ABSTRACT
We knew that we were going to lose a lot of our funding through the Department of Public Health because the money comes in through the CDC [Center for Disease Control]. The CDC changed their criteria for HIV and AIDS stuff, and youth are no longer considered a high-risk population...Only about 3% of our total income right now is personal, private donors. But building a donor base is going to be our critical piece. And fee for services currently represent about 12% of our income...And we need to bring that up to 40 or 50% in order to keep up a little more. And then we also have private grants...You almost grow, I think it’s called like the Peter Principle, growing just beyond your capabilities. Budgets and fi nances and stuff like that is not my strength. It’s been a painful process of going from receipts in a sack to coming up with budgets for programs and stuff. It almost seems like in an ideal world there would be somebody whose job it would be to do organizing and visionary stuff, and somebody else who would be doing, like all successful men, the woman behind the man...And so, it’s defi nitely challenging, and I get behind on grant work. And on the fi nances and stuff and trying to remember what reports are due when. (Robin, 47-year-old white working-class female)
It’s hard [to keep the money fl owing]. We write grants all over the place all the time. We get grants, we get state grants, city grants, corporate things, you know, foundations give us money, we write grants all the time. I mean, my attitude always had been, if we’re doing the right thing the money would come, but damn, you really have to work for it, and nobody wants to fund ongoing programming expenses. So, once you get a good program everybody wants something new. That’s crazy. We’re not going to start a new thing, and get a new group going, and then tell those girls [in the Latina empowerment group], “Oh, sorry, your group ends this year, you’re all into it, and you’ve just established a real strong support network among each other, but we’re going to have to close you down.” (Lisa, 39-year-old white middle-class female)
[My biggest challenge now] is doing real true grassroots organizing. Being able to just do grassroots organizing, not programming, not getting people to
come together to give out turkeys, not that stuff, just plain good old-fashioned grassroots organizing. (Karen, 43-year-old West Indian middle-class female)
If you’re not building organization, you’re going to end up losing....So, one of the things that we learned even when we’re doing issues and campaigns that might take a while is paying attention to the small things that are constantly helping to build the organization...And as we gradually started winning those smaller fi ghts and winning and winning, it’s to the point now where it is just basically understood and it is in fact the offi cial policy of the city of Hartford that organized neighborhoods are a real asset. That neighborhood people should be setting a priority. So you don’t have to put a group together to win that-even get respect, to get in the room, they invite you in saying, “Yeah, what do you want?” So that change in the power relationships changes what you do in Hartford. (Jack, 58-year-old white middle-class male)
Is building organization necessarily building the movement? When you’re developing organizations, you inherently become focused on money, membership and growth. And is it so insular that we focus too much on the organization and not on the world around us and on what the organization is doing to support the movement?...I mean we’re in the middle of it right now because there’s a lot of recent talk of the 501 c(3) issue. Is it time for us to become one? Because becoming a 501 c(3) opens us up to so many fi nancial opportunities in theory. And legitimacy within the liberal money circle. Thinking long-term, thinking having an organization last into the future, is it vital to become a 501 c(3) to move into the future and be more lasting? And the other idea, is that “selling out,” being recognized by the IRS to feed back into the capitalist system that we’re supposed to be rejecting, on paper you need to have a board of directors, you need to have a lawyer for the paperwork or whatever. Are we compromising if we do that? And then just as a basic idea, just because you become a 501 c(3) it doesn’t mean money’s going to fucking pour into you. You gotta work your ass off to get that money. You need someone who is very talented at writing grants and moves within those circles, and for us who’ve never done that, we’re all volunteers. Is it even worth it? And in most foundations or whatever, most foundations will only give you money if others have given you money. They want a proven track record, and so for a start-up like us, there’s no reason to believe we’re going to get money anytime soon. So we’re in discussions right now just evaluating different things. You know, some say all this is on paper, who gives a fuck, you know, Joe Schmo is our president, who gives a shit? It’s only for the IRS. It doesn’t mean we have to change how we operate, it’s only for more opportunity. Just because that system operates like that doesn’t mean we have to join that. (Josh, 28-year-old white working-class male)
I was one of two Latinos on a board of directors that were all white. And I knew nothing about leadership development, and they were deliberately
talking over my head, and they would say things I had no clue what the hell it meant...to deliberately keep me in the dark. (Luz, 52-year-old Puerto Rican working-class female) I’m used to being tokenized. But I felt like my thing is: once I start off I might be the only one but I am pulling in everyone I can. That’s what happened. I would get in being the token but I would not behave like they wanted me to because I knew they expected certain things especially when you are disabled: that people kind of like want to take care of you and not listen to anything you have to say. So they were like patronizing and protective and say: “look, what can she do, she’s blind you know, what’s the deal.” (Cheryl, 53-year-old African American middle-class female)
While Chapter 4 introduced and complicated our understanding of how activists think about strategies and goals, this chapter highlights the constraints on as well as the facilitating factors for implementing effective strategies and achieving desired goals. As the introductory excerpts illustrate, these factors are both external and internal to social movements, factors like money, bureaucracy, and internal confl icts. As we will see below, however, some of these factors are best understood as neither external nor internal but as constituted in the interaction between the two. Also, these excerpts resonate with many of the concepts and frameworks of social movement scholars introduced in Chapters 2 and 3, although not always in predictable ways.
