Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Advocacy and Community: The Delicate Balance.” View the full webinar here.

Nia Evans: 23:16-24:21

I really like to point out the role of relationships in our work— it’s very strong— and also the role of long-term work. It being really important, I think, not to be transactional in our relationships, or to be short-sighted. I think the fact that we had a group of people coming together who had already kind of worked together with each other in different ways, coming together around this venture was key.

The other thing is, we’re a multi-stakeholder initiative. And so, we have people from all walks of life participating in the formation of Ujima. We have people with finance expertise, community organizing, healthcare, you name it. It really was a place where different types of people could see entry points. And I guess the last thing I just wanted to touch upon: Julia [Ho] talked about this notion of moving beyond crisis, and then also just talked about this sense of long crisis. When I mentioned gentrification and displacement, these are realities that we were all living, and we all understood. There wasn’t a hard sell to say we needed to do our economies differently.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Can wealthy “impact investors” challenge the very economic system that has generated their wealth?

It may seem unlikely, but Ariel Brooks, Libbie Cohn, and Aaron Tanaka of the Center for Economic Democracy argue that it is not impossible. Their report, titled Social Movement Investing: A guide to capital strategies for community power, however, does not shy away from the question of whether impact investing is even worth the effort. Indeed, they begin with the famous Audre Lorde quote that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The authors concede that “using ‘finance tools’ to upend the ‘house’ of finance capital may seem like a dubious task” (p. 4).

Impact investing often looks like what has been called the philanthropic paradox. As a report from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors notes, this paradox obtains when a donor seeks “to solve problems that may have been caused by the source of a donor’s wealth” (p. 25). Authors Stephen Godeke and Patrick Briaud add that, “Two examples of this paradox include Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family’s philanthropy resulting from the profits of opioids, and the negative effects on the climate coming from the Rockefellers’ oil wealth.”

So, can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka delve into the complexities of this question. Lorde allowed, they observe, that the master tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those…who still define the master’s house as their only source of support” (p. 5). The point, the report authors contend, is to pair impact investing with community-owned economic structures, so that the master’s house is not the only source of support. They add: “While we cannot ‘impact invest’ our way out of capitalism, a new form of impact finance that operates in alignment with grassroots social movements could become a much more forceful tool to create the world that we all desperately deserve.”

Developing a Theory of Social Movement Investing

Key to the approach that Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka develop is to carve out “social movement investing” as a subset of the larger world of impact investing. As NPQ has noted, impact investing can have many definitions. For social movement investing, the desired impact is to grow community power. Drawing on the just transition framework developed by Movement Generation and Nwamaka Agbo’s work on restorative economics, Brooks and her coauthors identify four ways that impact investing can increase community power: 1) oppose negative practices and build positive solutions that are visionary and oppositional; 2) change the rules (e.g., through policy change); 3) divest resources from the extractive economy; and 4) invest resources in community-owned enterprises rooted in practices of a solidarity economy.

Critical throughout is coordination with social movements. It’s not social movement investing unless movements are involved in steering where investment dollars go. As Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka write, “the primary differentiator between impact investing and Social Movement Investing is a commitment by asset owners and managers to build accountability to the communities and leaders who are on the front lines of social change” (page 29, emphasis in original).

Social Movement Investing Tactics

What might social movement investment look like in practice? Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka offer a framework of six possible tactics.

