Funding

Yesterday Craig wrote about the "Youth Disengagement Meme" and closed with the following paragraph:

Unfortunately, given the lack of funding for many progressive youth organizations, the communications efforts aren't there. By no means am I an expert in progressive youth infrastructure, but I do want to raise awareness of this. Because I have a feeling that the Corzine campaign's inability to engage youth on a peer-to-peer level is going to have some rough consequences, I believe we're going to be facing the "youth are disengaged" meme that will affect our preparations for 2010 and 2012. What are we going to do?

Last week Sarah wrote about the lack of youth outreach from the Democratic establishment. In that piece, she quotes Morley Winograd:

"There's been a missed opportunity here in showcasing the kind of youthful, optimistic, hopeful energy that greatly Obama benefited from during the campaign," said Morley Winograd. . ."But of course it does not at all mean that the opportunity has gone away."

Between 2004 and 2008 progressive youth organizations were building a strategy and infrastructure to turn out young voters and engage them in issue advocacy outside of elections. Major progressive donors seemed to realize the latent power of the youth vote and the need to catch up with the conservative funding machine that supports conservative youth.

Money came in to progressive youth organizations and they continued building on their earlier successes. In 2008 the work paid off resulting in the election of President Barack Obama and large Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. Unfortunately, it seems that donors now feel like the mission was accomplished and the funding dried up.

There are some who argue that this is because of the financial crisis, but that is only a small part of it. There is still a lot of money being raised by candidates and PACs. It is that the donors aren't choosing to invest in the long-term as they had been for the previous four years.

Progressives can't take the support of young voters for granted, nor should they miss out on activating this powerful demographic when it comes to fighting for legislation or local races. As Winograd said, we are missing opportunities, and we will continue to do so until progressive donors recommit to building a long-term bloc of progressive voters.

She was too shy to include it in this morning's Quick Hits, but our intern Rachel Krause hit a career milestone this morning with her first piece published in Campus Progress: Killing the Programs We Need Most.

Rachel's piece is an in-depth look at the relationship between youth violence and economic downturns, and what happens when funding for prevention programs run out in the times of greatest need. It's a great topic with particular relevance to the 80 Million Strong youth jobs summit happening today.

Fantastic job Rachel, and congratulations on the publication. We look forward to reading many more.

The summer months are already known for recording increased levels of violence, but when the damaging effects of a recession are combined with the added freedoms of summer, what appears to result are the perfect breeding grounds for youth violence. Criminologists use numerous factors to explain why youth turn to violence, such as poor family relationships, poor grades in school, economic conditions in the community, or drug, alcohol, and tobacco use; however, experts point out that it is difficult to pin-point the cause of a rise in youth violence to one specific variable.

“Youth violence, specifically homicide, seems to move in waves, and social scientists have not been very good at predicting these waves. The recession is one reason why we should expect youth crime to increase, but many other factors, such as what’s happening with drug markets also matter,” says David Hemmenway, Harvard University professor of health policy and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Youth Violence Prevention Center.

[...]

The U.S. Conference of Mayors Workforce Development Council says that there are numerous successful youth violence prevention programs that have been implemented, such as Peacebuilders in Hartford, Building Futures in Seattle, gang prevention in San Diego, and the After School Matters program in Baltimore. But because of the economic recession, many successful youth violence-prevention programs might teeter on the verge of disbandment during a time when they are needed most.

Go read the whole piece.

Robert Frost once described education as "hanging around until you've caught on." Thanks to a generous scholarship program linking high school graduates with the local community college, many more young people will have that chance in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania.

In 2002, a foundation started by John E. Morgan, whose knitwear manufacturing company was one of the few large businesses to spring up out of Tamaqua since the decline of coal production there, agreed to cover two years of tuition at Lehigh Carbon Community College for graduates of Tamaqua Senior High School.The stipulations are few: eligible candidates must have attended the high school for two consecutive years before graduation, file a federal student aid application, and enroll in at least nine college credit hours per semester.

Morgan's effort has now become the community's, inspiring another similar donation building on top of the original.

