Play to Win

Back a long time ago at Playground Revolution I blogged about my friend Liz. Liz runs the PA Housing Alliance, an organization in Pennsylvania devoted to finding more and better housing for people with low incomes. Liz is very smart and very serious about her work. One night when a bunch of us were doing our usual political rants over dinner, she excused herself to go hang out with the kids. When she returned, she simply announced that she has little truck for political rants that go nowhere. She named a powerful local politician in our city, a man known both for hardball tactics and getting the job done. “Vince Fumo plays to win,” she said. “We need to play to win, too.”

Lately I’ve been wondering what it means to play to win. MomsRising is playing to win, getting the word out, organizing us online, nationally, in Congress and in the state legislatures. What would it mean to play to win, in an everyday, mom-and-dad world sort of way? I’ve decided to spend the next few months coming up with ways to win, and ways, playground-revolution style, that veer from the usual things we might think to do, or require more energy than most individual parents have. I’ll troll the discussion boards here to see what people are up to, and I’ll put on my thinking cap too, to come up with a list of ten ways, at least, that parents in our ordinary worlds can start playing to win, can start turning the tide of everyday life and public opinion so that it values caretaking and caretakers in real and practical ways.

If something sparks your imagination, well then chime right in. If there’s something you’re already doing, tell us, share it, write it here and write it loud.

Play to win.