staff

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, a home-grown non-profit that trains, mobilizes, and elects new progressive leaders in Montana.

When Forward Montana started back in 2004, we were an all-volunteer operation. At the beginning, we also thought it likely that we would stay that way. The core group had skills -- raising big checks was not one of them.

So we worked in coalition to move from youth voter turnout by phones to using doors instead. And then we launched a giant confirmation battle targeting the student member of the board of regents and won -- something that hadn't been done in 20 years, much less by a volunteer operation.

There's an energy to volunteer operations, including campus groups, where people who aren't making any money feel empowered to make the decisions regarding what the organization does. Strangely enough, getting staff can almost kill that initiative. When you're all going broke for the love of it, there's solidarity. When people start getting paid, it's easy to establish unnecessary hierarchies and for others to assume that the people getting paid can get the work done.