Community-led Participatory Policymaking - Sara Soka
In 2014, Berkeley, California passed Measure D, the first local tax on sugar sweetened beverages in the nation. Sara Soka, fellow at the Beeck Center and the campaign manager for Measure D, discusses the process of passing Measure D and the importance of community in moving SSB work forward. Reflecting on the Measure D campaign, Sara touches on the ways community-led research, storytelling, and mapping is necessary for participatory policymaking and emphasizes that equity must be centered throughout the entire SSB policy process, not just within the actual policy itself. For this to happen, community members must be at the table during decisions making and the process must center those most impacted, particularly communities of color.
This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes. Learn more about Praxis’ work around SSB taxes on our Centering Community & Equity Through Sugary Drink Tax Investments page.
The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.
You can also tune into this episode on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. You can also watch this episode on YouTube with subtitles for accessibility.
Community-led Participatory Policymaking - Sara Soka
Podcast Transcript
I want to see more policies that are driven by community and with community throughout the process. I think that, you know, there's a long way to go on really creating participatory policies and designing participatory systems to implement those policies, and I think that, in Berkeley, individuals knew how to use their voice and knew how to wield that power.
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[In Praxis Intro] You are listening to In Praxis, a podcast by The Praxis Project created to support, hear from, and uplift the stories coming out of the ecosystem of basebuilding organizing. An ecosystem that includes frontline basebuilding groups and the folks who help support their important work. In this season of In Praxis, our hosts, Julian Johnson and Kourtney Nham, focus on sugar sweetened beverage taxes. We have compiled interviews from advocates working on issues surrounding the reduction of sweet and sugary beverages as well as the taxation of these products. Participants of this podcast are community members, public health practitioners, health department representatives, and concerned parents that span across the country. In each episode, you will hear about their phenomenal work as well as their perspective on the health effects of sugary consumption, and in what ways policy can be used to combat this and lead to reinvestment in our communities.
Julian Johnson: Hi everyone, today we are here with Sara Soka. Sara, would you mind telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Sara Soka: Sure, I am Sara Soka, and I met Xavier Morales, the director of the Praxis Project, when we worked together on the Measure D campaign in Berkeley and that was the first soda tax campaign to pass in the United States.
Julian Johnson: And so more broadly speaking, I'd love to hear how you first got involved in issues surrounding health.
Sara Soka: It’s interesting because as long as I can remember I've been less interested in medical health and biology and much more interested in questions of history and sociology and really understanding questions of fairness, and it really wasn't until the end of college that I learned about the field of public health and that public health involved all of those questions. Again, like not just from a medical or doctor's perspective but really from a sociological perspective, so I really like the idea of the framework of social determinants of health. This is how issues like racism, income, education, urban planning, policy, who has power, who has voice get or contribute to how people and communities are healthy or not, and all of those social determinants are part of the field. From what I knew at the time, the people I saw working in public health went to grad school, so that's what I did, that's how I started.
Julian Johnson: I would love to hear how that gets transformed to you realizing that sugary drinks were related to health problems. Was it post your graduate school teachings, was it in the field?
Sara Soka: Yeah, it was in the field, so right after graduate school I was really lucky to get a fellowship, and I got placed at a state health department where I worked in their nutrition, physical activity, and obesity program. So, I got to know that sugary drinks contributed to many different diseases, many different chronic diseases there, but really the first time I saw the health problems with sugary drinks get communicated well to the public was when I was on a subway car in New York City. If you've been on a bus or subway car, you see those ads that are above the seats, those like PSA’s, and at the time I think this was…I want to say 2012. There were placards when New York City had an ad campaign about how much sugar is in your drink, and they were really grabbing. The placards I saw were bottles and plastic cups you usually get a soda in, and they were filled with this goop that looked like it was supposed to represent fat and that was a really graphic image. Then that campaign also involved a TV ad that ran, I believe all over the country, where you saw two people drinking a soda at a counter and one person–instead of drinking the soda–actually takes sugar packets that represent how much sugar is in the soda and just like crazily dumps it down his throat, so it’s like “what's with this guy?”–but it got the message across. Then the other example of really good public communication that I saw involving a deeper take on the problem was Youth Speaks. It’s a youth-led organization out of San Francisco, they do a lot of spoken word performances about many issues like education justice, prison reform, and there was a project they were working on before the Berkeley campaign started called the Bigger Picture Project. It was these really beautiful poems written by youth about how sugary drinks and all the diseases that affected them and their family were really affecting their lives and really talking about ideas of food justice and colonialism and that was one of the most compelling pieces of communication that I saw about the issue.
