The Canvassers Union (conclusion): Toward the Reform of the Fund/PIRG

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday December 04, 2006 · 5:07 AM PST

2006/12/04 · 05:07

This series is an expansion of my reporting in In These Times magazine (August 18th, "Do You Have a Minute For...?") about two offices of the Fund for Public Interest Research that voted to unionize and were subsequently shut down. Read More

The Canvassers Union (p6): the Questions

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday December 02, 2006 · 11:58 AM PST

2006/12/02 · 11:58

As I noted in the first post, the Fund is perhaps the single largest employer of progressive activists in the country - through the entire PIRG/Fund world, thousands of would-be progressive leaders pass every year.

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday November 28, 2006 · 10:13 AM PST

2006/11/28 · 10:13

This series is an expansion of my reporting about the Fund for Public Interest Research in In These Times magazine (August 18th, "Do You Have a Minute For...?"). about two offices of the Fund for Public Interest Research that voted to unionize and were subsequently shut down. As I noted in the first post, the Fund is perhaps the single largest employer of progressive activists in the country - through the entire PIRG/Fund world, thousands of would-be progressive leaders pass every year.

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday November 27, 2006 · 8:39 AM PST

2006/11/27 · 08:39

Last summer, I reported on the saga of two Los Angeles offices of the Fund for Public Interest Research ("the Fund") that voted to unionize and were subsequently shut down -- In These Times magazine published the story (August 18th, "Do You Have a Minute For...?") and I expanded upon it here. Then some other things happened, and the second half of “The Canvassers Union” was delayed.

But, now we’re back! I will finish the story this week, with one post a day.

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday October 05, 2006 · 8:35 AM PDT

2006/10/05 · 08:35

So, the Right has the money, and the Left has the People Power. We all know that's how the game is stacked. And ever since that whole shake-up in the 60s, when both sides got their boats rocked, the Right's been building this big machine and throwing money into it. Turns out they're pretty good at it! And the Left? We've been out knockin' doors, talkin' to the People, givin' them the Power--that's how we do. That's how the story goes.

And that's why this little book released last month is a big deal. In Activism, Inc., Dana Fisher of Columbia University traces the history of the canvass--from a vital grassroots GOTV tool of local politicians, to an innovative tactic for burgeoning advocacy/lobbying groups in the 70s, to the big-box fundraising industry that sprawled out through the 90s and continues to grow today. Fisher's book is billed as the first formal study of the modern fundraising canvass ever published. (She recently published a piece in the American Prospect that more or less summarizes her argument.)

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday September 19, 2006 · 12:23 PM PDT

2006/09/19 · 12:23

"We must give ourselves the permission to fail."

That is the lesson that my dearest college professor most indelibly imparted to me: you're gonna get it wrong before you get it right. (I said it to myself every morning for a year, as I learned the lesson the hard way...) But eventually, that permission must expire--or the wrong lessons are learned.

In 2004, MoveOn ran its first massive field campaign, Leave No Voter Behind; the campaign was subcontracted to Grassroots Campaigns Inc. Things went wrong, as things always will on a campaign -- and then things got worse, as things often will on a campaign. But after the initial setbacks, we found ourselves pinned under a crisis of leadership in which GCI betrayed the good faith of its employees, and MoveOn's members, in order to protect its contract. This move apparently worked: MoveOn rehired GCI, and in summer of 2005 their field campaign relaunched. Read More

The Canvassers' Union (pt3): The Long Road to Union

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday August 23, 2006 · 12:06 PM PDT

2006/08/23 · 12:06

This series is an expansion of my reporting in In These Times magazine (August 18th, "Do You Have a Minute For...?") about two offices of the Fund for Public Interest Research that voted to unionize and were subsequently shut down. As I noted in the first post, the Fund is perhaps the single largest employer of progressive activists in the country - in the entire PIRG/Fund world, thousands of would-be progressive leaders pass through every year. There is a new book that argues that this mode of activism is "strangling progressive politics in America." Think of it this way: if the blogosphere is the nascent progressive movement's intelligentsia, these canvassers are its toiling, near-invisible laborers - this might not be as glamorous as the ouster of a wayward Democratic Party leader, but it is just as central to our cause... [Cross-posted at MyDD.]
Read More

The Canvassers' Union (pt2): How Los Angeles Broke the PIRG/Fund Model

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday August 21, 2006 · 9:08 AM PDT

2006/08/21 · 09:08

This series is an expansion of my reporting in In These Times magazine (August 18th, "Do You Have a Minute For...?") about two offices of the Fund for Public Interest Research that voted to unionize and were subsequently shut down. The topic is perhaps a little earthy for these blogs, which focus largely on issues of electoral strategy and national news; but as I noted in this series' first post, the Fund is perhaps the single largest employer of progressive activists in the country - in the entire PIRG/Fund world, thousands of would-be progressive leaders pass through every year. A new book is being published that argues this mode of activism is "strangling progressive politics in America." Think of it this way: if the blogosphere is the nascent progressive movement's intelligentsia, these canvassers are its toiling, near-invisible laborers - this might not be as glamorous as the ouster of a wayward Democratic Party leader, but it is just as central to our cause... [Cross-posted at MyDD]
Read More