• Exclusion: A prominent example of this is a divestment campaign, such as the current campaign to divest from fossil fuels that has been supported by funds holding nearly $40 trillion in assets worldwide. (Screened investment funds that exclude categories of investment, such as military contracting or tobacco or shorting—betting against—companies are other variants of this tactic).
• Engagement: These are typically done through the use of stockholder resolutions. The report cites Majority Action, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, As You Sow, and Corporate Accountability International as prominent examples of movement groups that “have used engagement tactics to cajole or discipline problematic corporate actors” (p. 46).
• Control: Hostile takeovers in business are relatively common, but for movement investors this category is mostly theoretical for now. Nonetheless, Brooks, Cohn and Tanaka write, conceivably social movement investors could leverage their holdings to “force a hostile sale to more socially responsible owners or install new management for the good of the company and community” (p. 46).
• Conversion: These are investments to convert existing businesses into employee ownership or other forms of community ownership. As NPQ has covered, the retirement of the Baby Boom generation of business owners provides a potentially enormous opportunity in this area, with annual revenues of US businesses that fit this category exceeding $5 trillion.
• Seed Investment: As this phrase suggests, this involves investing in “early stage” community-owned businesses. NPQ wrote about a cohort of such funds last fall. This category roughly corresponds to what the nonprofit Transform Finance has called “grassroots community engaged investment.”
• Growth investment: These are investments that seek to “scale up” community-owned businesses and are rare. A recent NPQ article on the Open Collective, which discusses the concept of “an exit to community ownership,” however, illustrates the core idea of this model, which is to use social movement-oriented impact investing capital to scale up operations, with a vision of selling to community users after a specified period of time.

It is notable that there is a difference between the first three tactics—which are largely resistance-based—from the last three tactics, which seek to build infrastructure for a community-based, solidarity economy. This distinction also has some important investment implications. A longstanding debate in impact investing is whether the investor can have it all—in other words, can the investor both “do well” (earn a maximum financial return) and “do good” (have positive impact)?

Put simply, with resistance strategies, Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka write that doing good while doing well are largely compatible. But not so with the infrastructure-building tactics, where concessionary (below-market) rates of return are required to have community-building impact. As they point out:

Social Movement Investors cannot ignore the fact that accumulated wealth is generated through undervaluing labor, manipulating markets, and extracting from the earth, and must dispel the illusion that profit maximizing behavior is ultimately compatible with a regenerative economy (p. 47).

Addressing the Obstacles

In their report, Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka do not shy away from the nascent nature of social movement investment. “Investing in deeper alignment with movements, they observe, will necessitate not only relationship building with social movement partners and experimentation with Resist and Build investment strategies, but also mutual learning among Social Movement Investors, development of structures for coordination, and ultimately sectoral transformation” (p. 67). Over time, they envision that to maximize their impact, movement-motivated investors should shift their assets from resistance strategies to infrastructure-building strategies. Making this shift, however, will require overcoming many obstacles, which the report authors divide into “internal” obstacles (that is, within impact investing) and external obstacles (that is, from the larger capitalist economy).

A leading internal obstacle that the authors identify—no surprise—is the hold of the mantra that you can “do well while doing good.” Others include investor lack of knowledge of their actual holdings—as NPQ has pointed out, many “social investment” funds include mainstream companies like Amazon and Apple within their portfolios; financial and legal constraints (such as pension funds’ legal obligation to seek maximum returns for beneficiaries); and a reluctance to try new approaches to investment (risk aversion). A more complicated obstacle is organizational structure—e.g., are there avenues for foundation program officers to weigh in on investments that might undermine their grantees? Right now, the answer is most often “No.” Relatedly, there are even fewer avenues for social movements to coordinate with impact investors to set common investment goals.

One could list many external obstacles. The report authors focus on three. A critical one is cultural. As Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka put it, “There is still enormous work to be done to shift the collective belief that whatever is earned is fairly deserved’ to ‘wealth that was stolen should be returned’” (p. 74). Two other external barriers that the authors identify are incentives for financial advisors (i.e., few advisors are rewarded for helping their clients achieve “impact,” but many get bonuses for helping their clients maximize their financial returns) and the gap between the financial return investors demand and the financial terms that start-up community-owned businesses can afford.

Towards a Community Power Investment Screen

The last section of the report from Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka takes on the task of outlining what community power “due diligence” might look like. They divide this into two scores—one on movement alignment and one on community power and multiply the two to obtain an “expected power rating.”

For movement alignment, they develop a score of zero to six based on scores of three items (each scored as zero low, two high):

• Relationships: To what extent does the investor have relationships with the impacted community?
• Leveraging: To what extent does the investor utilize multiple forms of power on behalf of the community?
• Capital Coordination: To what extent does the investor share decision making with the impacted community?

