After the Boom, the Bust?

In 2004, we had a boom year in youth organizing. Upwards of $40 million was dumped into new organizations and new strategies to engage young voters in the election of John Kerry as President. A year later, in 2005, we saw a huge belt-tightening as, in the face of an unexpected loss, funders pulled back to rethink their strategies. With the exception of a few groups who emerged on the scene that year to become major players - Campus Progress and Young People For - most organizations either closed up shop in 2005 or saw a major belt tightening.

So my question is this: will we see a similar pattern in this coming year? I don't know, but I can say that 2008 is very different from 2004, and that could lead to a very different outcome in 2009 than we saw in '05. What's different?

• The organizations that lasted beyond 2005 are more stable now than they were back then and generally have more diverse funding streams. Decisions by one donor are less likely to affect their ability to operate.
• This year, investors only pumped around 1/4 of the money into independent youth organizing as they did in 2004, and a lot of that was supplemental so those organizations could scale up and do more during a big election. That money may disappear, but won't have a huge effect on operating budgets.
• There were fewer start ups this year due to the fact that we were not starting from scratch - good organizations were already formed to handle a lot of the task of reaching young voters.
• The biggest start-up of all was Students for Barack Obama, which never relied on big donors, but lived off volunteer efforts and campaign budgets. What happens to SFBO isn't about funders drawing down their support, but the will of an Obama administration to create a lasting institution like Governor Dean did with Democracy for America, or find a way to effectively merge SFBO into the Obama administration
• We won. Big time. And everyone likes to support a winning strategy.

For sure we will lose a few small start-ups, but hopefully any new/best practices they pioneered will be taken up by the organizations that do stick around. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I'm not too fearful that 2009 will be Dark Days like 2005 was after the Kerry defeat. Time will tell.