BroadSnark

I moseyed over to Occupy K Street last night for the general assembly and the action committee meeting. Not much to say about the GA – except maybe to mention that there was a serious shortage of women. Of the two that spoke, one offered to take notes and the other was reporting back from the committee that cleans and does dishes.  I’ll let you make your own comments.

The action committee meeting was much more interesting. If you have been following a certain blogger (who I most definitely would never, ever socialize with – please don’t ban me too) then you know that the action committee is exhibiting some of DCs most common ailments.

There are a whole lot of people in this town who make their living in orgs that lobby. That includes me, by the way. I work in the advocacy department of the Oxfam International Secretariat. I don’t lobby. I make sure people get paychecks and that their insurance doesn’t get cancelled. (There. Full disclosure. Happy now?)

I don’t actually think lobbying is very useful. I do think the watchdog role we play has some use. My peeps watch the World Bank and IMF. But I stay the hell away from all that shit in my spare time. I’m sure a lot of the people down at occupy are like me. They are paying their rent by working in an org that they hope doesn’t do more harm than good and are happy to have an outlet for the stuff that might matter. The revolution will not be funded and all that.

The thing is, it is extremely difficult to get out of the professional, policy, advocacy, pro-democrat mindset in this town. And not everyone is just paying the bills. There are a lot of climbers in DC. That includes lots of people in organizations that you may think are warm and fuzzy.

Happily, the first part of the action committee went pretty well. While we were still talking national politics, the general tone was that democrats and republicans are equally responsible for our mess and should all be targets. So far so good.

But then the conversation turned to actions sponsored by SEIU et al. While the committee separated itself from them to some extent, we were still basically talking about actions that will inevitably connect Occupy with organizations that spend money and energy to elect democrats to office.

One minute we were talking about how fucked up it is that the democrats are having a $1,000 a plate fundraising dinner. The next minute we were talking about supporting (however nominally) an organization that funnels millions of dollars to democrats in order to get access to the halls of congress.  (How’s that been working out for you, SEIU?)

Orgs that focus on the political process drain all our energy. They are part of the problem. Any organization that is taking our money and giving it to political candidates needs to be a target. They are screwing us. The idea of marching on K street with a bunch of lobbyists (albeit more benign ones) makes my brain hurt.

Nonprofits shouldn’t get a pass either. We spend too much money on the political process as well. We can’t support candidates, but we spend a lot of time on policy. I should note here that, while the Oxfam International Secretariat is not unionized, Oxfam America is represented by…wait for it… SEIU.  (It may be very awkward in the office tomorrow.)

I’m not saying that nobody should ever lobby for anything. People have immediate and pressing needs. Sometimes a minor reform can actually help somebody without increasing the state’s power. Changing the crack to powder cocaine sentencing discrepancy does not challenge the racist prison industrial complex. Though I’m sure those people getting out of prison a bit early are glad someone did it.

But that is not radical change. And people need to recognize that being reformist and radical at the same time is damn near impossible.

The capital occupies this city. It is just too tempting for activists to focus on big, sexy targets like congress, especially in a town where so many people move here specifically to focus on national and international politics. Then we have the continuous stream of outside protesters that come in needing coordination, support, and places to stay.

It weakens us.

All the time that we spend on protesting the national government or supporting the constant stream of demonstrators to the capital is time we do not spend on local DC issues. We live in a city that has hideous statistics. Three out of four African American men in DC will spend time in prison. Our illiteracy rates are through the roof. Our AIDS rates are astronomical. Unemployment may be as high as 50% in some areas.

And by allowing ourselves to be sucked into the national political scene again and again we lose so many potential allies that would work with us if we were focusing on their daily struggles.

Another thing I noticed last night, and that I have noticed in lots of activisty spaces in DC, is the rather narrow age range present. I was probably one of the oldest farts there. We live in a city that is packed with people who have experience with everything from CORE to ActUp. Where are they at?