For community power, the scoring is more complicated, with three sub-categories of community governance (i.e., community control), community ownership, and community action (i.e., how much the investment will help a community group win its campaign?). There are four impact-related items (scale, need, etc.) in each category, each rated on a scale zero to four. These three categories are then averaged to allow for a maximum rating of 16 (four times 12 divided by three) and then multiplied by the movement alignment rating. In theory, this framework would allow investment analysts to create community power investment ratings on a scale of zero to 96 (maximum community investment score of 16 times maximum alignment rating of six).

The scoring system—Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka concede—might be “overly simplistic” (page 93). But the idea, they explain, to advance the discussion of “movement centered asset allocation models.” If, as the cliché has it, “what gets measured, matters,” then the effort to create the model, flawed though it may be, represents an important advance.

Remaining Questions

As noted above, the report authors mostly concentrate on developing a theory of social movement investment. While the report cites a number of organizations and initiatives, there is no attempt to quantify the current size of the social movement investing universe, nor is there an attempt to identify what scale it would need to achieve to have transformative effect.

Nonetheless—Brooks, Cohn, and Tanaka observe—the implications of a successful buildout of social movement investing infrastructure would be profound. As they point out, if community groups are aligned with movement investors, this would encourage the “integration of capital strategies as a new but essential dimension of campaign planning” (p. 96) and alter the “power map” that community groups use to run their campaigns. Even more critically, they add, “for social justice enterprises and solidarity economy practitioners, the expansion of investors willing to make non-extractive loans could be the difference between succeeding as a ‘high road business’ or failing in a ‘race to the bottom’ economy.”

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

About the co-authors: We are long-time consultants to nonprofits and philanthropy. We met periodically over the last six months to name and explore the recent, recurring patterns across our consulting practices. This piece came out of our conversations. It humbly builds upon and attempts to amplify the work of leaders and fellow capacity builders who inspire us to evolve our thinking and practices.

Since the uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder, we have seen unprecedented demand for consulting to nonprofit and philanthropic organizations around race equity. This work exists along a continuum of depth and intended impact: from shorter-term trainings and retreats meant to bring people to a baseline of understanding, to longer-term work that attempts to transform the ways that staff and board members interact with one another and with their constituents, ultimately transforming program design and impact as well. Here, we want to focus on that latter part of the continuum—on the work that goes well beyond “DEI training” and on the kind of work that requires staff and board members to examine their personal identities and habits, and to articulate together an organizational accountability to equity and justice. Specifically, we want to explore how that critically important work is increasingly interacting with—and disrupting—how organizations approach strategy development and planning.

Does a Distinction Between Race Equity and Strategy Work Matter?

As consultants, we witness a widespread frustration, especially among BIPOC staff, at the parsing of language and at ongoing attempts by executive and board leadership to compartmentalize processes into distinguishable “DEI” and “strategic planning” scopes of work.  This compartmentalization can suggest how personally disconnected white leaders are from experiences of injustice and marginalization; these distinct scopes of work allow them to create distance from necessary organizational change work and their personal role in it.¹ Moreover, in predominantly white-led organizations, it is nearly always the case that BIPOC staff and board members are asked to lead the equity work while the executive director and board chair lead the strategic planning. A fundamental difference in authority to drive change is baked into this process parallelism. The consultant and writer Mistinguette Smith described her experience of this dynamic in “Nonprofit Leadership at a Crossroads”:

A decade of advancing an incomplete “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) approach to dismantling white supremacy in the nonprofit sector has contributed to this painful moment…. This incomplete approach creates “snowcapped” organizations: places where staff of color carry the focus on equity and justice in frontline, mission-related work, while being clustered at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. They have little voice, inconsistent influence, and lack the power to change the rules about how the organization works. The decision-makers on strategy and resource allocation sit at the top of the organizational hierarchy like the snowcap on a mountain, mostly white and white-haired people over 50…. This snowcap produces predictable cumulative results. I often find myself invited to meetings with nonprofit and philanthropic leaders who want to work on racial equity. But when I arrive, there are seven white folks! And they experience my work with them as tumultuous as an avalanche.

