organizing

Looking to get involved in progressive youth organizing?

I got a lot of emails from folks looking for job candidates, pimping conferences, and scouring or interns. It seemed to make sense for me to put out a call and compile as much as I could into on place. So here's a fairly comprehensive listing of all the jobs, internships, and conferences that can help you do it.

I hope folks find this valuable. Also, I'm pretty appalled that there is no central repository for stuff like this. There are places to go, sure - NOI's job boards, Idealist.org, Democratic GAIN, etc. but all of those seem somewhat incomplete and are hard to navigate. Building a real "youth movement job board" isn't at all a bad idea and it could probably be done super cheap if it was all done wiki style.

Job listings in the extended entry. Please spread widely.

Zack Exley has a must-read piece posted to Open Left about how the campaigns - specifically the Clinton campaign - is grooming the next generation of field organizers.

Seriously, this is mandatory reading.

It took me a while to pick up on this whole Facebook business, but when I finally did... WOO what a blast! While it lasted anyway.

See, not so long after I logged on for the first time, Facebook shut down my account.
But I don't hold it against them. I wasn't playing by their rules -- it's fair, and it's square.
So I got some explaining to do.

Now, I was virtually dragged into Facebook--and when I finally joined it, it wasn't just to post silly pictures and update my status. I joined to organize.

I was organizing a group of people who have been institutionally exploited for years, but who have not previously had any viable way to speak up for themselves. This group is comprised of young, progressive activists--fellow veterans of the Fund for Public Interest Research, Public Interest Research Groups, and Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated.

SOME BACKGROUND!

The Fund, PIRGs, and GCI are interconnected organizations that run fundraising canvasses for a huge chunk of the progressive world. Veterans of these organizations have taken to the internet before to call for change to their notorious labor conditions, and there were a number of groups on Facebook that had already been started in protest of their policies. But these were just scattered outbursts of frutration leading nowhere. The organizers needed organizing.

If I may say so myself, I was good at organizing my fellow veterans. I have many years of experience as an "organizer" for the Fund and GCI; I'd worked in every town, I'd worked on every campaign. I'd trained hundreds of people and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, lied to my staff about how our campaigns worked, fired people for any old reason just to get rid of them, and taught young idealists to think about grassroots activism in terms of cold, inhuman numbers. And when the situations arose, I busted up the early formations of what could have become a...shhh...union. Eventually it all reached a certain point when I stopped to think about it all and decided that no, this isn't how a progressive movement is built, and yes, I was finally pissed off.

Yes, I announced on my new Facebook profile, I am still pissed off. There's a lot to be pissed off about.

See, over the course of the second half of 2006, I'd watched with budding interest as some of these GCI and Fund veterans turned to the blogosphere to expose these practices and explain how they are harmful to the progressive movement. I'd watched with even more interest as they were dismissed, derided, and demeaned by defenders of the Fund and GCI. But the defenders always lost the argument. Many of them even ended up agreeing with the protesters in the end. I did as well. The point was very much made: these organizations, the ones I'd sacrificed years of my life for, were hurting the progressive grassroots. Not because they were staffed by bad people; but because they were being led by a handful of prideful, fearful, haughty leaders who retain power under the dangerous condition of being simultaneously out of touch and wholly unaccountable.

Almost every single person I knew, inside the organization and out, had been personally burned by this crisis of leadership - whether they were willing to admit to it or not. Now that it was all being blogged about in public, people openly wondered whether anything could ever be done to fix the system.

Eventually, the blog posts died down. My friends in PIRG and GCI pretended they didn't exist any more. If the posts were ever brought up, they were quickly dismissed as the delusional rantings of a rabid few losers in pajamas.

And yet, the unrest continued to brew. People kept reading the blog posts and spreading the word among themselves. This year, a group of canvassers from the Fund filed a class action lawsuit seeking to recover unpaid wages. A group from GCI sought to do the same thing. They needed to spread the word and recruit others.

And so I was selected to go to the place where the people were: Facebook.

So today I want to riff a little on numbers 35-39 of my youth vote theses:

35. Culture is a progressive's natural advantage.  We should use it.
36. 95% of the people in these constituencies won't ever care about politics as much as you do
    
37. Asking them to participate in hard core political actions (canvassing, phone banking, etc.) as their first introduction to politics is doomed to failure and low conversion rates.
    
38. Politics must be made relevant to the life of a person if you want them to participate and make civic participation a habit.
    
39. This means there must be a ladder of participation providing substantive involvement for people at multiple levels of engagement.

Culture is a progressive's natural advantage.  From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, the creative class leans heavily democratic.  Most often, that translates into money for campaigns, or a pretty face on the trail.  Rarely does it mean employing the natural talents of that segment of the base.  We see it when campaigns hire political consultants to manufacture stale, uninspiring ads while guys like Bill Hillsman get locked out.  This is as true on campus and among young professionals as it is among the "adults." Yet if you look at the work of someone like Michael Moore, or watch An Inconvenient Truth, creative use of media (old and new) can be one of our biggest assets.  Considering their media consumption habits and the growth of new outlets for that creative energy online, this is doubly true when reaching out to young people.

