Selfless Advocacy

The Daughters of Charity live a life of humility and simplicity dedicated to charity. Those I knew in Austin lived communally, and donated their salaries back to the organization. Of those, JT Dwyer was another Sister who obliterated the typical nun mold in my book.

Sister JT can scurry around a room, gesticulating and sputtering, with more energy than most people I know – all while bent at the waist in a 60° angle. When I learned that one of her duties included advocacy at the Texas state Capitol, I was awestruck. Texas politics were still new to me at the time, so the notion that some of the shenanigans going on occurred while Sister JT played witness in the gallery, or testified in open hearings, was even more shocking.

Three years after the Affordable Care Act became law, yet the governor of Texas had still declined to participate in its expansion of Medicaid expansion. An organization comprised of advocacy groups and health care providers, called Texas Left Me Out, created a campaign to raise awareness of the resultant gap in insurance coverage.

                                                                                

Sister JT Dwyer holding a t-shirt that says: "My name is Jesus. I have no papers." 

According to Sr. Dwyer, who participated in the group, "All of us know the people being left out of coverage; they are the working poor and we work with them every day. It's the veteran and his wife, the construction worker who helped build your neighborhood, the person that takes care of your child at the nursery, and the health attendant that helps care for your aging parents."

Texas Left Me Out was unable to change the mind of Rick Perry when it came to Medicaid expansion. But at least they tried. And they weren't afraid to shame elected officials in order to persuade them to do the right thing. Sister JT has since relocated to the Daughter's mission in San Antonio, where her work now focuses on immigration and asylum.

 This tweet received more engagement than most posted by the organization, but 85% of the comments were negative.

Her successor, however, takes a different approach to advocacy. He isn't a man of the cloth; his background is politics. More of a schmoozer . . . than a shamer. 

The kind of guy who would gladly pay a friend $12K a month to write speeches for Seton leadership (I know at least one doctor who was being paid much less at the time), or hire the son of a state senator fresh out of college even though it means laying off a long-term employee who recently learned she was expecting a newborn. Someone to whom patronage and nepotism are normal ways of conducting business. 

And last time I checked, selfless pols are few and far between these days.