Julian Johnson: As you're learning and as you're seeing this issue for what it is, what made you decide to say, I'm going to invest time and energy into actually reducing the consumption of sugary drinks? Because a lot of people would say, okay, I’m seeing that there's health problems related to this, to drinking these drinks for myself. Personally, I’m going to stop, but I'm not going to necessarily make the effort to educate or inform other people; so, what made that decision?
Sara Soka: Yeah, so it's kind of started where you wouldn't expect. I’m from the Midwest and before I moved out to California, I had been very lucky to be part of a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where we got to work with coalitions across the country that had also gotten funding–very local coalitions, so usually like city-based, county based. It was working with them on persuasive storytelling–so really understanding, bringing their own experience and their communities’ experience to why they were working on different health issues. They may have involved smoking, it may have involved other types of changes at a community level, but what I learned from that experience working with coalitions–in big and small cities and small towns–was really the power of a coalition and really valuing the impact that they bring, and the impact of stepping back, letting the coalition lead, and whatever you can do as somebody maybe from outside, you follow them, and you support. People from the community are the most persuasive at moving a change forward, and it seems kind of obvious, but, in many cases, that's not the framework for how this type of change happens. So, I love that experience so much, and it was so transformative to me that when that project ended, I ended up deciding to move to California because I knew in the Bay Area there are a lot of organizations that got funding to do similar community support work on these types of projects. I moved without a job to the Bay Area and ended up in the East Bay and happened to find a housing situation in Berkeley, and I heard through a listserv, that Berkeley was interested in developing a soda tax campaign. I thought, wow, that's really cool that they have that much go ahead and that much community support for this, and they were having an open community meeting on this, and so I just went to the community meeting and that’s how I got involved.
Julian Johnson: Wow, that's great! In the work you've been able to do now, what strategies would you say are the most effective in reducing sugar return consumption? Is the answer education, is it policy? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Is it a combination of both?
Sara Soka: Well, I definitely think it's both. I think the biggest, most influential thing that can do is if you have genuine community buy-in for the issue. The thing that was really special about the Berkeley campaign, is it really did come, for multiple reasons, was raised by community members. It was raised as a food justice issue: knowing that there are racial disparities and class disparities in the impacts of sugary drinks, like type 2 diabetes, like amputations, and then also thinking about it from “where can the tax money go?” And so, there are a lot of people who are interested in helping to fund a school-based program that involves cooking and gardening and learning about food justice, and then what ended up being other community-based projects led by Black and Brown nonprofits in Berkeley to do work related to this, but also other types of community building and like health and cohesion work. What's missing and what's important is that we would need more community-led research and that's a mixture of qualitative research: it's storytelling, it's disseminating information, really listening to people's experiences, and also mapping potentially coming from communities.
A long-time activist in many issues, Francis Calpotura, led a project in Oakland called the Sugar Freedom Project, and he did this after Oakland passed its soda tax in 2016 because he noticed that, as far as the voting districts went, the districts in Oakland that had the least yes votes for the soda tax were the districts that were highest Black, and so he thought, that's a problem. Yeah, certainly from an equity standpoint, so he thought, okay, well I'm going to engage and listen to people and hear why they thought this, and like any campaign you have to do a lot of community outreach, but you only have a limited amount of time to do that. So, really the issue was, there needs to be engagement beforehand. Ideally, that policy–the sugary drink tax–doesn't go forward unless it's organically coming from community, and I would say led by people of color, led by people who are targeted by the soda industry. One of the things that he did was both the qualitative research, but then worked with people to map where stores were putting up negative messages about the soda tax, and that was usually planted by the beverage industry. By doing that type of mapping and talking with people about the participatory way that the money from the tax could be allocated back to communities in Oakland, he helped I think a lot of people… I've heard stories of people saying, “I didn't know this was the way it was, and I may have supported it” or “I would have supported it” so that's what I see needs to happen as a first step.