One of the “predictable cumulative results,” as Smith calls them, may in fact be this period we are in now where leaders and consultants are struggling to determine which process—equity or strategy—contains which questions and how those processes should be designed and sequenced. Further, consultants may specialize in one but not both types of project, so often staff and board are having overlapping conversations in concurrent processes. Staff might also sense an avoidant deferral in assurances from executives such as, “We will get to race equity work in a different process; this is strategic planning.” Smith called this a “painful moment” and, indeed, across our practices we are at times witness to or even a part of that pain—and to a palpable exhaustion as staff, leadership, and consultants miss one another’s expectations and struggle to find momentum. (Please also see Andrea Rogers and Tiloma Jayasinghe’s excellent piece, The Hidden Cost of DEI Work—And What to Do About It.)

With such widespread concurrence of equity and strategy projects right now, one of the patterns we are experiencing across our consulting practices is being asked to join or complement processes that have already been designed and may already be underway, either to bring a strategic lens to equity work or to bring an equity lens to strategy work. Also common right now is leaders asking us to partner with other consultants—sometimes consultants with whom we do not yet have a history of collaboration—in an effort to cohere concurrent projects in ways that allow staff and board to feel and trust a connection. These attempts at coherence do not always work, but sometimes they can be fertile learning and experimentation grounds for leaders and consultants alike.

Race Equity Work Is Strategy Work

Regardless of how processes are defined in the near term, it is, we think, self-evident that long-term, transformational work around race equity will affect organizational strategy in profound ways. As our analyses of problems change, our solutions—or strategies—inevitably change. In truth, this is what many white leaders find threatening about transformational race equity work: it results in challenges to their expertise, their signature programs and methods, and even their revenue models. Another way that race equity work is strategic work is in how it can lead to changes in who defines strategy for an organization. As BIPOC people and people with relevant lived experience step into executive and board chair roles in greater numbers, they have the authority to create the strategic changes they had been arguing for from the marginalized equity processes they formerly led.

We see evidence of race equity work as strategy work across the sector now. It manifests in things like fundamentally revised theories of change, bold initiatives and collaboratives, and sometimes, as new leadership. For instance, Hannah Mahon and Luke Newton wrote recently about the radical transformation of a family foundation in Washington D.C., The Pink House Foundation (PHF):

With the recent launch of PHF 3.0, we have shifted from funding 30 individual grant partners and are now instead making 10 large, multi-year grants to grassroots alliances and movement-accountable public foundations, trusting them to redistribute those funds to BIPOC-led grassroots organizations according to their own priorities and visions. Our new model represents not only a deeper alignment of values and practices, but also a deeper alignment of strategy and impact, recognizing that front-line leaders who are immersed in the day-to-day realities of organizing in marginalized communities are in the best position to strategically deploy resources to advance change.

Particularly notice the shared primacy and proximity of the words “values,” “practices,” “strategy,” and “impact,” as well as the directive source of their strategic shifts: “front-line leaders in marginalized communities.” Equity analysis and practices are so embedded in their new strategies that they are indeed indistinguishable.

Approaching Strategy Anew

The necessary blurring of equity and strategy work is indicative of a long-overdue revisiting of strategic planning itself. In their immediate and constituent-centric responses to COVID-19 and the uprisings for racial justice, nonprofits and philanthropies demonstrated that they can in fact develop and implement strategies quickly. That “responsiveness” is more often the judicious tapping of organizational core competencies than the verboten opposite of “strategic.” Over the last two years, leaders have made and executed bold decisions in a matter of weeks or even days that would normally have been subject to months of articulation, revision, and approval processes. These strategic decisions were made, of course, without the benefit of detailed, predictive strategic plans.

