ve got the podcast too, that they can check out, which is voices and advocacy podcast as well as the website, and rogerrickard.com. So go and check out the resources that he’s got there. it’s, it’s a blast to listen to you when you interview people. anybody can find value there.
And for everyone listening to this episode, just like Roger, that meant the world that you were saying thank you and making me feel good about the work that we do. I wanna make sure that we pass that along to our listeners and y’all are doing the work in the community. I hope that you found something valuable on this episode. There’s probably a friend who didn’t hear it. So don’t be afraid to share this link with your other coalition friends and get them on the website too so that we can all get better together because your work matters and a rising tide raises all ships. Let’s do this fight together. Then we stand a chance. So Roger, thank you for being on the show. This has been incredible. And thank you for all our listeners for being in this field because you’re changing and saving lives. All right, that’s what we got. We’ll see you on the next episode next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.
