The Emerging Progressive Leadership Pipeline

In discussing a new fellowship offered by the Open Society Institute, Josh Bolotsky of Living Liberally has written a vital post on Open Left about the emerging progressive leadership training pipeline. Read it.

Here's an excerpt:

Like so much of the frenzied progressive infrastructure-building of the last few years, much of the netroots support for these types of activist-in-training programs comes from the often correct perception that given the huge amount of ground left to cover in catching up to what the institutional right has done, we better get cracking on "the progressive version of" whatever given aspect of conservative advantage we seek to emulate - if we can just start with our own progressive version, in other words, we'll be on the right track. As someone who spent time as the Chair of a major College Democrats state federation, I can anecdotally attest to the kind of forced comparison points you often hear from frustrated students - that Campus Progress is or should be "the progressive version of" Young Americans for Freedom, or the Center for Progressive Leadership is or should be "the progressive version of" the Leadership Institute, and so on. In other words, we're so frustrated at how far behind we are in the race that we're looking for the reflexive response, which is a counterpart above all else - just as we might look at, say, Air America Radio to be "the progressive version of" right-wing talk radio.

All of which is not just well and good, but, I think, quite necessary - it's wonderful that we are moving towards having these counterparts. But as a first step - then you start moving towards innovations. All of which makes the choice of OSI to make eligibility open to all, student or no, all the more striking: along with projects like YP4's Young Elected Officials Network, it's a unique take on the format, one that isn't a reaction to any kind of adult-training-program that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is cooking up.

The emergence of this new leadership training pipeline - particularly Young People For, DMI Scholars, and the Center for Progressive Leadership is something that I cover in my book as part of the "[dot] Org Boom," and as I've been touring I frequently get a question similar to the one Josh is asking - is it enough to replicate what the Right has done, or do we need to innovate?

Josh is right that imitation is not enough and we need to innovate and create better training programs more suited to the values of the progressive movement - at home and internationally. He's also right that in some ways we're starting to move beyond that "first step" in building a leadership pipeline.

But I would add that in another, more basic way we are still on "step one," as Josh terms it. I'm speaking in terms of scale and resources. Organizations like YAF still receive far more monetary support from the conservative foundation world and donor class, and these organizations still have a much greater scope in terms of how many conservatives they train each year. In 2003, the last year for which I have data (data which comes, btw, from Young People For, which completed a study of the conservative Leadership Pipeline), Young America's Foundation had a $12million budget. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Leadership Foundation each had $11 and $9 million, respectively. All three of these organizations had at least $1.5 million in reserve. That's money not earmarked for any program, but rather a mini-endowment to ensure the fiscal health of the organization should they suffer a decrease in funding.

Comparatively, the organizations cited by Josh, and covered in my book, have budgets that are less than 1/10th the annual budget of their conservative "counterparts." In some ways, we are moving beyond "step one" - mimicking the conservative infrastructure - but in others we do still lag frustratingly behind. One of those areas is in the level of commitment we're seeing from progressive foundations and individual donors.

This is actually a problem larger than the emerging progressive leadership pipeline. Almost all of the new youth organizations created in the last 5 years have faced serious funding crises since the initial boom. Many of them spent 2005 and 2007 (non-election years) operating on shoe-string budgets and almost none of them are operating at full scale.

There are a couple of reasons for this, some of which are reasonable and some of which are extremely troublesome. The first reason - and an understandable one - is that donors have spent the last few years demanding a much higher measure of accountability, or Return on Investment (ROI) for their donations. Youth organizations have had to work to prove that what they do is effective with hard metrics and independent research studies. A related issue is that no one knows how effective it is to just dump money at "the youth movement." For every project that worked out well in 2004, there was another that bombed or had little to show for its efforts. And many organizations that received significant funding boosts did not spend that money as efficiently as possible. Some donors are indeed waiting to see what the balance is between their donations and effective/efficient movement to a higher scale of organizing.

The second reason, which is less acceptable, is that the progressive youth movement is still highly dependent on just a few donors who provide the millions of dollars that have made our current gains among young voters possible. To them, I and other youth organizers are extremely grateful. But it's unfortunate that the club of donors is so small. The growing progressive youth infrastructure needs more supporters beyond the few that helped us get this far. More progressives - young people included - need to be supporting the work of these groups.

This is a concurrent process - innovation and scale shouldn't occur separately. But once this happens - once progressive youth groups have a donor base on par with their conservative counterparts - that's when I think we'll truly be out of "step one."