YDA Day 1: Campaign Committee - Transparancy and Funding

So real quick on the campaign committee. First a bit about what it is. National YDA - which raises money from large donors like the Democracy Alliance - has a program through which they partially fund state chapters. This is called the State Partnership Program. State chapters wishing to participate in the program draw up a plan, submit it to YDA National where it is vetted. Successful applicants will receive half the funding for their plan from National YDA and they are required to raise the rest of the funds themselves.

These state partnerships are in turn funded in two ways: through the Party Building Committee and the Campaign Committee. The Party Building Committee funds organizational overhead like Executive Directors and staffers and non-campaign activities that help build a chapter. The campaign committee funds specific projects to get out the vote around elections. These campaign proposals were the main topic of discussion.

Participants (mostly regional representatives) had a few main concerns:

• Was YDA running out of money and unable to afford supporting new/more campaigns?
• Could YDA open up the funding process (transparency!) and let states that have made proposals know where they stand?
• Could some kind of review metric be established and enforced to make sure states were living up to their commitments?
• Could guidelines be established that would push states to make their programs self sustainable, freeing up YDA money for other state campaigns?

In all these instances members wanted more information available and wanted to spread that information amongst the membership to alleviate unwarranted fears/gossip, and help chapters help themselves. For instance, thus far the committee has approved 11 of 26 campaign proposals. A few members were pushing the committee to release a ranking of the proposals so chapters could know where they stand in the process and could potentially use an "endorsement" by YDA National of the strength of their plan to raise money locally. (For instance, if the "12th" best plan - and first "unfunded" state - knew that but for funding shortages, they would receive money from YDA National, that's a selling point they can use to raise local money. Again, greater transparency was pushed as a good policy to strengthen the organization.

A word on the money question. I don't want to leave readers with the impression that YDA is running out of money and is broke. That seems to be the fear among some chapters but everyone tells me it's not true. But there does seem to be less money in play this year overall that in 2004. My guess is that, excluding non-electoral organizations like Young People For and Campus Progress, which don't do fieldwork - there is far less youth money available or in play right now than there was in June 2004. Maybe it's because of the ongoing primary or Obama's success with youth, maybe it's donors feeling burned (and it should be noted that as far as I can tell the Rappaports - one of the major youth donors over the last 4 years - have yet to give to any youth orgs). But just when we should be increasing youth funding to begin locking in Millennials for the next 40 years, the funding seems to be drying up or at least on hold.