It seems to me that a lot of activists get burned out on the national protest scene. It is emotionally draining and shows very little results. A person can only do that for so long. Some of those people go off and work in small orgs focusing on local issues. Those people need our support and we need their experience.

I don’t know how we avoid getting caught in the national, international, labor, NGO, lobby black hole. I’m not sure if the reform v. radical or agitating v. organizing conflicts are resolvable – or even manageable. And I have no idea if we can actually get more people in on this conversation. But I don’t see where things are going if we don’t try.

Last week, I was invited to an awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center. The event was put on by an organization called Vital Voices, an NGO that “trains and empowers emerging women leaders and social entrepreneurs around the globe, enabling them to create a better world for us all.”

Sunitha Krishnan, won the human rights award. Liron Peleg-Hadomi and Noha Khatieb won the Fern Holland award. Even a cynic like me finds it difficult to watch the linked videos without being a little inspired. In Sunitha’s case, that is despite my generally negative view of people in the rescue industry. (Just count how many times Sunitha says “I” and “rescued” in this TED talk).

But it isn’t the messianic complexes of so many in the non-profit world that really made the event horrific. That I could deal with. The real problem was who put on the event and what their agenda is. You see, Vital Voices was started by Hilary Clinton and Madeleine Albright back when Clinton was first lady. The organization still receives government funding. They also receive funding from a smorgasbord of some of the most hideously destructive private corporations.  If you want to get an idea of who this organization is built to serve, take a look at their board list.

So there I was, watching a splashy awards show that cost who knows how much of the organization’s multi million dollar budget. (They pulled in over 12 million dollars in 2009.) There I was watching Hilary Clinton march up on stage to introduce an event that honored women in countries like Afghanistan and Haiti – countries Clinton and her closest pals played a large part in fucking up.

I had to watch as they honored Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a woman who never met a war she didn’t like and who was rated 100% by the Christian Coalition and 0% by the HRC. Her voting record is just anti-human. And what about some of the other presenters/agents of misinformation. Wolf Blitzer? He may as well be paid by the Department of Defense. He does their work for them. Cokie Roberts? She robotically spews conservative talking points on trade and uncritically accepts conflating Iraq with terrorism.

Even worse was the sponsorship.  Much of the time the event felt like an ad for Goldman Sachs. Fatema Akbari, who won the entrepreneurial achievement award, actually thanked Goldman Sachs during her speech. Yes. Thank you Goldman Sachs.  Thanks for helping to blow up the world economy. Thanks for gambling on food and energy futures. Thanks for so generously letting all your employees work in the government. Everything is all better now that you supported a woman’s business in Afghanistan.

I wanted to punch somebody.

Much like my experiences working at that hotel in Miami, the Vital Voices event made abundantly clear how elites in politics, media, and corporations all merge into one amorphous blob of self-congratulatory power. And I have little doubt in my mind that most of them actually believe that their little philanthropic show makes them upstanding people, fighting the good fight. The delusion is infuriating.

So what do we do when social justice is co-opted by power? How do we compete against a money drop by Goldman Sachs when we can barely scrape together money to bring coffee to a meeting? How do we confront the people who use justice for women as a front for wars and crooks? How do we deal with the twenty-something girl who thinks Hilary Clinton is some kind of hero? How do we break the illusion?

I signed up to be a literacy tutor with an organization here in DC.  The program requires a half day training class.  Looking around at the other trainees, I noticed a huge gender imbalance.  Sure enough, the trainer soon confirmed that, while 55% of the learners are male, only 22% of the tutors are.

There are similar discrepancies in my day job.  Ever since I switched from for-profit to non-profit work, I have been surrounded by mostly women.  (Of course, there has almost always been an old white guy running the place, but that’s a subject for another post.)  This isn’t just a fluke of my experience.  Seventy percent of nonprofit workers are women.

Then last week I read this article about volunteer vacations.  Apparently, about 70% of volunteer vacationers are women too.  So I did a little snooping on volunteer rates overall.  Nationwide, about 10 million more women than men volunteer.  And they put in 4.6 billion hours to men’s 3.5.

