Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Notes on the ups and downs of rage-giving, philanthropic ambitions and illusions, and progressive organizing as we slouch towards 2024.
—A year after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, “rage-giving” in response to the ending of Roe v Wade has dropped off, Thalia Beaty and Glenn Gamboa report for the Associated Press. One clinic in Memphis, Tennessee saw $150,000 in donations to its annual spring appeal last year; this year they raised just $40,000, according to the AP. Oriaku Njoku, the new executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, told the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Eden Stiffman that they raised more than $8 million in the five months after the Dobbs ruling, but that pace hasn’t continued. “As the energy around Dobbs and the donating started to dwindle, the need and the amount of work that goes into supporting people who are going to get abortions actually went up. My worry is this sense of complacency and people thinking, Oh, abortion funds got it.” In fact, she says, “the need is increasing, but the amount of support that’s coming in has not balanced out.”
Even worse, the changed environment is imposing new demands on groups like hers exactly when the need is rising. “Especially with some of the new funders, we’re hearing things like, What is your playbook?” Njoku relates. “What is the actual strategic plan of the movement? What is the 30-year plan? That’s a little hard right now. This is uncharted territory for so many of our organizations. We’re having conversations and really trying to figure out what a strategy looks like. But abortion still needs to be accessible, and we need to keep our clinics open to make sure that abortions are available.”
Imagine a funder daring to ask an abortion access provider, “What is your 30-year plan?”
—Speaking of what happens when you live in a world dominated by the mercurial mood swings of big funders, here’s the ever-useful Theodore Schleifer of Puck reporting on what could be a very big shift in the funding of democracy defense, internet freedom, and a host of human rights and journalistic enterprises. He writes (gift link) that Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, whose Omidyar Network includes spinoffs like the Democracy Fund, Luminate and Humanity United, “is making another major pivot. Omidyar, who is primarily holed up these days in New Zealand, has recently been sending word to the network of organizations that depend on his support that he is planning to scale back his political and philanthropic giving, perhaps dramatically. The network of organizations, part of a constellation called The Omidyar Group, have received almost all of their funding to date from Pierre and his wife, Pam. Without their largesse, these nonprofit and for-profit companies, each of which have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Omidyars over the last decade or two, will possibly be forced to scramble to find alternate funding to remain operational. ‘The folks I have heard from in several of the orgs are worried, some freaked,’ said one person close with leaders at multiple Omidyar groups.”
I have no inside knowledge of this, though I did hear recently that Luminate had decided to shift its focus in Europe towards supporting litigation and other legal strategies for taming the power of Big Tech, and away from seeding and funding civic tech projects across the Continent. That may be a reasonable strategy whether or not Omidyar is retrenching, since the EU along with a few member countries like Ireland seem to be offering the strongest regulatory response to unfettered tech development, but it still is a challenging development for civic tech.
—Now for a bit of a palate cleanser, if you’re like me and the last two items made you throw up in your mouth a little.
"It can't be your organization if you don't pay for it, or if somebody else pays for most of it. A lot of groups try to finesse that. We don’t. We put dues upfront. If we can't generate a dues base, we don't get started in a place. We just tell people, it's not going to work. And if people say well, we could raise this money from X, Y or Z Foundation. We say that's fine. But the primary source of money has to be your money. The philanthropic money can complement that, but it can't be the bread and butter.”
That’s Mike Gecan, national network leader for the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Civic Action, talking to Daniel Stid of Lyceum Labs along with his colleague Amy Totsch, who runs Chicago-based United Power for Action and Justice. He gives Stid a revealing example of what happens all too often: “Just last week, I was talking to a major foundation here in New York about a new effort in the South Bronx. I wanted to raise money to bring organizers in to rebuild our effort and institutional base there. The foundation said we want to know your outcomes on housing and on school safety. I said, look, we don't have an organization yet. I'm asking for money to build an organization that will inevitably get involved in those areas over time. They said, just give us some outcomes and we can proceed. I said, I can't give you outcomes! This is a classic tension we have with foundations. They want programs before power. And they want to fund programs, but they either don’t understand or don't believe that you first need a power base to get the kind of programmatic or or issue impact they want at scale.”
Imagine what the progressive scene would be like if most of what got attention was being paid for by grass-roots members rather than foundations and big donors.
The whole conversation is illuminating, including Gecan and Totsch’s understanding of what it means to try to rebuild places that have been deindustrialized when government isn’t going to do the job, and Gecan’s suggestion that a crucial part of organizing is “disorganizing” institutions that are no longer fulfilling their function and redesigning them for new patterns of life (like churches whose membership melted away during Covid). Read the whole thing.
—The Biden Administration is embarking on a big push to convince Americans that its major legislative accomplishments are changing their lives for the better. But while their “Investing in America” three-week barnstorm will have lots of ribbon-cutting-style events, it’s questionable how much of an impact this will have on public opinion. As Deepak Bhargava, Sharzhad Shams and Harry Hanbury write in Democracy Journal in “The Death of ‘Deliverism’,” it’s time we took seriously the possibility that working-class Americans of all colors are so profoundly disillusioned they can’t believe it when government does something good for them. They cite the widespread public apathy about the demise of the child tax credit, which had temporarily lifted more than 2 million children out of poverty and reduce the rate of child poverty by 46%. They write, “during the same time span in which monthly deposits landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, the percentage of Black voters—a group that especially benefited from the policy—who said their lives had improved under the Biden Administration actually declined.”
