Organizational Models: Deconstructing Music for America

(by samuel)

hey gang.

i'm going to try to address a lot of points. i will probably fail.

i've been with mfa for, i think, just about as long as anybody. i first got shacked up with mfa in december of 03. i've watched a lot of stuff come and go. most of you in this discussion know this, and i say it only as a preface: i have a hard time dissecting my experiences into conlclusions about what should be done in youth organizing as a whole, so i'll stick mainly to the narrative of what's happened to me as an mfa volunteer, and hopefully you people with better heads for organizational models can provide some analysis.

field
i agree with joe that this is the missing limb. i worked under taya when she was minnesota's state coordinator, and there tried to implement a number of schemes, and also tried to scale them outwards. the scheme that showed the most promise, though it never went much of anywhere, was the scene leader / team leader scheme. at one of our monthly meetings (a thing that was at one point an intractble piece of the fabric of how mfa worked, and an imminently good idea, i think) we came up witht he idea of dividing up what mfa does into two categories: music and politics. each music scene was to have a liaison. the punks would get a rep, the hip hop heads another, the r and b folks would have someone - and these people would stay in touch with the bands in their scene, leaning heavily on the state coordinator for support, logistics, and know-how. team leaders would take on projects and areas of political activity - such as organizing coordinated efforts to get mayors out to mfa shows, getting letters to the editor published, endorsing candidates, and so on. scene and team leaders would meet with the state coordinator on a somewhat regular basis, give each other updates, and coordinate with one another. the state coordinator's job would be to fill in the holes and to develop volunteers into leaders.

so if it showed such promise, what happened?

when mark says

Attempts at getting our committed Minnesota community to organize themselves failed[...]. We provided them with their own website in hopes that it would jumpstart the action, but at the end of the day we were asking too much from unpaid volunteers.

he's talking more or less about me and those ideas.

i tried to carve out an identity for mfa in the local ska and punk scene, and was failrly successful in that mfa became a staple part of the scene in spring 2004. i got friendly with a lot of local acts that regularly opened for bigger touring acts, and was present at an awful lot of shows. it got to the point that when the band would give a shoutout to the mfa booth, the crowd would cheer before the band could tell them who we were. i even got a humber of touring acts to give tentative yesses to having mfa on their tours (i'm not sure if any of them ever worked out though).

when i left, mfa left.

i thought this kind of decentralization was a good thing, and i tried to provide minnesota and mfa with a working model before i left - as i knew i would be doing soon. i offered a model whereby people would recruit their local bands to mfa, set them up with a contact to the music director, and off they go. this was met with a response whose benefits and detractions i'm still trying to work out: "just do it. get them the materials and you then become mfa. go to the shows, do your thing. you don't need us."

and in a sense that works. i was certainly able to go to a hell of a lot of shows in the spring of 04. but again, when i left, the whole thing went up in smoke. ideally i would have liked to have handed off my role to someone else, and i spent a good deal of time looking for someone to train into the position, but absent the promise of monetary comensation, nothing happened. that kind of decentralization and member ownership of the organization is i think highly desirable and can be quite effective, but absent a well-designed support structure, immediately falls apart.

as for my own contacts: because it was unclear who those relationships should be handed off to, they went to no one. i still have the spreadsheet of all of the local bands in minneapolis that said they'd love to have us at their shows. there hasn't been a local show in the tc on the mfa calendar for ages.

venues

Both of you talked about the importance of local places for local MFA organizing to live. Mike hinted towards some sort of "partner venue" model which could work. I'd love to talk more about that. Can someone fill me in on what happend with venue partnerships in '04? What did MFA attempt, and why did it fail?
-mark

allow me to fill us all in.

the transient nature of music communites makes what we do hard, and a stable home would go a long way towards creating bettter communities. we had for a while a "program" whereby you'd get a venue to agree to have you once a month at their shows, and you'd give them cocktail napkins, an mfa hand-stamp to use instead of ther own stamp for over 21ers, etc. you'd have a table, it'd be great. ultimately the idea was to implant yourself as a piece of the culture of that bar, that stage, that venue, thereby becoming a piece of the youth culture and building longer-lasting relationships between volunteers, and so on.