An even bigger discrepancy is in what kinds of volunteer work men and women do.  While 20% of our volunteer time goes to tutoring and teaching, teaching doesn’t even show up in the top volunteer categories for men.  Instead, almost 19% of men volunteers are volunteering in the “professional/management” category, a category that doesn’t break the top spots for women.

Workforce participation can’t completely explain it.  While it is true that men have a higher workforce participation rate,  most of that difference is with women who are married or separated and most likely have children and all the work that goes with them.  And studies show that women who both work and have kids do more housework and get less sleep while their men get more free time.  Besides, none of that would explain the massive discrepancies in the nonprofit field or certain types of volunteer work.

This is particularly interesting to me because I have found my life has become oddly gendered.  In my day job and my volunteer work, I am surrounded by women.  But in my interactions with other anarchists and atheists, I am surrounded by men.  That is particularly true whenever something involves theoretical masturbation or high profile, confrontational actions.

So what gives men?  If you’re a man, do you volunteer?  Doing what?  Any theories on why men are so much less likely to do unglorified, unpaid/low-paid, but imminently necessary tasks in life?  (Note:  I am highly prejudiced toward nurture over nature, so if you try to make a nature claim, back it up with some studies please.)

There has been a lot of internet chatter on what organizations to donate to in order to best help the Haitian people.  Naturally, you want the maximum amount of your dollars to go to the people who need it.  So you read articles like this one about Yele or you go to charity navigator and you check out what percentage of donations go to program vs. administration or fundraising.

The thing is, those percentages can be deceiving. One of the biggest expenses for any nonprofit is salary costs.  So while your idea of “program cost” might be medicine bought and provided for someone in need.  In actuality, program cost might be the salary of the program assistant who does paperwork in the office.

Or let’s say you receive an email report from a nonprofit that also includes a link for donations.  You might think that goes to fundraising, but it probably gets coded with media, outreach, or campaigning.

How an organization codes things depends a lot on the person doing the coding.  Some organizations are more likely to code things to show less administrative costs.  Organizations that have been around longer have more experienced staff who understand that donors don’t want to see high admin costs.  Organizations that receive restrictive grants will have more constraints they are working within.  Large organizations are often more closely scrutinized.

Low administrative costs could also mean that administrative people are being screwed.  The organization could be using a ton of unpaid interns to do work.  Not only are they relying on free labor, they are restricting their labor pool to only those privileged enough to be able to work for free.  Or they could just be underpaying their admin staff.  I’ve seen full time admin positions in New York being offered less than $30,000 a year.  Do you really want to support an org that doesn’t pay its people enough to even pay the rent?

All of that is to say that you should not use program cost percentage as your only decision maker.

Then there is the choice between large and small organizations.  In the case of an emergency situation like Haiti, there are many large humanitarian organizations who have vast experience with catastrophes.  They know how to set up camps and what to do for sanitation.  They are experts at providing potable water and avoiding diseases.  That is invaluable expertise.  They have also been around long enough to have tested systems and they probably have survived a lot of scrutiny.

But there are downsides to larger organizations.  Many of them do not work in Haiti all year round, although they may begin to now (especially if they receive massive funds that have been restricted to use in Haiti*).  Aid workers flown in will not necessarily have knowledge of the language, community, politics, and culture – knowledge that will also be important in the coming days.  Large organizations can be bureaucratic and experience diseconomies of scale.  They are usually heavily populated by managerial class elites from the United States and Europe.

Smaller, local organizations are closer to the community.  They are more likely to have local staff in key decision-making positions.  Your money won’t go to pay salaries of people based in London or DC.  Their people will be sticking around.  They won’t be moving on to the next catastrophe when the immediate crisis is over.  They don’t require large bureaucracies or  thousands of dollars in conference calls.

But small organizations have their problems too.   They can’t respond on the same scale as large organizations.  Their inexperience can be costly.  There may be less accountability, because fewer eyes are on them.  The staff are even more likely to be massively underpaid.  Their equipment is probably held together with duck tape and rubber bands.  They are less stable, especially when new, and have fewer processes.  The loss of one employee (and their institutional knowledge) can set the organization back months or years.