I don't mean to traffic in stereotypes - there are certainly exceptions to what I'm about to say - but in general, political involvement on campus and among young professionals typically draws membership from a specific type of person: (ex)poli-sci majors and aspiring politicians/staffers/policy wonks.  The volunteer and leadership opportunities in youth activism are similarly limited: donate money, canvass, phone bank.  

I fully understand that democratic youth groups are under enormous pressure to justify their existence to the party and to political operatives.  That means they need to quantify their work and produce tangible results: voters registered and GOTV'd; doors knocked and phone calls made.  Volunteer efforts are generally focused like a laser on producing the highest numbers possible in those categories.  But that leaves a lot of people who (understandably) don't want to participate in those activities out of the Party.

It doesn't have to be that way, and I worry that by not reaching out and involving these folks while they are young, we're making more work for ourselves (and shooting ourselves in the foot creatively) further down the line.  These lost volunteers have a lot to offer, and Democratic youth groups, and the progressive movement generally, need to make an effort to expand the scope of what it means to volunteer to include the types of activities and talents that these other people who are left out can offer.

As I work on my book, I'm writing about the many new organizations run by and for Millennials that have sprung up over the course of the last four years. Usually that means that I'm writing about how and why those organizations got started.

For instance, Drinking Liberally got its start because Justin Krebs and Matt O'Neil wanted to integrate their social lives with political discussion. They knew lots of folks in creative fields and in politics, and thought that the two crowds could learn a lot from each other through informal discussion over some pints. No organization existed to make those social ties, so they created one themselves. Music for America began because myself, Dan Droller and Franz Hartl saw first hand how traditional political action - protest - failed to stop the march to war. We were all avid music fans and concert goers and we all thought that Rock the Vote was a failure in mobilizing those communities. So we set out to mobilize them ourselves on behalf of Howard Dean, the credible anti-war candidate.

Campus Progress, Young People For, Oregon Bus Project, National Hip Hop Political Convention, The League of Young Voters, The Roosevelt Institution, DMI Scholars, Forward Montana, New Era Colorado, Punk Voter . . . the list of new organizations that were either started by Millennials or created for and primarly run by Millennials could go on, and each would have a similar story.

In each instance, I've focused on the how and why each organization started - where the funding came from, what hole the org filled in the larger progressive movement, etc. But there's another why. One that goes deeper than the strategic failures of existing organizations or the gaps in progressive youth infrastructure. Why has all of this social entrepreneurialism emerged from the minds and actions of young people?

Update: I've got this cross posted at MyDD and Daily Kos. Please give it a recommend.

We've talked a lot lately about young voters. How they turned out in near record numbers, and broke heavily democratic. Pollsters, bloggers and strategists are also busy promoting the fact that if a someone votes for a party 3 times (before they turn 30),they are likely to become a life-long voter for that party. The new conventional wisdom is this: "youth voted Democratic in 2004 and in 2006. If we get them in 2008, we've locked a generation the size of the baby boomers for life."

While technically correct, there are some assumptions in that statement that need to be challenged.

First, I think that the "2/3 shooting for 3/3" frame is the wrong mindset with which to approach the upcoming election. "Young voters" are not a solid block. The category is fluid by its very nature. I'm a cusp Millennial - 28 years old. After one more election I will no longer be a "young voter." From now on, every election will be 1/3, 2/3, or 3/3 for somebody, and we should create institutions and strategies that organize around that principle. Second, we need to recognize that, despite our recent successes, our current methods are inadequate to that task and adjust accordingly. Young voters still volunteer in their communities far more than they participate in politics. We can do better. And if we do, we'll win even bigger. In whatever strategies we adopt, our goal should be closing that "volunteer gap."

So let's talk about this.

Tired of discussions about whether progressive campaigns are "working" or not? Worn out from the protests of would-be progressive activists who feel like their commitment has been disrespected and soured? Exhausted by the effort of having to respond to each new argument carefully and with consideration for what could be done better?

We can help!

We'll teach you how to suppress discussion of campaign mismanagement in eight easy steps. Soon suppressing discussion will be so easy, you'll never again have to actually think about the way your campaigns are run!

Especially designed for your online needs!

Maybe you're experienced in this sort of thing through face-to-face arguments. (You probably know, then, how easy it is to deal with such a situation: question your opponent's commitment to the cause, say "I just don't think you're a good fit for this campaign," and get them outta there!) Maybe you're new to the online world, and baffled by this chaotic new medium. This guide is just for you! Whether you're a baby troll or an experienced flame warrior, we can teach the best way to make your online environment a safe, friendly, hierarchically-stable place. Soon the World Wide Web will be your home away from home — and like your home, the people who run your campaigns will be totally unaccountable for their actions!

It's easy!

Just follow the steps below in order.

Just came across this site - Lose the Label.

It's a group - they claim 700 members - that has emerged out of the Great FaceBook Revolt. They're looking to channel the energy created by the outrage at FaceBook's new interface into some actual activism. It will be interesting to see how - and if - this develops into something substantial.

Their plan is begging for some Drupal magic and they are looking for help getting their site running . . .