Morgan's gift has now inspired a copycat, to the benefit of Tamaqua's students. The Scheller family, which has an aluminum coatings manufacturing company and donates generously in the region, this April announced its own $1.5 million endowed scholarship program that aims to pay for Lehigh Carbon Community College students’ next two years of schooling at certain four-year institutions in the state. Roberta and Ernest Scheller announced the endowment and dedicated the half-million dollar firehouse-turned-student center on the same day, in honor of their daughter, Lisa Jane, an alumna of LCCC and now the CEO of the family's company.

The two scholarships together permit students to finish bachelor degrees at regional state universities, like Bloomsburg or Kutztown.

Congress advanced education and the public good with passage of the Serve America Act, which strengthens the bond between service and education. But programs like these represent what else might be needed. Yes, I believe the federal government can support and implement education-improving programs effectively, but perhaps an effort to strategically create these locally-focused scholarship programs across the country has its place too.

Sarah's post yesterday was correct -- we need to bring education in this country into the 21st Century. But while we're doing that, we should keep an eye on access to higher education, which has continued to be problematic for low-income students. In improving access, we should review win-win situations that not only improve education, but rewarding the communities supporting educational institutions as well. Tamaqua, Pennsylvania's program is a great example of this, providing underrepresented students with an opportunity to get that crucial college degree while settling in their home region.

The Rappaports, who were big supporters of youth groups from 2003 through 2006, and provided the seed funding for a number of youth organizations through the now-defunct Skyline Public Works, are throwing their hats back into the ring.

Via the Rappaport Family Foundation, the couple are looking to provide seed grants to 501c3 projects aimed at increasing civic engagement among youth in a non-electoral context.

Apply here. The deadline to submit an initial Letter of Inquiry (LOI) is this Friday.

The Rappaport Family Foundation is seeking Letters of Interest describing innovative and promising projects or organizations that propose to take advantage of the current political and social environment to increase the civic engagement of young people. The Foundation is particularly interested in projects that continue to engage young people in the leadership and governance of this country. In 2009, we expect to make five to seven grants in the range of $20,000-$40,000.

The Foundation is particularly interested in supporting organizations or projects whose budget is less than $100,000.

To learn more, go to Rappaport Family Foundation. Deadline to submit the LOI for the June 2009 cycle is Friday, April 10.

In a time where advanced education is critical to the United States' standing in the global economy, students are finding that getting that education is becoming far more difficult, especially students who do not come from wealthy backgrounds.

Most Americans believe that access to higher education should be based on ability and merit, yet in the wake of university budget shortfalls some schools are creating a pay-to-play policy with their admissions.

Facing fallen endowments and needier students, many colleges are looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make their admissions decisions this year.

Once again, our higher education system is contributing to the socioeconomic status quo.

“There’s going to be a cascading of talented lower-income kids down the social hierarchy of American higher education, and some cascading up of affluent kids,” said Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams College and an economist who studies higher education.

(...)
This year, many of these colleges say they are more inclined to accept students who do not apply for aid, or whom they judge to be less needy based on other factors, like zip code or parents’ background.

Many of these schools are opting to admit a higher percentage of wealthy foreign students than in the past, since they are not eligible for public scholarships and pay the highest tuition rates. This means that fewer admission spots will be available to American students, further contributing to the United States' comparative education decline.

The economy has also severely affected admittance into Ph.D. programs, leaving the United States in danger of losing even more ground in the information economy.

Several colleges have recently announced that, regardless of application quality, they plan to admit fewer Ph.D. students for this coming fall than were admitted a year ago. The economics of doctoral education are different enough from those of other programs that some universities' doctoral classes will be taking a significant hit, with potential ramifications down the road for the academic job market, the availability of teaching assistants, and the education of new professors.

The reduction of Ph.D. students admitted into programs will have negative consequences down the road when we look to a new generation of academics and researchers to make the innovations and form the ideas that will lead the country forward.

Charles B. Reed and F. King Alexander have a proposal in Inside Higher Ed calling for a “new kind of institutional aid” that would support colleges and universities that admit lower-income students.

