New Orleans There’s no question. A dues-based organizing model for community organizations and informal worker associations is a tough road to follow, even if all of the other variables are great. Members pay for the organization; therefore, it’s theirs in ownership, participation, and governance. This was the path that ACORN has travelled for more than 50 years with affiliate organizations being funded directly by their members anywhere from 95% to 35%. No sense in lying, it’s hard, takes a lot of discipline, and requires constant attention and fieldwork. As successful as ACORN has been, not many organizations have followed our model.
All of which found me reading an interesting article recently forwarded by a colleague published in Inside Philanthropy entitled “What If We Paid for Organizing” by Yoni Landau, who is CEO and Founder of Movement Labs, a pro-democracy program incubator that has conducted hundreds of randomized controlled trials in voter contact, and Matt Singer who is a partner at Impactual LLC, a pro-democracy social impact consulting firm. I don’t know either of these folks, but they are singing a verse from our song, so I’m glad to promote it in hopes it’s a hit.
Their mission in this piece is to make a case to foundations and funders for a different paradigm for program officers and their supplicant organizations. Rather than having executive directors and development teams polish proposals and curate relationships with funders, they advocate for a funding model that allows the value of the work on the ground to create the resources to sustain and build organizations.
The heart of their argument is that boots on the ground and the participation of community members should drive resources and that grassroots involvement from dues payments to bottoms in the chairs at meetings to feet in the street in actions should be rewarded by donors. They propose a matching model. Here’s how it might work:
If a large funder matches member contributions at 2:1, a member giving $15/month generates $45/month for the organization. An organization with 60 contributing, participating members generates over $30,000 a year in predictable, unrestricted revenue — enough to fund a part-time organizer or bridge the gap between election-cycle grants. And unlike a grant, as long as the matching funder remains committed, this revenue grows automatically as the organization grows its base. More importantly, matching support from funders who trust a member-driven model changes the incentive structure for organizational leaders…In a matching system, the rational strategy is to recruit and retain members — to hold events people actually want to attend, to build relationships that encourage people to invest their own money, to run campaigns that make membership feel meaningful.
Well, amen, you have my vote! Truth to tell, I’d sign up if it was a 1:1 match, 50 cents on the dollar match, or anything that rewarded the members going into their pockets with real dollars and sweat equity to get the chance to expand their organization and make it more sustainable.
They acknowledge organizations pursing something similar to ACORN’s is “brutally hard,” saying “This idea isn’t entirely new. ACORN built its organizing model on member dues — new organizing efforts had to hit a quota before the organizing could even start.” Our 5 members in the first 10 days in Canada, Cleveland, and elsewhere around the world right now is still what determines whether an organizer is brought on the staff. At the same time, their participation system for funders would be a breakthrough and slice through the bull to get to the brass, allowing the base to establish the value of the organization itself, rather than being propped up by external money. Furthermore, it actually would empower people themselves and be sustainable, which is the critical point of community organizing, rather than enabling advocates until their money runs out.
Program officers with jobs on the line might be the first great wall of resistance as well as executive directors and organizations currently privileged by the existing funding system, no matter how dysfunctional. I’m not saying that foundations and donors will line up to adopt this model, but they should. It would be a gamechanger, and actually build power in the hands where it should be wielded, rather than elsewhere. We would sign up to prove the viability of this system tomorrow!