Kansas’ landscape is much like North Dakota’s, according to grassroots solutions’ own Sarah Hassell, a North Dakota native. Upon arriving in Topeka for her latest assignment in the field, Sarah – and you’ll recognize her affinity for native landscapes from her recent tales of the Arkansas primary — immediately felt the warm and comfortable embrace of the prairie, and was almost swept away (literally) by the wind. Her mission: to come up with a grassroots organizing strategy and field plan that would prevent the state of Kansas from passing a tax on nursing home beds, while simultaneously building a base of support for Kansas seniors for the long-term.
As Sarah soon learned, the state of Kansas was not only proposing to tax nursing home beds; they were also proposing a 10% cut to the Medicaid reimbursement rate. In short, they were cutting services for the people who need them most, then asking those same people to help foot the bill.
Kansas Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (KAHSA), an organization that represents not-for-profit long-term care provider organizations throughout Kansas, enlisted grassroots solutions to help them and their members respond quickly and powerfully to this crisis, and to help set themselves apart from the usual scrum of lobbyists by putting a human face on these complex and abstract finance issues.
grassroots solutions’ strategy was to let the legislature know that Kansas seniors were paying attention, and that they didn’t like what they were seeing. We wanted KAHSA and its members to be a force that legislators simply couldn’t ignore. Sarah helped KAHSA establish 13 Senior Advocacy Councils comprised of nursing home residents, staff, and resident families that called and wrote to their legislators, and sent letters to the editors of their local papers. We also designed a rigorous paid phone program that connected 779 members of the voting public directly with their legislators to let them know that their constituents opposed the bed tax.
Working together, we helped KAHSA create a campaign unlike any it had attempted before. And the results were greater than we could have hoped for. The activists organized through KAHSA’s campaign made so much noise that the governor and the Secretary of Aging were forced to negotiate the terms of the bed tax. grassroots solutions left Kansas having helped to create a solid and battle-proven grassroots infrastructure among seniors. Working with KAHSA was an inspiring experience, and we’re proud of the testimonial of our partner in action, Executive Director Debra Harmon Zehr:
“We benefit tremendously from our partnership with grassroots solutions! They helped us discover and implement new ways to engage and activate our grassroots…at a level never before employed by our organization. As a result, we grew in power. The governor sought us out to offer a compromise that addressed many of our major concerns. We were able to gain additional concessions (leveraging the power we had built) and, in the end, arrived at a bill that protected our members and the seniors they serve.”