Hard Times on the Social Change Frontlines

Layoffs at the Sierra Club and Color of Change are bringing the internal challenges of do-good advocacy work in the age of big money fundraising, celebrity branding and millennial miasma to the fore.

Every day in America, tens of thousands of people working for social change organizations are trying to advance their mission. A relative handful of those organizations, maybe a few hundred or so, are well-known enough that a much larger audience of supporters of those causes, perhaps twenty million people, decide to give them money. But how does anyone know if these organizations are doing a good job?

Those are the questions that have been running through my mind after reading two notable stories that came out last Wednesday about high-profile progressive advocacy organizations dealing with internal staff challenges—Kate Aronoff’s report in The New Republic on the Sierra Club, which has just announced massive layoffs in response to a project $40 million budget shortfall for next year, and Sean Campbell’s report in Insider on the digital racial justice group Color of Change, which he claims is “wracked with internal turmoil, ineffective leadership and deep layoffs.”

At one level, these are two very different organizations. The Sierra Club is one of the oldest continuously operating advocacy organizations in America, founded in 1892 by John Muir. Unlike many other groups, it is built on a federated membership model, with chapters in all fifty states whose members have a vote in electing its board. The club has around 800 people on staff and an operating budget of roughly $150 million. Color of Change, by contrast, was founded just 18 years ago by James Rucker and Van Jones to be the MoveOn for Black Americans. It has a giant email list of perhaps seven or eight million names, which it has used to fund all kinds of nimble and opportunistic digital advocacy campaigns, and in more recent years it has also grown a sister political action committee that has played a role in many elections.

If you read Aronoff and Campbell’s reports on their own, you might be led to believe a few things about the two groups: that their leadership is top-heavy, out of touch, and engaging in unnecessary layoffs that it is blaming on the bad economy rather its own mismanagement; that they each have mishandled internal disputes over allegations of abuse and misconduct; and that they have internal staff unions which are fighting hard to protect jobs and demand changes in how these organizations function.

But is that what’s really going on? It’s very hard to know because social change organizations operate in an information vacuum. There is almost no consistent independent reporting anywhere about their work. Instead, there are typically just three kinds of information available about these groups: self-promotion, official filings, and word-of-mouth. Self-promotion is everything these organizations put out about themselves, from annual reports to tweets. Official filings are things like their annual 990 reports to the Internal Revenue Service, which contain some useful information, like the names of top staff and board members, top salaries paid, how many employees they have, and occasionally some details about how they’ve spent their money. (Unfortunately, right now the IRS is still dealing with a backlog of filings from the pandemic, so these reports, which typically aren’t publicly available for two years, are even more delayed now.) Word-of-mouth is the rumor mill.

What interferes with this picture is the occasional news story or article that mentions the organization and/or its leaders, which can have a huge impact on its fortunes especially if it appears in a prominent outlet like The New York Times. But, reader beware, or be aware. There’s a whole industry devoted to placing these stories and generating good press for organizations. This exists in part to help them fundraise, but also to counteract the one type of reporting about do-good groups that news organizations tend to do on their own: stories about scandals or conflicts or hypocrisy. BlueTent.us, an independent news organization started by David Callahan, the founder of InsidePhilanthropy.com, is trying to fill this vacuum with structured case studies about progressive groups, but so far his team has only gotten to a few dozen organizations.

What’s Going On?

So, all that said, what—in my humble opinion—should we take away from these new stories about the Sierra Club and Color of Change, and most importantly, what do these stories tell us about the state of progressive social change organizing today? I’ve talked to a number of people over the last few days, including people who have worked, consulted or been on the boards of these two groups, as well as people close to this part of the social change sector. No one wants to go on the record. Nor does everyone agree about the details or the conclusions drawn by each author. But here’s where I found some consensus.

First, the internal turmoil described by Ryan Grim a year ago in The Intercept (“Elephant in the Zoom”) and addressed by Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell in his recent essay “Building Resilient Organizations”—the fever state which we might call “social justice grievance culture”—is far from over. Second, the economic downturn that started to hit last summer as the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates is now reverberating across the balance sheets of many progressive groups. The $458,000 that Color of Change paid its longtime president Rashad Robinson in 2019, double what he made in 2016, is probably an unsustainable number (if it indeed is still that high, and even after you factor in the cost of living in NYC and his understandable need for private security.) And third, as the chances for tangible progress on a host of policy issues seems, again, stymied in Washington, a lot of groups are heading for a reckoning not unlike Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner and zipping off a cliff, spinning his legs helplessly in thin air, hovering for a brief moment before crashing down.

It's critical to understand the various factors creating this unstable moment. The first one is the underlying economic reality of how a lot of advocacy work is paid for, with big grants from a relative handful of major philanthropies, a system that rewards dynamic, charismatic leaders far more than great managers. “People like that, in my experience, tend to make very poor organizational decisions,” one veteran of this sector commented to me. “And when the leader winds up saying yes to everything, operationalization is a disaster. And that leads to overall disgruntlement….Leaders wind up being accountable to their funders, not to their constituents. And the way that foundations fund is so mercurial and delusional—‘OK, we’re gonna give you a major grant for three years and then you have to find that money somewhere else.’ Literally, where else?”

While there’s always been a boom-and-bust cycle to funding for causes, the last few years have been extraordinary. Color of Change, for example, went $2.6 million in revenue in 2016 to $20.5 million in 2020, according to its 990s. The Sierra Club didn’t boom nearly as much but still saw its total revenue rise more than 30% over the same period, to $152 million. While neither organization is sharing details about their current finances, the fact that they’re laying off staff now speaks for itself. “They wound up growing too big too fast,” one person told me. “And all of those decisions have led to unsustainable work, because we’re never going to have money like that again.” (As I noted here a few weeks back, M&R’s annual benchmark survey found that annual revenue for nonprofits was down four percent last year; ActBlue’s latest report on the first quarter of 2023 shows that the number of unique donors making contributions through its portal dropped about 25% compared to the same period four year ago.)