i got about five venues to agree to this in minneapolis (with varying degrees of enthusiam) - a significant piece of musical real estate in the twin cities. but they all fell through because nobody was keeping track of the logistics. nobody was following the calendars and requesting certain shows, nobody was checking up to see who had materials and who needed them, getting .png logos to the venues for links on websites, and so on. i couldn't do it because i was in college and just didn't have the time. in organizational model terms, this means asking too much of unpaid volunteers.

but because it was i who had recruited the venues, it was i that had the personal relationships, and mfa staff found it hard to deal with the venues, the venues didn't know who to contact, and it all got sticky and defaulted to broken. josh needn't have put his comment on the subject in theoretical terms:

If we think the volunteer process is messed up now, try handing off responsibility for making it work from venue to venue. It will get worse.

i lived through exactly that. as a result of these structural vagueries, mfa lost not only a lot of volunteers but also the opportunity to become an ingrained part of the live music culture in the twin cities - a thing which once seemed not only possible, but in tangible reach.

i understand we also had some people working on the venue thing in seattle. i don't know what happened there.

transience
i think my experience shows some structural hindrances that mfa will always suffer from. one advantage that many comparable (older) groups have over us is age and stability. as a youth-oriented organization, we will perpetually be dealing with people who are moving around, shifting states at the end of every semester break, and packing up and moving off to new cities at a moment's notice. which is precisely what happened to minnesota. it's tough to build strong communities in that environment, because communities are personal relationships.

i don't know how you overcome the problems cause by the transience of the youth.

field
in this context alex's answer to the million dollar question is well taken:

How does a staff of 6-12 maintain meaningful, personal contact with 70,000 kids?

It doesn't, especially not when all of the staff are located in one location, far from almost all of the nation's political action.

alex's dig at the choice to move to san francisco is a bit misplaced, but the point remains: 12 people can't manage 70,000. especially when there is no field department. as of now, as far as i know, there is no one in charge of the actual people making up mfa - there are poeple in charge of the bands, the venues, tha materials, the artwork, and so on, but no one paid to deal with the people. the closest thing to dealing with the people is mark dealing with the website, which is as far as i can tell mfa's only contact with its membership.

that's insane.

alex and i are of the same generation of mfa volunteers, and i am like him in that if the people at mfa had not taken such a personal interest in me and encouraged my thinking and my work, i almost certainly would never have become so politicized. i probably would have stuck with the social justice-y work that i inherited from my parents, and would never have learned the blockquote tag, or learned to manage drupal websites. i certainly wouldn't be involved in this discussion as to the scalable aspects of functional online youth organizing.

in early 2004 there was a small and obvious community of dedicated people, and it was easy to maintain relationships with them, easy to shape them into something resembling an effective team. because of the organizations's success, however, staff could not keep up those kinds of relationships with its base. and that's where we started to falter. those relaitonships eventually broke down online as well, with the old guard of mfa people largely abandoning the website, but the place we felt it first was field. suddenly discussion stopped at all levels of doing anything but the most streamlined mfa process: getting attached to a mid-level band's tour, registering voters and givingout issue cards, and producing propaganda for the website and newsletter. to do anything else at all, we needed field people - local people - and the money and the management wasn't there to support the structure.

when we did have field people - the state coordinators, it was far from rosy. a lot of shit didn't work. people flaked out, there was a lack of vision, and almost no management experience. the lesson that mfa apparently learned was that we couldn't afford to do local pople - because people, as josh noted, are expensive, and as the org discovered, often suck. i'm not sure that the lesson we learned - that we should streamline the field people out of the operation - is valid. it could be, i'm open to that possibility. but it's hard to isolate the variables here. was it because the model was inneffective, or because of our collective lack of experience?

did the system suck, or did we?

it might be useful to remember how taya hired some of these people. she took a road trip across the states dropping in on coffee shops and hiring people on the spot - no grooming, no testing, no climbing the ladder. that was insane. when she left minnesota to be the national volunteer coordinatrix she had to sucker her roommate into being minnesota's state coordinator because i was moving back to new mexico and couldn't take over. under the new leadership, minnesota did, predictably, worse.

maybe i'm not in a position to make the judgement that the reasons that field failed were more skill-related than model-related, but that's the way it feels. the money, of course, you also can't get around. and if mfa and similar gruops can't afford quality local leadership, then that's how it is. that's what you have to work with.

