Helping Changemakers Make Change

Why We Need a National Nonprofit to Start School Later

Lots of people seem to be reflecting on “existential” questions these days. One that I’ve been reflecting on lately involves why the world needs an organization like Start School Later to get schools to end to unnecessary practices proven to harm kids. It also involves reflecting on why a handful of self-described crazy people like me continue to pour our hearts and souls into it, generally without pay and often at great cost to our families, careers, and health.

Only now as we are well into our second decade as a 501(c)(3), I am also beginning to realize we may have been conceptualizing ourselves all wrong.

Helping Kids or Helping Others Help Kids

Our taglines since we started have involved “health, safety, and equity” for kids, particularly adolescents. Our ultimate goal has always been promoting healthy sleep for students of every age and school hours that allow students to get that healthy sleep.

None of that has changed. However, I think we may have gotten it wrong by focusing solely on kids. Our primary work ultimately helps kids, sure, but what we directly do (and why we are both needed and unique) is to help our chapter leaders, other community advocates, and school leaders put school hours that help kids into place.

We do this by bringing together people who normally wouldn't cross paths, sharing resources and experiences with them to effectively navigate obstacles that for decades have kept communities from making choices that help kids—despite clarion calls from health and education leaders to do so. We connect sleep researchers, health practitioners, education leaders, and community advocates; enable social media chat groups and monthly meetings for our chapters; and provide sleep education materials, relevant research, webinars, and in-person implementation workshops that community advocates and school leaders can use to promote change in their communities.

We do all this, again, because we believe the resulting changes will improve the health, safety, learning, productivity, and overall well-being of children, families, and communities. But tying our various activities to direct, measurable impact on these target groups is complicated, and attempts to do so lead to what I think are often uncompelling claims about cause and effect. (Non-profits notoriously make such intellectually suspect claims to justify their existence and attract funding, but these claims can make academic nerds, myself included, uncomfortable.)

If true believers like me can say things like this, you know we have a problem showing concretely how our actions have led to measurable change. Yet I can simultaneously say that because of Start School Later hundreds of school districts have changed their hours for the better, over half of US states have looked at laws to ensure healthier school hours, and the lives of millions of children have already been vastly improved.

How is that possible? Well, just because you can’t always measure impact directly does not mean there is no impact. I’d even argue that sometimes it’s the actions with harder-to-measure impact that our society most desperately needs but most poorly supports.

Support for Groups Fighting the Good Fight

Mulling over these things led me to an epiphany: supporting the groups fighting the good fight, particularly those that don’t bring anyone obvious profit is an underrecognized—and definitely underfunded—need in our world.

That is why Start School Later so often struggles to reach potential supporters and members: the unique and valuable role of a national organization to get schools to do what both research and commonsense clearly say they should do is not obvious to most people—including people who deeply care about adolescent sleep and well-being, or even school start times. Many people understand that kids are suffering and that we need to help these kids. But our appeals about our success helping those kids seem slightly off, tortured, and incomplete.

A lot of the problem is the surprisingly complex, multifaceted, and political nature of the school start time issue. It takes a long time to get people, even smart and involved people, to accept that ensuring developmentally appropriate school hours is not only a challenging undertaking but that success cannot be simply or quickly measured. Improvement in school start times are not as quantifiable as how many bedtime stories or pajamas you provide or how many sleep education talks you give.

The latter are all lovely things to do, and we do some of them. Still, however much we preach to kids and families and healthy sleep or provide them with sleep aids and advice, until school starts at times that allow students to get it, it’s just empty talk, or, if you will, sleep theatre.

Still, sleep kits and pajamas are easier to measure and to “sell” to supporters and donors. It’s easy to tell supporters that their contribution paid for a sleep mask or a conference. We can show them kids and families happy that their schools started later, too. However, it’s not so easy, or honest, to directly tie this emotionally appealing outcome to our webinars, flyers, or networking opportunities.

Nor are later start times any guarantee that students are going to get more sleep, not to mention be healthier, safer, or more productive. All we know is that by tolerating today’s too-early hours, we are harming children—and that, by providing later start times, we give students an opportunity to get healthier sleep and the many benefits we know it can bring.

No, what we actually do as an organization is less tangible, but ultimately also more meaningful. What we do is to help changemakers make change. In doing so, we are ultimately helping kids families, and communities over the longer-term by helping the otherwise unsupported people who are working for them.