It is not a new idea to disentangle strategic thinking from organizational planning. David La Piana did it very convincingly in his 2008 book, The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution. But, alas, it is still far too common for leaders to contain strategic thinking to episodic, high-stakes, top-down planning processes. We know intellectually that our staff need daily proximity to and influence over the evolving “why and to what ends” of our organization’s programs if we want those programs to be cutting-edge. We know that our boards will never be the strategic thought-partners we say we want them to be without their own appropriate version of that access and influence. We know that the wildly unpredictable political and economic context means that we have to actually be nimble, not just profess to be. And especially after the last two years, we know that staff and community stakeholders are going to push. To insist. To demand that leaders engage the hard questions about organizational purpose and direction, including internal and external race equity commitments—that they not bury these questions in opaque planning processes but address them frankly in the here and now.

What if We Prioritized Equity and Strategy Practices Even Over Planning Processes?

We believe that the notion of practices—articulated well by a number of progressive capacity builders (see the recommended resources below)—offers an opportunity for leaders to move through this stuck period, this “painful moment,” as Mistinguette Smith called it. Weyam Ghadbian and Jovida Ross have a very useful definition of practices in their compelling new guide, Moving Towards Each Other: A Conflict Workbook: “Our agreements for how we’ll move together. This could include agreements about roles, decision-making, and navigating conflicts, as well as celebrations and mutual support.”  In other words, these are the everyday ways that we interact with care and intention towards what we are building together.

What if we prioritize equity and strategy practices even over planning processes? Here, “even over” is reference to a prioritization technique used when a group needs—as we so often do—to prioritize among two good things. This resource from Brave New Work was highlighted by Ghadbian and Ross—and their collaborator Ingrid Benedict—in a recent NPQ article. We are inspired to apply it here like this: everyone learning and trying on equitable practices even over a beautifully crafted equity plan. Or, designing an organization’s structures and systems around core strategies even over every-three-year strategic planning processes.

Traditionally, we love planning processes in nonprofits and philanthropy: strategic planning, business planning, equity planning. And at their best, we believe that processes can be a critical tool. We believe in courageously designed processes that allow groups to go deep on the specific questions they face in real time, whether those questions are about organizational vision, purpose, values, programming, or financial sustainability. But processes are also extremely vulnerable to habits of white supremacy, aren’t they? In dismantling Racism, Tema Okun, outlines fifteen characteristics of white supremacy culture: “perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, only one right way, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, i’m the only one, progress is bigger/more, objectivity, and right to comfort.”  Please reread that list if it’s new to you. It is uncanny—and profoundly disturbing—how accurately this list describes the worst forms and experiences of traditional planning processes, isn’t it?

Our view is that organizations need courageous processes at key junctures to articulate and align around their shared analyses and intentions, but that without an emphasis on learning and implementing new practices that embody any plan’s “worship of the written word,” we are going in circles. Staff and community will not take comfort in a plan’s updated words if they are not also experiencing the organization as different because of real shifts in both practices and their resulting work products. Frustration and unproductive conflict will persist. Trust in leadership will wane. Talented people will leave organizations seeking the opportunity to be different, not just describe aspirations of being different.

Towards an Integration: Equity, Strategy, Process, and Practice

Last year, the three of us were part of an NPQ webinar called, Strategic Planning: What Now? The strategic planning story that Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, shared has stayed with us and informed this article. Smith described the unpredictable and transformational effects on her organization of letting go of old strategic planning habits and centering the voices of constituents even over the expertise of leadership. This included her and her board stepping out of an urgency-to-finish mindset as they increasingly understood how much there was to learn and incorporate. At the time of the webinar, they were a year into a process of deep community listening designed in partnership with the strategic facilitation group, Collaborative Labs. “It began a journey that we are still on,” Smith says. “We have not produced the document called ‘the strategic plan’ yet. But it has been changing our organization at each iteration.” Indeed, what we need from leaders and consultants now is the willingness and capacity to work towards an integrative approach to organizational change. One that acknowledges the direct interplay of race equity and organizational strategy work as well as the essential coupling of new practices with courageous processes.

