While Congress gets ready to take a break from the frustration of filibusters, leaks, and lost legislation it may be a good time to question whether there might be something fundamentally flawed with their style of leadership. Expected to rise above their own experience in order to play politics where someone has to win or lose few are able to make the kinds of changes that benefit the lives of their constituents where they live. And regardless of the money thrown about, the majority of our most urgent social problems remain unsolved.

Is there another way to lead that brings better results - where success is measured in the improved lives of friends and neighbors, and accountability and responsibility triumph over spin and blame? The stories below, of people accomplishing major social successes certainly suggests there could be:

• Working in the fields from the age of eight she experienced firsthand the hardships women and girls suffer -- inferior working conditions, inadequate health care and legal protections, exposure to toxic pesticides, and sexual harassment. Learning about organizing from her father and brothers and inspired by the theology of liberation she started talking with women in the fields who were seeking their own solutions. Together they organized a farm workers organization thirteen years ago which has helped create a women's farmworkers movement in California and beyond bettering their lives.
  
  
• In the public space, society sentences women to prison for their drug addiction or their children are removed from their custody creating great shame. Two women drawing on their own experience created a program that helps them heal while bridging the wide divide between Congress and the real lives of low-income families. They prepare mothers to present, in their own words, the uncontested truth of their own experience at meetings, hearings and briefings with Congressional staffers and national policymakers offering their answers to the issues of poverty, substance abuse, and recovery.
  
  
• As a child, he lived in New York housing projects, spent time in foster homes, and often went hungry. Experiencing that hunger hurts far more than the physical pain caused by a lack of food -creating equally painful psychological and emotional consequences that can last a lifetime - one man became a leader in a model food program in Vermont and went on to become a state legislator. Finding the biggest challenge he faces is that many people don't believe hunger is a problem, he draws on his own experience to change their understanding and meet the needs of hungry children
  
  
• Two women grew up in Spanish-speaking households in East Austin, Texas where a 1928 segregationist zoning plan physically relocated the city's communities of color and where still nearly four-fifths of Austin's industrial zone remains; they banded together to create an environmental-justice organization bringing neighborhood residents together to fight unsafe industrial development and successfully cleaned up the area by shutting down the "Tank Farm," a 52-acre fuel storage tank area with three main pipelines owned by 6 major oil companies that for 35 years had emitted toxic chemicals that caused chronic illnesses among neighborhood residents.
  

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