To attempt to change this ominous direction to focus on the new generation of students with the greatest educational needs, it is imperative that we revisit the “cost of education allowances” program and develop a federal Title I type program for higher education institutions. This policy would provide a specific flat “capitation” institutional grant per lower-income student to every college and university that meets a minimal enrollment threshold of 20 percent.

Reed and Alexander argue that the current “individualistic and market-oriented approach to funding higher education by simply putting resources in the hands of students” has resulted in “perverse fiscal and institutional incentives,” despite being worthwhile. They believe that their proposal could reduce the challenges facing universities and low-income students that have led to the return of pay-to-play admissions mentioned earlier.

Part of the problem is that many short-sighted Republican state legislatures have been attempting to balance their state budgets on the backs of students, leaving universities no choice but to raise tuition rates and cater to the wealthiest applicants.

The United States needs a strategic plan; one that focuses on long-term investment in infrastructure, research, and human capital. We need more ideas on how to improve and progress like those posed by Reed and Alexander, and most important, we need the courage and values to implement them.

In 2004, we had a boom year in youth organizing. Upwards of $40 million was dumped into new organizations and new strategies to engage young voters in the election of John Kerry as President. A year later, in 2005, we saw a huge belt-tightening as, in the face of an unexpected loss, funders pulled back to rethink their strategies. With the exception of a few groups who emerged on the scene that year to become major players - Campus Progress and Young People For - most organizations either closed up shop in 2005 or saw a major belt tightening.

So my question is this: will we see a similar pattern in this coming year? I don't know, but I can say that 2008 is very different from 2004, and that could lead to a very different outcome in 2009 than we saw in '05. What's different?

• The organizations that lasted beyond 2005 are more stable now than they were back then and generally have more diverse funding streams. Decisions by one donor are less likely to affect their ability to operate.
• This year, investors only pumped around 1/4 of the money into independent youth organizing as they did in 2004, and a lot of that was supplemental so those organizations could scale up and do more during a big election. That money may disappear, but won't have a huge effect on operating budgets.
• There were fewer start ups this year due to the fact that we were not starting from scratch - good organizations were already formed to handle a lot of the task of reaching young voters.
• The biggest start-up of all was Students for Barack Obama, which never relied on big donors, but lived off volunteer efforts and campaign budgets. What happens to SFBO isn't about funders drawing down their support, but the will of an Obama administration to create a lasting institution like Governor Dean did with Democracy for America, or find a way to effectively merge SFBO into the Obama administration
• We won. Big time. And everyone likes to support a winning strategy.

For sure we will lose a few small start-ups, but hopefully any new/best practices they pioneered will be taken up by the organizations that do stick around. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I'm not too fearful that 2009 will be Dark Days like 2005 was after the Kerry defeat. Time will tell.

Mattie Weiss, the director of Campus Camp Wellstone, has an important blog up on her site today entitled Where is the Love. In her post, Weiss notes that, despite record breaking youth turnout for Senator Obama, funding for youth organizations is anemic at best. Some youth organizations like The League are running mainly on volunteer energy, and almost no youth organization is working at its full scale and capacity considering we are now in the final sprint of a major Presidential Election in which young people may play a pivotal, if not decisive, role.

This shouldn't be too much of a surprise to readers of this site. We've been blogging about the lack of funds in the youth organizing sphere for months, and in fact, by some estimates, investments in youth organizing this year are only 25% of what they were in 2004 (to be fair, that number has probably climbed since I last reported on this, though I don't know by how much).

While I can't say that I definitively understand the minds of donors, there are a few plausible reasons for this:

• The protracted primary process - donors wanted to wait and see who would win before giving. In this scenario, if Obama lost, money would have presumably flooded in to fill the gap in youth organizing left by his loss.
• Conversely, because Obama won, in no small part on the strength of his youth organization, donors felt there was little need to invest in independent youth organizations and their money was better spent elsewhere.
• Obama specifically stated that donors should not give to independent 527 organizations. Not all 527 organizations are media hit squads. There are field organizations like the Young Democrats who also fall under that tax designation and may have suffered from these comments by the Obama team.

This isn't to say that there weren't big advocates in the donor world who were out there pitching the case for more investment in independent youth organizing. And it isn't to say that there aren't donors who stepped up to the plate this year. There are, without a doubt. But it's undeniable that the amount and strength of support is far less than it was four years ago.