The Canvassers Union (part 1)

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday August 18, 2006 · 8:13 AM PDT

2006/08/18 · 08:13

My article in In These Times magazine is published online today- it's about two Los Angeles offices of the Fund for Public Interest Research that voted to unionize over a year ago. You can read their stories directly at their web site. I'm thrilled with how the ITT piece has turned out; I also want to expand upon many of the issues in there. So I'm going to blog for a while about this issue of activist unionization, a subject that has come up a few times in the comments of my last two series, "Strip-Mining the Grassroots" and "Grassroots Campaigns Inc's Great War of 2004." [This is cross-posted at MyDD.]

From "Do You Have a Minute for ... ?," August 18th, In These Times
Read More

Towards a Progressive Model (pt1): GCI/PIRG/Fund, meet the Internet!

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday August 16, 2006 · 11:35 AM PDT

2006/08/16 · 11:35

This is a new series, cross-posted at MyDD, that will focus on resolutions to the "crisis of leadership" that failed MoveOn PAC's 2004 Leave No Voter Behind campaign, and continues to fail its 2006 Operation Democracy campaign. As explored in the post-mortem "Grassroots Campaigns Inc's Great War of 2004," the crisis is located in MoveOn's subcontractor, GCI, which uses a campaign model based on the Fund/Public Interest Research Groups. This model is unaccountable to its participants and unresponsive to conditions on the ground; consequentially, its grassroots energies are burned through and, at the same time, it fails in its own objectives of political action. It bears repeating that we don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to run better campaigns -- the fixes to the model can be significant without being structurally radical. This post will propose one such change. To do so, I want to take another quick jump back into 2004 (after this, I promise to put the nasty business behind). Read More

Grassroots Campaigns Inc's Great War of 2004 (p5): Masters and Slaves continued

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday August 07, 2006 · 12:07 PM PDT

2006/08/07 · 12:07

[Cross-posted at MyDD.]

In late September of 2004, MoveOn PAC's Leave No Voter Behind campaign launched its swing state GOTV operations. The company that MoveOn had subcontracted to run this campaign, Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), had lost almost a third of the campaign's timeline to delays. A week into the campaign, the campaign's central nervous system -- the 'cutting-edge' Web Action Center (WAC) -- crashed, never to fully return to true functional capacity. So, things had gone from bad to worse.

But LNVB still had 600 committed, energized organizers deployed across the country. The massive MoveOn membership was chomping at the bit (relatively speaking) to be organized into volunteer precinct teams. The following is a hypothetical scenario (assembled from the experience of dozens of organizers) of what could have been done given the time and the circumstances. Read More

Grassroots Campaigns, Inc's Great War of 2004 (p4): Masters and Slaves

greggish

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday July 27, 2006 · 8:21 AM PDT

2006/07/27 · 08:21

[Cross-posted from MyDD]

So we've been talking about MoveOn PAC's 2004 GOTV campaign, Leave No Voter Behind. About how the company that MoveOn subcontracted, Grassroots Campaigns, Inc (GCI), was significantly delayed in getting its campaign off the ground, and about how its `cutting edge' internet-based computer system (the Web Action Center) collapsed barely a week in. About how, in order to make up for these setbacks, GCI forced its organizers to redouble their recruitment, at the expense of training their volunteers--which effectively `broke' its own campaign model, but succeeded in getting GCI re-hired by MoveOn for 2006. All along, I've been saying that this conversation is building to a constructive point - but before that can happen, it's important that I fully illustrate the rather bold claim made in the first post: that the result was, for many involved, `a soul-crushing experience.'

I want to make sure that when you read that 'half of the organizer staff didn't make it to Election Day,' you see more than a number. Read More

Newer
Older

RSS

The Canvassers Union (conclusion): Toward the Reform of the Fund/PIRG

The Canvassers Union (p6): the Questions

The Canvassers' Union (p5): The Fund Busts the Unions

The Canvassers Union (p4): the Calling Room

Fund/PIRG/GCI: the Incorporation of the Progressive Grassroots

Operation Democracy: MoveOn/GCI's Crisis of Leadership Continues

The Canvassers' Union (pt3): The Long Road to Union

The Canvassers' Union (pt2): How Los Angeles Broke the PIRG/Fund Model

The Canvassers Union (part 1)

Towards a Progressive Model (pt1): GCI/PIRG/Fund, meet the Internet!

Grassroots Campaigns Inc's Great War of 2004 (p5): Masters and Slaves continued

Grassroots Campaigns, Inc's Great War of 2004 (p4): Masters and Slaves