These people are addressing a complicated, intractable, structural problem that has proven itself generally unaddressable if left to short-term, localized, disconnected efforts.

Whether the changemakers parents, students, school health professionals, teachers, school administrators, or other concerned citizens, these changemakers turn to us for advice and resources that allows them to do what they couldn't do before we came along!

Money Makes the World Go Round (Except for Us Crazies)

So, now I begin to see the problem: No one obviously profits by helping the civic-minded people working for later school start times. So the only way to support a supportive organization like SSL is “sell” its work emotionally to supporters. The problem here is that later start times don’t have immediate emotional resonance in the way childhood hunger or poverty do, for example. Many people want to pitch in and help address childhood hunger or poverty because it’s easy and obvious to see impact. But getting people energized around lasting solutions to the deeper reasons these kids are suffering is much more difficult.

Until SSL (or someone) makes "early school start times" as immediately recognizable as a multifaceted and complex social ill as MADD made "drunk driving” (a problem that not all that long ago was often framed as a joke), we will struggle. And so will people trying to understand what we do or why we need to exist.

I feel stupid that it has taken me over a dozen years to realize all this. But this dilemma isn’t intuitive. At SSL we’re working for structural, systematic changes that only ultimately will have consequences for the students, families, and communities that have no choice but to live and work within these structures and systems. That means that what we do isn’t as immediately heart-grabbing as, say, giving free lunches or bedding to children who aren’t getting enough food or sleep.

But it is essential, and, arguably, more essential than serving immediate needs. That’s because it involves what amount to public goods, things that serve the public at large but do not make sense for rational individuals to pursue on their own.

The lack of rationality brings me back to the “crazy” word that others have applied to me and several of my long-time colleagues readily apply to themselves. We fully understand that it would have been easier for many of us to put our own kids in private or home schools, buy them cars to give them more morning sleep, or just ride out four miserable years of early high school start times as so many of our friends felt they had no choice but to do. Instead we opted to spend decades, sometimes long after our own kids were grown and had kids of their own, trying to get whole school systems to change hours.

This was and is irrational from an economic or short-term perspective. But as I described in earlier posts, I realized long ago that this problem had vast health, social, and economic impact and that relying on people to solve it for their own kids was doomed to failure given the complicated politics of school schedule change. I realized that without an organization with institutional memory, and filled with people who would stick with this issue beyond the school years of their own children, we would see an eternal recurrence of the same.

I was fortunate to find a few kindred spirits along the way who agreed. They are now the heart and soul of Start School Later.

Beyond Rationality

Ideally situations like this—situations involving public goods where it doesn’t make sense for individuals to fight—are filled by government. In some cases, the public good can also be served by professional organizations that support their paying members, some of whom may in turn do valuable work in the world, often to the benefit of children and families. Sometimes even private businesses find it in their business interests to fund public goods as well, but most often easily recognizable, measurable ones.

When the public good cannot or is not served by government or these professional or private organizations, however, we rely on charities, foundations, and other non-profits to step in. But too often these organizations work to fix immediate problems (the obvious, measurable ones, as described above) and not the often complex or structural root causes of the problems.

That’s our real challenge at SSL in terms of what you might call a business model if we were a business. , That’s because most charities serving public goods are either self-funded private foundations.or that promote causes that further the interests private business interests. Alas, when it comes to SSL, we fit neither category. And, for good or for bad, no one really stands to gain economically (at least in the short run), by starting schools later. (The economic benefits to society over time could be vast according to reports by the RAND Corporation and other analysts. But that’s too theoretical and long-term to generate emotional appeal.)

To anyone who has stayed with me so far, I do want to emphasize that despite these hurdles, our little non-profit that could has made tremendous progress since we began in 2011. School are changing. Laws are changing . Minds are changing. They just aren’t changing fast enough.

Meanwhile, I’m sure someone far more knowledgeable about social policy can provide a higher-level analysis of these matters, as well as examples of other social change efforts like ours that address structural and systemic problems that provide no short-term or obvious return on investment but are essential for ultimate public good. I’m not an economist, policy analysis, nor a businessperson and likely and missing some important nuances here, but I do think I’m on to something.

At the very least, I hope this post will encourage some of them to weigh in here so we can continue the conversation.