Even though Obama tacitlylifted the sanctions against 527 organizations, I don't expect to see the floodgates opening for youth organizations. The best youth groups we have are field organizers and it's just getting to be too late in the game for a major cash infusion to do as much as it could have 6 months ago. They can't just whip up an ad and buy time on the TV like the media 527s can. Certainly organizations like The League that are operating with volunteers can still use the cash to make their people full time in the states in which they are active. But the opportunity to get these groups to scale up even further and operate in a coordinated fashion (as much as legally possible), is quickly slipping away.

What's done is done, and we're all going to have to make due with what we have this year. So let's look forward to 2009 and 2010. There are two possible outcomes to this election, both with similar ramification for the future of progressive youth funding.

1. Obama wins
2. Obama loses

No brainer, right? So what happens if he wins . . . what is the narrative? Most likely it will be a justification for his investment in the youth vote. No more will young voters be a "hidden" vote, unicorns, the "icing on the cake" or fool's gold. The youth vote will be a real, proven force in 21st Century American Politics. State parties will begin to raise money and invest in full-time youth directors, and campaigns will all make a play for young voters in their districts (best case scenario).

Should that happen, my hope is that this will also open up a much wider field of donors willing to give some of their money towards youth organizing, allowing us to expand the donor pool beyond the half dozen or so major funders that have built this movement thus far. With Obama not directly on the ballot in 2010, that might be an easy case to make. I hope so.

If Obama loses, even if the youth vote turnout in record numbers and vote overwhelmingly in favor of Senator Obama, they will likely be blamed for his loss. It won't matter that the youth vote, as with John Kerry, will likely be the only age demographic to break in favor of Senator Obama. It won't matter if we break record turnout levels or increase our share of the electorate. The youth vote strategy will be deemed a failure, again, and young voters will take a bad rap for Obama's beat.

In that case, we're going to need to do some political jujitsu. It's going to be our responsibility to remind donors and activists and bloggers and everyone who will listen that donors did not invest in youth organizations in 2008. That they left it up to the Obama campaign, which at that time will be little more than a memory, barring some conversion a la Democracy for America. We'll need to pivot off of that somehow to make the case that we need to reinvest in youth organizing like we did in 2004 and 2006. Those will be dark days, as was 2005, when so many youth organizations from the '04 cycle went bust.

There is, of course, a third option. That win or lose, 2004 was the apex of progressive investment in youth organizing. I don't even want to think about that option . . .

I was a bit inspired by Justin's post last week about ways students returning to school can buy their new gear in a sustainable way, and thought I'd revive an old post from way back in the day.

Every semester, college students spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on textbook purchases. Frequently these text books go for outrageous prices. Wouldn't it be great if some of that money could go towards your activism instead of into the pocket of publishers with dubious liberal credentials?

The College Democrats of Harvard University hit upon an easy way to do just that using Amazon.com’s Associates Program. The Associates’ Program allows third parties to refer book sales to Amazon by pasting a simple HTML badge into their website. Referrers can earn between 5% and 10% of the sales they direct to Amazon based on the volume of sales.

How did it pay off for the Harvard College Dems?

“Last year we sold $6000 through Amazon.com, earning the Dems about $360,” Dems Treasurer Harlan M. Piper ’08 wrote in an e-mail. “So far this year, we’ve sold about $1600, though we hope that number will go up as people buy more books!”

...

“It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s significant,” he said, adding that the windfall is enough to fund perks like pizza at general board meetings.

So how can you make this work for you on your own campus? It couldn’t be simpler:

• Sign-up for Amazon’s program (this will require a checking account or a PayPal account). For tax purposes and transparency, it’s probably best if this account is in the name of your organization.
• Paste the Amazon Search badge onto your group’s website. If you don't have a website, sign up for a free Word Press blog. Here's a look at what the Harvard Dems did:

• Request that all of your members, their friends, and anyone sympathetic to the goals of your organization buy their course books through the search badge. Use Facebook and anything other tool at your disposal to promote this fundraiser to as many students as possible.
• Rake in the cash.