Julian Johnson: You mentioned equity, and I'd love to just talk a little bit more about that. There's a lot of initiatives right now that are aiming to try to center health equity in either policy work and education or awareness–you name it. When looking at soda tax policy or just policy that looks at the taxation of sugary sweetened beverages as a whole, how do we ensure that health equity is rooted in that policy, that it's not harming low-income communities of color? Because you hear the beverage industry constantly use that narrative that it's going to hurt low-income communities and that they're going to be the ones that are affected the most. I love this idea of reinvestment; I'm assuming that's kind of the way or the approach to make sure that we are ensuring health equity in these soda tax policies.
Sara Soka: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's essential and this was a piece that many of the people that I worked with in Berkeley… We decided to write into the policy a creation of a panel of experts–people from the community who either knew about/were involved in community nutrition issues or had some other background on sugary drink issues. Kind of like elected representatives, they listen to constituents and represent on that committee where the funds should go. It depends state to state and municipality to municipality how prescriptive you can get in the policy language for that, but I think it's very important that that is there. I think it's an essential for any sugary drink policy. I also think that the equity and the participation is essential at all stages. It's essential in the pre-work; it's essential in determining whether to go for the policy; it's essential during the campaign. Is this a campaign that's really owned by the community? Even if the community may not have a lot of background–and this is probably a gross understatement because advocates are consistently making policies or working for policies–but community members should be equal at that table. It's not just a political consultant or some funder who's deciding to go for this. It's essential that community members are at the table for implementation, the planning for the reinvestment, planning to implement the tax, and how that works with retailers and making sure that they understand the reason for the tax and how it's implemented so that it's as little a burden on individual retailers in the community as possible. Because what this is really fighting against is fighting against the beverage industries which are the big players that are making a ton of profit off of hurting people, and it's not meant to hurt communities. It's meant to help communities and that's everybody in the community, so equity should be throughout the entire process, not only in the written policy.
Julian Johnson: No, I 100 percent agree. I'm wondering then, as you guys were in this campaign, was there community pushback? Were there people that said, “I don't like this policy.” You mentioned individual retailers, how were you able to communicate to them that this policy is not going to hurt the community, but actually help the community?
Sara Soka: I think that retailers may have been…It's hard to convince them when they're hearing one thing from the beverage industry that's kind of a scary “the sky is going to fall” message and then one thing from a campaign, and I guess there are there are two things here. One is just to make sure that the beverage industry, when they know a tax is going to go forward they preemptively go to retailers, they preemptively go to different influencers in the community who they think they can get on their side at the beginning. I think the most important thing is that community members who are supporting the policy talk to retailers about this as soon as the policy is announced, as soon as it becomes public to make sure that they understand really how the policy works, that there's very little that they're going to have to do, that there's history and other communities of this not having detrimental effects on individual retailers. It's hard because there are other ways that retailers and distributors can make money. I mean, it's like bringing water, bringing other types of drinks, and helping to change demand, and I know that there are a lot of healthy food access programs that happen with corner stores and so forth. For instance, I think the city of Philadelphia when they passed their tax had a healthy beverage credit that could help retail stores. There are different ways to go about that but really thinking about that in advance and making it as less of a burden as possible and also really shaping the message. That’s true for anybody, being the first one out there with the message and making sure that the message is getting out from people that locals trust. You're going to learn about this from your neighbor, you're going to learn about this from like local leaders that you respect, and so it's very important that those voices get out there early on.
Julian Johnson: And in the campaign, what were some of the main messages or counter-messages you guys used to refute the beverage industry claims? What are common slogans or–for lack of a better word–talking points trying to communicate what the policy is? What are key messages that you guys had ready to employ when you had to refute the narrative that the beverage industry is very, very good at making in terms of trying to convince people it’s going to harm them?