Recommended Reading on Equity/Strategy Practices

• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
• Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups
• Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation
• Moving Towards Each Other: A Conflict Workbook
• The Ladder of Inference

1. We gratefully acknowledge Milika Miller, Senior Program and Data Manager at the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, for contributing this idea.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

The following is an excerpt from Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education by Joe Berry and Helena Worthen (2021), reprinted with permission from Pluto Press. Use the code NPQ30 at Pluto Press for an exclusive NPQ reader discount.

I hope that UPC will break out of the narrow confines of what usually passes for collective bargaining and attack the university on a wide front, aimed at transforming the university into something that services far more people than it does now.

– John Hess, 1981

Andy Blunden, an Australian Marxist, researcher, and trade unionist, has written a book titled Hegel for Social Movements (2019) as a way to make Hegel more accessible to people who are participating in a social movement.¹ The book is written for activists who are likely to have studied Marx as a way of interpreting their own experience, but who have probably been reluctant to invest time in studying Hegel.

Hegel posited that it is through the contradiction or combat of oppositional ideas that new and qualitatively different ideas arise. Marx took Hegel’s concept, the dialectic, and applied it to the material world, testing it throughout his study of human social relations, in everything from economics to evolution. Blunden explains how social movements and the simple abstract ideas that animate them are also the product of this dialectical process. In his book, he describes the arc of a social movement:

To begin with, at point zero, so to speak there is no social movement, there is only a number of people who all occupy some social status or location. But they are not necessarily aware of sharing this status with others. This social status may be being an educated woman, or an African immigrant, or a carrier of the BRACA gene. [p. 61]

Blunden is outlining this process in order for us to appreciate how Hegel’s fundamental idea of how change happens through the resolution of rising contradictions lies at the base of contemporary thinking about change, including changes in biological adaptation to the environment, changes (transitions) in human history, changes in collective and individual psychology and of course, changes in social movements.

Or, in our case, someone is hired as a contingent. We might be grad students, research assistants, one-class professors, or half-load or full-load professors off the tenure line, but we would all be hired without job security, or contingent. However, we do not see that as what we have in common. We do not view ourselves as being part of a broad group, but instead assign ourselves individual blame for our status as contingents. At the same time, we question it. We would ask, “Why, if I did all the right things—went to a good university, got an advanced degree, won grants, published research—why am I getting older and older and still don’t have a tenure-track job?” The phrase “all the right things” is an indicator of thinking of one’s status as being outside of any conflict that might be bigger than the individual level. Of course, doing “all the right things” is not really the ladder that one climbs to grasp the brass ring.

Then something happens which either creates a problem for all the people of this social status or provides an opportunity of some kind. Perhaps only a few people are aware of this fact, or perhaps all of them, but in most cases few of them are aware that the project or opportunity is one shared with others or have an adequate concept of it.

This opportunity started to open up for contingent faculty on a national level in the US in the 1990s, at the time when the MLA Radical Caucus held its first separate gathering for non-tenure-line faculty and when the first COCAL conferences took place. These gatherings were the “opportunity,” because they gave people a chance to meet each other, share information, organize, and discuss the idea that the problem was the mounting casualization of the faculty. It was still not widely recognized that this was not just a set of individual failures-to-hire, but a staffing policy that served multiple agendas. The few who were aware took it upon themselves to talk about it publicly and on the adj-l listserve, for example. A few analytic pieces began to appear in book form, in organizational media, and even in the mainstream press. Blunden continues: “Then someone proposes a concept of the situation that they all share, and signifies this concept with a word (probably an existing word imbued with new meaning, or a new word altogether) or some other artifact (such a Gandhi’s charkha) and publicizes this.”²

This doesn’t happen all at once. In our case, the use of specific words to name our social status tells its own story. Part of the story has to do with higher education administrators trying to find a euphemistic label for this swelling workforce that did not give them a public relations problem that involved contingents gradually replacing traditional full-time professors. In the CSU system, we were Lecturers. Lecturers themselves have not challenged that label. In other systems, the name of our group has been a matter of great contention. In the California community college system, for example, we were part-timers, because under state law we were unable to work more than 60 percent (now 67 percent) of a full-time load. Some organizers would aggressively use the full legal term, part-time temporary, to make a joke out of the fact that one could be temporary for 15 or 20 years. Adjunct is the word many of us knew first, especially outside California. This was behind the partial list of these labels in Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.