There’s a third problem that rarely gets talked about, which is the misalignment of organizational goals and strategies. Or, to put it more bluntly, organizations not succeeding because their theory of change is kaput. With the window for federal legislation now closed at least until 2024, that is pushing some groups, like the Sierra Club, to try to restructure themselves to be more state focused. But that work is often just as hard as national advocacy and far more poorly resourced. Color of Change has tried a variety of strategies, including wading into district attorney elections, investing in in-person relational organizing, and showing up in more high-profile media settings (like Fashion Week) where cultural signaling matters as much as political positioning. But, if you haven’t noticed, we are in a doldrum time for progressive activism compared to the 2017-2020 wave. (As just one example, for week Indivisible National has been urging its local affiliates to organize rallies for a week of action against the “MAGA Debt Crisis”; by my count they’ve managed to cobble together barely fifty. This may be more indicative of Indivisible National’s having squandered much of the post-2016 moment on building a bloated and ineffective DC staff rather than supporting local groups, but either way, here we are.)

A fourth problem is the culture gap between younger and older staff, which is also a power gap between junior and senior staff. And it’s getting wider and less tenable. Older and more senior staff often feel like they paid their dues to get where they are, and they don’t understand why younger staff aren’t satisfied with the privilege of getting to work for a meaningful cause, even if that means long hours and relatively low pay. You can call that “toxic martyr culture” because it means the very people who self-select to work at social change organizations often have unhealthy habits or unrealistic expectations about changing the world. At the same time, younger and more junior staff are often more impatient for change and far less willing to accept the bargain that their more senior colleagues made, partially because they don’t know how much of a future they’re really going to have and want to enjoy their lives now, and partially because they’re braver and angrier about the status quo than their elders were a generation ago. But the pendulum seems to have swung quite far in the other direction, with lower-level staff making pretty outlandish demands in response to organizational screw-ups.

You can catch of whiff of that in this letter (posted by Sean Campbell as documentation for his story) that a group of Color of Change senior directors sent to the organization’s leadership team in May 2022 in the wake of one senior staffer being terminated after allegations of sexual violence and misconduct. They asked for a “recovery period” to “create space to process and heal” of a “minimum of 2 weeks” when the organization would stop “all external-facing work.” They also asked for the hiring of external crisis trauma counselors to run “group sessions for staff to process and heal collectively,” a series of meetings for staff at all levels to process what happened and brainstorm solutions, and a restorative justice process for the entire organization. In effect, instead of existing to make change happen in the world, the purpose of the organization would become making change in itself. Good luck trying to sustain that model!

One person I spoke to also noted that there’s a disconnect between the boom times and what organizational founders remember about leaner times, pointing out that “Many nonprofit advocacy organizations operate from a place of scarcity, that they’re still the $20,000-a-month organization they were when they started rather than the $20 million organization they are now. They may be much bigger but only a few people have real input or decision-making power. And this leads to perverse outcomes, like not allowing anyone to really grow inside the organization without agonizing delays. And it’s not just people asking for raises, it’s people being asked for the title of senior director rather than director because they’ve pulled far more than their weight in the last six months, and then being told, ‘oh, I don’t know if we want a senior director in that role.’ Well, do you just want people to quit?”

Then add the presence of staff unions, which is a relatively new phenomenon in the advocacy sector. One movement veteran who ran two different organizations over the last decade said they always told their peer leaders in charge of other groups to embrace their staff union. But that isn’t always an easy or obvious move, especially as many such units are fairly new and haven’t quite figured out how to use their power responsibly in order to win concrete improvements for the people they represent. And in the current economic downturn, where nearly every social change organization is facing shrinking revenues, that means the need for belt-tightening is colliding with unions flexing their muscles by putting out lots of negative information online.

All of this leads me to conclude that we are collectively in objectively hard times for progressive organizations. In the same way that high interest rates suddenly swamped Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank, the downturn in cause-related giving is hitting many organizations and some may not be resilient enough to make it through to 2024, when election-related spending typically rises. They’re dealing with a toxic mix of internal misalignment and external pressures, and something’s gotta give.

—Related: On the brighter side, here are two organizations who are getting ready to launch bold new efforts: IfNotNow, which is about to make a major push around turning AIPAC money toxic; and Get Free, the product of two years of incubation by by Project Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations.

Odds and Ends

—One good link about AI: The leaders of OpenAI are calling for the creation of “something like an IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] for superintelligence efforts,” that is, “an international authority that can inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security, etc.”

—Amazon’s Seattle-based employees are talking about walking off the job on May 31^st to protest layoffs, a return-to-office mandate and concerns about the company’s climate commitments, Caroline O’Donovan and Naomi Nix report for The Washington Post.

—Say hello to the Alliance of Civic Technologists, a new organization which has as its “initial goal is to ensure the continuity and growth of civic technology volunteer communities across the United States, launching immediately to fill the gap left by the sunsetting of Code for America's Brigade Network.”

—From the US Surgeon General’s new report on social media and youth mental health: “In a unique natural experiment that leveraged the staggered introduction of a social media platform across U.S. colleges, the roll-out of the platform was associated with an increase in depression (9% over baseline) and anxiety (12% over baseline) among college-aged youth (n = 359,827 observations). The study’s co-author also noted that when applied across the entirety of the U.S. college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression.” For some reason, the Surgeon General doesn’t name the platform discussed in this study, but the authors say quite clearly in their abstract that it is Facebook. But you probably already guessed that.