Real Clout is about real people having a real impact on the public policies in democratic country. To paraphrase the late Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House of Representatives, all policy debates are local, and we believe every policy debate should include the active participation of those most invested and involved on the local level - affected constituents and community leaders.

Real Clout is about power. We believe that involvement in the policy making process is good for community activists and good for the process. We urge community activists to reconnect with the public policy process at the local and state level and learn how to exercise their own political power with their own elected and appointed policy makers.

Many gifted and savvy community activists with a commitment to social economic justice have forgotten their civics lessons: how laws are created, who writes regulations, what roles the courts play, who spends public money, how public priorities are decided, how public policy problems get on the agenda for debate. Others have been turned off by politics and the process and focused their energies on the delivery of good services and programs.

Real Clout is about getting down to the business of working for a just society. Learning the rules of engagement, developing the skills, marshalling the resources, mounting and implementing winning public policy campaigns.

We both started out as community activists 25 years ago. We've learned a lot about how to address the obvious and visible injustices visited upon too many residents living and working in our community. We've worked inside government as public policy managers. We've worked outside government as public policy movers. We've worked alongside Governments as public policy partners.

It's hard work, with long hours that often resulted in incremental improvement in the lives of fewer people than we had hoped. Still we celebrated the initiation of dozens of new government programs and policies that that brought real, measurable, positive change to a community or population that sometimes didn't even know we existed.

We learned an important lesson about public policy campaigns during those years.
It always worked best when we were able combine a smart, savvy insider strategy with a district based network of affected constituents ready and willing to exert political pressure from the outside.

That is the real lesson of Real Clout.