Then in the last few years, along with the words “gig,” “precarious,” and “zero-hours contract,” the word “contingent” came into focus and it became more or less the term of choice. “Contingent” names the common condition that makes good teaching impossible: lack of job security and therefore lack of academic freedom. Thus today we speak about the “contingent faculty movement.” The ultimate goal of this movement, though not universally understood by everyone in it, is the elimination of contingency, to replace it with the standard for job security found in other kinds of work: “just cause dismissal”. So “contingency” would be an example of naming what Blunden says is “a concept of the situation that they all share.” He continues:

Thanks to this new concept, all the affected or interested people have an understanding of their situation and probably some degree of consciousness of being part of a “group” sharing this situation, and they begin to act in concert in some way. [However,] [n]ew concepts can arise only in institutions where there are definite norms which are capable of manifesting contradictions and stimulating the formation of new concepts. Where “anything goes” there can be no contradictions.

Higher education is certainly an institution with definite norms—for example, the norms of what good curriculum, good teaching, and other good practice look like. The AAUP Statement on Tenure and Academic Freedom is an example of one of those norms. The mission statements produced by every institution of higher ed, even the sleaziest, also boast of “quality,” which is another norm.^3] In the daily effort to practice “quality” under degraded working conditions, every contingent has lived under the pressure that shows the sky through the cracks in the contradiction between what is supposed to happen and what does in fact happen. But taking action is not easy:

To know the problem does not immediately mean to know the solution. Many different solutions will be tried out one after another. The initial concept is thereby modified; misconceptions are dispelled through bitter experience, more and more adequate concepts are formed, until the problem and solution come together in a simple abstract idea which encapsulates the shared problem in such a manner as to be able to transform their situation.

Blunden uses the phrase “bitter experience,” and everyone who has been involved in this movement recognizes what that means. We can all think of people whose lives were permanently damaged—or lost—because of the ideas that were tried out but failed, or morphed into something different and left people behind. But once a certain critical mass has been reached, the movement continues. Sometimes it is the very outrageousness of the opposition—for example, the 2012–16 attacks on City College of San Francisco by the ACCJC (Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges) and its corporate and government allies—that spurs the movement forward.

But—a “simple abstract idea”? It is actually the case that major social movements of the last thirty years have been animated by simple abstract ideas. Examples are the SEIU “Justice for Janitors” campaign and the UPS Teamsters, who in 1997 struck around the slogan “A Part-Time America Won’t Work.” In 2005, immigrant workers marched to “A Day Without Immigrants” and “We’re Workers, Not Criminals.” The hotel-room cleaners in UNITE-HERE in the 2010s used the slogan, “One Job Should Be Enough.” In Chicago in 2012, it was “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve.” In 2018–19, the teachers in three states struck under “Red for Ed(ucation).” In all of these cases, these simple abstract ideas were useful for people organizing on their own behalf, but also spoke to the public on a recognizably common-good basis, therefore making appeals for solidarity, not charity.

Another simple abstract idea is Medicare For All. The idea of a national healthcare system for the US has morphed from the single-payer (government-payer) program that was supposed to be part of Social Security, to the early days of Medicare in the 1960s, and then various campaigns for Single Payer since the 1980s. Today, Medicare for All, which was part of Bernie Sanders’ platform, would transform (actually abolish) the entire health insurance industry. Is today too soon for a comparable “simple abstract idea” for higher education? Is it possible to develop, from the Blue Sky agenda discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, an idea that works both for self-organizing among ourselves and one that engages other workers to act together with us?