There is no perfect organization.  If you want a guarantee that your money will go straight into the hand or mouth of a Haitian, then you should go to Haiti or Miami or New York and drop a wad of cash on someone.  If you donate to a charity, you need to accept that some of your money will be spent on administration.  Some may be spent on fundraising.  A large portion will pay staff costs (program and otherwise).  Some money will likely be wasted.  Some may even be stolen.  Given the absolute chaos in Haiti, expecting that not to be the case is just unrealistic.

So how do you decide?

Check the organization out.  Go to Charity Navigator or Guidestar or the charity’s website.  Look what people have to say about them.  Read their 990s (the form U.S. nonprofits have to file with the IRS) or their annual report.

Who are the board members? How much do the big shots make – officers and employees?  Board compensation is reported on 990s, as are salaries of some highly compensated employees.

How are their expenses broken down by function?  One organization may have a higher percentage of program costs, but it is all in staff salaries. Another organization may have lower program costs but give that money in direct aid.  One is not necessarily better than the other (humanitarian staff need to get paid), but it gives a more detailed picture than just program v. management or fundraising.

Does the organization have local offices?  Have they been working in country for a long time?  Does it look like they will stick around?  Are they staffed by locals or is it all people from the U.S. or Europe?

What kind of programs do they do?  Are they in keeping with your values?  If you are passionate about environmental issues or health care for all, then you should support organizations whose mission most closely matches your own.

If the organization doesn’t have much history, are you willing to treat it like a startup?  Are the ideas so great that you are willing to risk your donation on the chance that they can use this new (extremely rare)  influx of capital to get their dreams off the ground?

My recommendation is to spread it around.  Give some money to a large experienced organization with the planes and equipment ready to address the rescue, food, water, and sanitation needs. But also give money to smaller and/or local organizations whose salaries are paying locals and who are likely to stick around.  Haiti will need help long after the Red Cross moves on to the next disaster.

You can find a comprehensive list of organizations to donate to here.

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* If you send money and tell an organization that you want it to be used for a certain project or place, they must do that.  In most circumstances, I would actually discourage you from restricting your money.  For smaller nonprofits, funds for basic expenses are hard to come by.  Having all their funding restricted actually weakens the organization and, in the end, could lead to less accountability – no money for auditors, bookkeeping staff, board training, etc.

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Disclaimer:  All thoughts and opinions on my site belong to me alone.  I am usually quite careful not to post anything even remotely related to my day job.  This post is a bit close to the line, as I work for an organization that is working in Haiti.  They are not an organization that I have listed or talked about on my blog.  I have no intention of recommending or not recommending them.  If you know where I work, nothing should be read into that.  I just don’t want to have to vet my blog through my work and, if I spoke about them directly, I would feel that obligation.

The situation in Mexico keeps degrading.  Predictably, increased police and military are being used against more than just drug cartels.  I mean they are so handy at getting rid of unions.  Also, they don’t actually have to worry about trials or anything, they can just shoot people and then kick back with a cold one.

Wiretap says that Latinos are Underrepresented in Nonprofits.  I can testify to that, having worked in Cali nonprofits for six years.  They say there is some better news when it comes to board representation, but I’m fairly sure those figures are misleading.  In Central California, the same handful of Latinos were on many, many boards.  In other words, they are counting the same few Latinos over and over.

Yvette brings up a good point about why women who are anti-porn don’t have equally scathing critiques about working at McDonalds.  Those women probably don’t buy porn, but they do buy cheap food from poor women (as I’ve written about before).

Janelle wrote a great article about sharing on Trust is the Only Currency.  It’s amazing how many ways there are to shift our lives in a more cooperative direction.

And, finally, this article over at the New York Review of Books talks about nonviolent revolutions since 1989.  It’s long, but there is a lot to debate about in the piece (especially for the revolutionarily inclined).