Sara Soka: What we wanted to make sure people understood was that this is an urgent health crisis. If trends didn't change, it was projected that one in three young people in the country would get diabetes in their lifetimes. If you were Black or Latinx, the chances were even worse, it was one and two. That has to do with social determinants of health and like, food access and a lot of other issues, and so that's clearly unfair. That was one of the first ways we talked about this. We talked about stats and examples of how the beverage industry targets young people, but especially disproportionately targets Black and Latinx children and teens, and so they have a direct role. Very similar to how the tobacco companies worked in causing these health disparities and entering it for profit, and then we would say that our community is taking a stand on this. Berkeley is taking a stand, and soda tax is one way we can start to make a change. It’s not the only way. It's one first step, and so we also would talk about the work that people like Xavier and many other people in Berkeley were able to do and that is really gain a big coalition and make a big tent for this policy and talk to people in the community. We had buy-in from everybody from the entire city council and the school board to everybody under election for those positions, many different non-profits across the city, churches, church leaders, a lot of health organizations–which kind of seems like a no-brainer that they would be on board. It’s really these trusted sources that are saying this policy is being done in a way that we can support, and it's being done in a way to support equity. We ended up getting like 76% of the popular vote which was much more than we expected and really goes to show the work that the coalition did to get that message across.
Julian Johnson: So, this next question is a little bit more open-ended. I think people that may be listening in might wonder what is the end goal, what's the end game? So, the question I have is: what will it look like when the advocates win? For you, when you're thinking about an ideal world, when looking at the beverage industry and their influence, do you imagine that what we need is statewide adoption of soda taxes? Do you imagine that we get rid of sugary drinks in general? What would look like when you win against the beverage industry?
Sara Soka: Yes, I would definitely support a statewide soda tax when there is something equivalent to a community coalition directing where the funding goes, and I think something on a state-by-state level that does that would be terrific. I think that it's important that there's a lot of local representation in those questions too, that it's not just state-based agencies that get to make the decisions, but it's a lot of local organizations that are very close to communities, community organizations. I think that in a broader sense what it looks like when the advocates win–this is across issue, really–is I want to see more policies that are driven by community and with community throughout the process, in any type of policy that involves public health. I think that there's a long way to go on really creating participatory policies and designing participatory systems to implement those policies, and I think that in Berkeley, we're very used to being politically active and being politically efficacious and that's not to say that doesn't–I mean it happens in a lot of places, clearly–but individuals knew how to use their voice and knew how to wield that power, and I just feel like in many places in the country, we feel kind of beaten down and not able to do that as much, and I would like to see that change. I would like to see true participation in politics for equity in the future happen. That's my end game–soda tax or not; soda tax is a totally different issue.
Julian Johnson: I think for people that may be in either policy or the field of public health, they may be wondering, what are the first steps in trying to create that equal partnership and that equal collaboration? A lot of times–I'm sure you're aware–politicians or public health practitioners will go into communities and will superficially try to get their input but not necessarily make ways to create not only trust but a partnership and a deliverable that is actually going to benefit that community. What would you say are the first steps trying to bridge this gap?
Sara Soka: Yeah, I think the first step is about listening and humility. I grew up very close to the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee is a very segregated city with a long and current racist history. There are a lot of people in Milwaukee now who are trying to change that, and there's a great group in Milwaukee called BLOC, B-L-O-C, it's Black Leaders Organizing Communities. The woman who's the Executive Director, Angela Lang, began this practice where they would do these silent canvases and what that would mean is if there was a leader, somebody running for office–like for county exec or for a board of older people–they made the option that you could go with BLOC leaders, who were Black leaders in the community, and knock on doors in Black neighborhoods, and you just listen as an elected official to “what do you want to see change in the community,” “what are you proud of in the community”? And the rule was that a) you couldn't speak if you were the elected official and b) you couldn't wear any campaign material–you can’t say “vote for me” on your t-shirt. I’ve heard that's been an incredibly effective tool, both for people running for office really trying to listen and understand and represent and also for people in the community for understanding who to hold accountable for things that they want to see. I think that kind of thing, you can't substitute authentic relationships, authentic trust and that's the most important part if you're trying to do something in public health. It's a long road, and it's a lot of showing up for each other and your different issues but that's what becomes rock solid.
Julian Johnson: No, I 100% agree with that. You know, Sara before we close out is there anything else you'd like to add on?
Sara Soka: No, I don't think so.
Julian Johnson: Thank you, Sara.
Sara Soka: Thank you, I really appreciate it.
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[In Praxis outro] Thank you for listening to this episode of In Praxis. We hope you all enjoyed it. Make sure to visit our website, www.thepraxisproject.org, where you can check out additional episodes of other guests as well as learn more about our work.
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