“It has long been an article of faith among liberals and leftists,” they write, “that if you ‘deliver’ for people—specifically, if you deliver economic improvements in people’s lives through policy—these changes will solidify or shift people’s political allegiances….However, progressive economic policies do not necessarily lead to the political outcomes that deliverism predicts they should, and deliverism is proving ineffectual as a response to authoritarianism. People are fully capable of supporting or ignoring progressive economic policies while voting for authoritarians.”
What should progressives do? Start by abandoning the assumption that technocratic solutions will be enough, and take identity, emotion and story-telling that names clear villains a lot more seriously. “Stories without villains make no sense to anyone,” the authors write. “The mainstream Democratic Party’s tendency to avoid naming corporations as bad actors, whether pharmaceutical companies or big banks, is politically disastrous.” They also suggest taking “social connection, isolation, and community much more seriously as policy priorities.” We are in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness, one that only worsened due to Covid. Nearly one in six American men report having no close friends at all. They add, “Policy can’t solve a crisis of friendship directly—but it can support the rebuilding of social institutions, like community organizations and unions, that create opportunities for connection.”
Bhargava et al don’t just point to problems, they offer examples of solutions too: “Defanging authoritarianism requires a shift in organizing methods to widen the on-ramps that welcome in people who are not already progressive and to work at the levels of survival needs, meaning, and identity—not only policy. One group, Hoosier Action in Indiana, likes to say that its model is to create an organization that is a ‘Church, Shelter, and Vanguard,’ meaning that it provides a combination of belonging, mutual aid, and intensive training and meaning-making. The organization also works directly on issues at the heart of the crisis of despair, like the opioid epidemic. Hoosier Action is building community-owned centers that can provide an institutional home to help foster solidarity among working-class people. Some organizing on the right—for example, in evangelical churches—is thick in this same way, forging deep social ties rather than relating to people transactionally on issues of the moment.”
As I said to a friend of mine the other day who just started working as a program officer at a major foundation, if I had $10 million, I’d put it into subsidizing as many store-front community gathering places as possible. At a hypothetical monthly rent of $2000 with a $4000/month subsidy to pay part of an organizer’s salary, you could get 100 centers off the ground for a year. The GOP is doing this already with its community centers focused on Black, Latino and AAPI communities, as I’ve reported previously. On the progressive side, the Center for Common Ground is already supporting a handful of “Democracy Centers” mostly in the Deep South, something I dug into here. How about some more?
Imagine that.
Odds and Ends
—The good news is that the Biden Administration has finally announced how its going to allocate $42.45 billion in Broadband Equity Access and Deployment funds across the country. The bad news is this is literally nineteen months after that money was appropriated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on November 15, 2021, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is requiring states to provide final lists of all the sub-grantees that are going to actually get this money before they get their hands on the dough. Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting, who writes the POTs and PANs blog, estimates that it’s going to take another 16 months at best to get through all the hurdles before the money will truly flow. Worse yet, if the NTIA rushed the process and pushed the money out faster, the vast majority would flow to the large incumbent internet providers who are best equipped to snarf up that money, he writes. In other words, the first Biden term will almost be over before anyone in poor rural counties or urban Wi-Fi deserts really see the impact of this spending.
—Here’s a fun interview at Democracy-Technologies.org with my friend Matt Stempeck, who is still valiantly steering the Civic Tech Field Guide after we launched it together (along with Erin Simpson). Matt sees a silver lining in the Covid-driven collapse of many civic coworking spaces and projects: around the time that more grassroots projects became unsustainable, a lot of skilled people began migrating into government jobs and have started making some much needed impact on the inside.
—Speaking of having an impact from the inside, here’s Code for America founder Jen Pahlka writing in the Washington Post (gift link) about why the state of New Jersey managed the surge of unemployment claims that flooded in during the start of the pandemic more successfully than most of their peers. She writes, “One of the secrets to the state’s success is a team of in-house experts: the New Jersey Office of Innovation. This was established in 2018 by Beth Noveck, one of my predecessors as U.S. deputy chief technology officer. Its mission is to improve residents’ lives by partnering with state departments. Instead of PhDs in government contracting, staff members have the skills that make applications easy to use: design, engineering and user research. The innovation team had been working with the New Jersey Department of Labor before the pandemic. When the crisis hit, the teams’ combined expertise in delivery and policy helped the state meet the surge.”
—We’re celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision today to reject the “independent state legislature” theory that would have enabled Republican-controlled legislatures to overturn the results of elections if they didn’t like them, but as election law expert Rick Hasen points out, the court’s decision leaves a lot of room for concern. As he sees it, the Supreme Court is reserving for itself the power to intervene in highly-charged election disputes. “This is a bad, but not awful, result,” he writes.
—Say hello to Democracy Next’s spanking new website.
End Times
—Gotta get some of these for the office bathrooms.
Summer programming note: I’m taking off next week to catch up on my beach reading. See you in two weeks!