Through their Amazon referral link, the Harvard College Democrats were able to raise $360 a semester. Not bad for some quick HTML work. With some good promotion via Facebook, and requests to get your non-political friends to support you through their own text book purchases, who knows what you could do . . .

Some light summer reading.

• Did Obama lift the ban on independent expenditures to outside groups? Maybe so. The real question is, will donors listen and how much can we get done in the time that is left.
• Obama to announce VP pick via text message. - First Read
• In a changing corner of PA, a glimpse of Obama's "age problem." - Washington Post
• The Bradley Effect or the Obama Effect: what aren't the polls telling us? - Huffington Post
• Could religious youth tip the election this fall? - Fox News
• Politics Unusual: Hip Hop's Hopes for Obama. - Huffington Post
• Help Our Veterans Vote - New York Times
• A New Generation of Black Leaders Looks to Lead - Hip Hop Caucus
• Are We Neglecting the Next Generation of Activists? - The American Prospect
• Court Supports Rights of Gay Students - AlterNet
• In Virginia, 64% of the states new voters are under 35. - InRich.com
• Early history of the Creative Commons. - Lessig Blog
• Rock the Vote is finally getting ready to air their Christina Aguilera PSA. - Washington Post

Matt Stoller offers a broader view on the lack of funding in progressive organizing that I identified last week. According to Stoller, this isn't just a problem in youth organizing, it's a movement-wide problem among a range of single issue groups, 527s and anyone not directly associated with the Obama campaign:

I keep having conversations this cycle that come back to a basic theme. People assumed that there would be lots of money available for organizing and media work, and yet not only is there less than they expected, there is less than would naturally exist in a Presidential year. Normally the Democratic economy works based on the Presidential cycle; lots of money once every four years, some money during the midterm election, and starvation other than that. It seems as if 2008 is an anomaly, unless you are working for the Obama campaign.

As far as I can tell, there are three intersecting trends that are cutting off the funding stream for progressive groups. One, Obama defunded outside parties reliant on big dollar donors, which means that a good amount of talent is sitting on the sideline, helpless to affect Congressional or Presidential races. There is no cavalry in case Obama stumbles and there are no groups that can go negative against McCain. We knew that. Two, Obama is vacuuming up huge small dollar donations, and sucking some of the oxygen out of downticket races. The media glare on Obama has effectively damaged the megaphone of downticket candidates, and their ability to pull in small dollar donors. This is hurting Senate candidates like Al Franken, for instance, because there is no VoteVets ad to go after Norm Coleman like there was to after George Allen in Virginia. A dozen candidates might lose because the right is going to come after them viciously, and there is nothing on our side to deal with that - no small dollar donors, no outside groups, and very little media attention.

And three, I keep hearing that Foundations are cutting back on funding for non-profits. Foundations are huge entities that grant a certain percentage (usually 3-5%) of their asset base every year in keeping with their mission statement. Because of the market drop, these groups are cutting their grants, which is further starving progressive groups. Foundations are the biggest source of reliable funding for progressive nonprofits, so this is quite nasty. The progressive movement, aside from the Obama campaign, is starving. The better groups are building small dollar donor networks, and the incentive to build revenue streams independent of foundations and large dollar donors is growing. That is a positive development.

Matt looks at the sunny side here - a whittling down of groups that are "unfit" and fat on the largesse of big donors and foundations, and a forced push towards more sustainable practices. But I still think that it's a hell of a gamble that donors are taking and it's consequences go well beyond the lack of a proper infrastructure supporting rapid response efforts and down-ballot candidates. Even in the best of circumstances it is going to leave us with a weakened infrastructure that will be entirely dependent on Obama to move policy. And if we dont' like that policy? Well I guess we can just suck it because our options will be pretty limited.

One final comment. Matt identifies this as a problem affecting "single issue groups," which are more and more getting a bad rap for creating a disjointed (or "siloed," as folks like to say) movement and affecting little if any real change. I just want to be clear that I don't consider youth organizations "single issue" operations. Getting young people civically and politically engaged builds a constituency for the Party and for all issues. It's an investment in the future (and current) health of the Party and the larger progressive movement.