But it was a fundamental part of the original idea behind the organization.
-mike

and that's what was so exciting to me about it at the time.

i remember a time when a handful of volunteers were on the staff email list and realy had a hand in the direction and function of the organization. while i recognize that this might not be a model that you might want to keep, i think it can work on a modified level: why is the only newsletter there is sent out to all 70,000 members? why is there no insider community of functional volunteers contributing to the machinations of the beast? i think that josh's proposed overhaul of the profile system is totally wise, and could help create the kinds of communities that you'd want to have getting an insider newsletter lacking in propaganda and heavy in functional business.

i have over the last year or so found it exptremely hard to give to mfa. i went so far as to get them to pay me to write a volunteer structure and political handbook. it was a thinly veiled attempt at getting them to pay me to help direct mfa's course.

the volunteer structure i imagined is here. the political handbook has been taken down, but some of its elements - none of the localized elements - have been incorporated into mfa's "politix" tab here.

eventually i was forced to think that mfa had wasted their seven hundred bucks, because almost none of what i wrote or advised ever got used. personal relationships with staff had all broken down, and i no longer had a clue who i should even talk to about various ideas.

at first i felt kicked out of the loop - and then i realized that there was no longer a loop to be in. i think this is a problem with a lot of organizations. in working for the league i found that you were either a chapter head or out of the loop. a ranking system of volunteers is sorely needed by a lot of orgs - some way to identify, further rope in, utilize, and develop your best volunteer talent.

strategic vision
one of the themes i've harped on endlessy over on the mfa forums has been that once we succeed, we immediately fail. after engaging a young person to be interested in politics, we are powerless to do anything else. and that interest is itself a victory - but much potential is going to waste.

one strategy, apparently the "gateway" strategy so villified by alex (somwhere in here) is to feed kids like me into other organizations. i have mixed feelings about that.

I can recruit much more efficiently for the League by recruiting-directly-for-the-League, than by getting them on MFA's list and hoping some transformation will occur. There's gotta be more if you want to make the effort worthwhile.
-joe

mike's counter point is well taken that we're reaching into places that the rest of the young progressives types can't. on the other hand i agree with joe that we could be doing a whole lot more than handing out issue cards, collecting email addresses, and registering a handufl of people to vote. we occupy a unique position, and what it seems everyone agrees on is that we need to be doing a better job of exploiting it.

part of what mfa suffers from is lack of strategic vision. my strategic bent has always been to move away froma rock-the-vote model and towards more overt, direct political connection - overt connection to candidates. as exibit A, i present my second ever blog post on mfa, entitled strategery.

while josh's point that foisting a party line on a loose collection of touring bands and their fans is not only unmanageable but antithetical to mfa's vision is entirely right, ultimately elections and parties are where mfa leads. as such the reluctance to go the route of PAC as oposed to 501-c-3 i find distasteful. i've long sought out ways that local mfa gourps can get involved with local candidates for office and direct, concrete political action. most of these efforts have failed. in part becuase of my own youth and inexperience, my lack of relationships and skills in the local political woprld, and partly because most mfa staff have for one reason or aother looked at me like i'm an alien when i've tried to push the topic.

i've tried to find ways to make mfa shows themselves more political events - keeping a polaroid camera in the gearbox and snapping shots of people to sign and send in to senators as a more personal way of saying "hey, don't sign HR 122fucked-up". and so on. thus far they've all evaporated in wisps of crack-pipe smoke.

conclusions
i'm at a loss for a cohesive vision towards fixing mfa's strategic malaise, and even further lost when diagnosing future steps towards a more effective model for other youth organizations.

i know only what i have done and failed at. the only things that have ever motivated me to further action are personal relationships, not newsletter content. as such i have always pushed for a more personal and local mfa. but it's tough to weasel past the money and management issues involved in such an endeavor.

i see two roads for mfa:
breadth of contact, and depth of contact.
the breadth road seems to have been where they'be been heading: wider communites introduced to progressive propaganda, and call it a day.
depth, whereby they sacrifice some size in order to create more effective young politicos.

perhaps it's not a zero sum game, and there are ways to keep our breadth and find creative ways to achieve depth absent a sizable field department - such as becoming a feeder organisation. perhaps not.