| Sam Daley-Harris | |
| Known For: | Founding Results |
| Occupation: | Writer and activist |
| Notable Works: | Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government |
Sam Daley-Harris is an American activist and author. He is the founder of Results, and has been a hunger eradication advocate and democracy activist since the mid-1970s. Daley-Harris is also the author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.
Early in his life, Sam Daley-Harris was a music teacher, and was a percussionist for the Miami Philharmonic.[1]
During the 1970s Daley-Harris became involved in the movement to eradicate global hunger. During this process he spoke with about seven thousand high-school students, at which time he discovered that only 3% of the youth knew the name of their congressperson. In response, he founded an organization called Results (stylized: RESULTS),[2] which is an acronym for "Responsibility for Ending Starvation Using Legislation, Trimtabbing, and Support".[3] After working with other anti-hunger organizations like Bread for the World,[4] he founded the organization in 1980, which recruited and trained volunteers to lobby the government on food security and hunger issues. Tactics have included sit-down meetings with politicians, generating supportive media, and letter writing campaigns.[5]
The organization has also[6] helped advocate for global vaccination campaigns with UNICEF, and worked in promoting micro-lending. Muhammad Yunus said of Results' work in micro-lending that, “No other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that micro-credit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women.”[7] Daley-Harris has also served as the director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign,[8] [9] where he advocated for the role of microcredit in combating poverty.[10] The Microcredit Summit Campaign tracked the “performance” of microfinance organizations.[11]
He later founded the organization Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation, which provides consultations to organizations on the subject of “deep advocacy”, a method of working with politicians and the media to fuel advocacy efforts for social issues. The organization later changed its name to Civic Courage.[12] He has also worked with Citizens' Climate Lobby.[13] [14]
Sam Daley-Harris is the author of the book Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government, which at the end of the book outlines thirteen “principles of action”, and uses case-studies of successful advocacy to show evidence of their efficacy. Many of the case-studies come from Daley-Harris’ work as the head of Results.[15] The original version was published in 1993, and a twentieth anniversary edition was published in 2013 with a foreword by Muhammad Yunus.[16] He is also the co-editor of the book New Pathways Out of Poverty.[17]