Blunden describes stages that are recognizable but our movement has not arrived at these yet:

All going well, next begins a process of institutionalization. The abstract concept enters general social practice and becomes part of the language. Actions formerly carried out by activists are carried out by institutions—either new institutions (such as a Sex Discrimination Commissioner) or existing institutions are modified (new occupational safety procedures are introduced). Sometimes the activists themselves are appointed to positions in the state apparatus, and even whole activist groups may be co-opted into institutions, such as Aboriginal self-help groups who receive funding for the services they provide.

Through this process the original concept gradually dissolves into everyday discourse and its origin is forgotten. There are no longer any special institutions dedicated to dealing with the issue, but the entire society has been transformed. (p. 62)

The most important example of this historical sequence in the US is the history of the Black Liberation Movement. While the anti-slavery movement dated from the 1600s, it was actions by Black enslaved people themselves during the Civil War, who enacted a general strike, refused to work and then joined the Union Army, that changed the war from being a war to save the union to being a war to abolish life-long racial chattel slavery. That action was animated by the simple abstract idea, “Freedom!” which has been part of the Black movement ever since, through the years of Radical Reconstruction (the attempt to institutionalize revolution in the South) and its defeat, through the years of Jim Crow segregation laws and disenfranchisement, the Second Reconstruction of the 1950s–70s (the Civil Rights movement). Today it motivates the current movements to create full legal and social equality under the law and in practice.

The contingent faculty movement is at the point where to know the problem is not yet to know the strategy for winning. The real battle—for resources and authority sufficient to turn the course of history around before we burn up the world we live in—will take place on a level above our fight right now. But this shifts us into thinking on the proper scale. The most obvious conclusion to draw is that the transitions we need to bring about are not going to be won by individual local unions at the bargaining table. They go far beyond that. A comparison between the Blue Sky conditions envisioned in Chapters 6 and 7, “What we fight for” versus what is captured in the CFA contract should show how incommensurable, yet how closely linked, they are.

However, at the level of our rising national movement, we can point to examples of how our efforts have led to changes that have become institutionalized in some respects. We have recognition by major unions, action plans, and strategic initiatives flowing from them; legal changes that have been pressed and won in legislatures, courts and other government bodies, and the spread of collective bargaining at a time when collective bargaining is itself under attack. The movement is also much more conscious of its place in the broader struggle within the political economy of higher education.

We are entering this dialogue at a moment when a lot is at risk, but a lot is possible. The rest of this book is intended to be a guide to navigating that moment.

Copyright

Joe Berry and Helena Worthen. “The Contingent Faculty Movement as a Social Movement.” Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education. pp. 155-160. © 2022 Pluto Press. Reprinted with permission.

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[1] Blunden, A. (2019). Hegel for Social Movements (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV); all quotes from Blunden in this chapter are from p. 61 of this volume.

[2] See https://youtu.be/cXXYsVhlv1U for a view of the small spinning wheel used by Gandhi and an example of how it was (and is still being) used as a symbol of a movement (accessed January 18, 2021).

[3] We contrasted two views of “quality”—one judged by typical outcome measures from a management perspective and the other from a student and faculty learning perspective—in our article, “A CHAT analysis of college teaching”: Worthen, H., and Berry, J. (2006). Our Working Conditions are Our Students’ Learning Conditions: A CHAT Analysis of College Teaching (pp. 145–159). In Sawchuk, P., Duarte, N., and El Hammoumi, M. (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work & Everyday Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

When you have mentors, which, that’s not a thing that the nonprofit sector and the organizations I partner with, work with, work for, they don’t seem to have that practice really developed, especially when we’re talking about BIPOC leadership. But when you have access to mentors who can give you the game, who can tell you what it’s been like, and can also show that they can adapt and care for you, that is an invaluable resource for new leaders, and also for leaders who are thinking, what is the way that I give more instead of take? I think when we see folks modeling what it looks like to adapt as a leader, and that can take shape in many different ways and forms, paired with creating and prioritizing the space to connect and really be able to share what is it that makes us want to be a part of this organization? Why do we want to be committed to being compassionate about why we are part of this community or part of this organization? I think that goes a long way.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.