What I Do Well (Third Essay): Help Groups Act

I help people think so well about their personal/professional lives that most would muse, "He does this so wonderfully that this must be all he does. Indeed, it is enough for any person to do." In fact, I am just as competent at helping groups of people act. The statement I tell myself on this score is that I do personal stuff so well that one naturally wants to put me in the "box" of the "thinker" or the "idea man," but I also do group things so well that people, upon seeing me do my "group" work think that I am solely an "activist." The equal capacity to do these strikingly different tasks well often has caused confusion when I have worked with people in the past. Why? Because they "hire" me to do something (usually think--and the things that flow from thinking) and I do it, but then I begin to "poke around" and discover that people aren't expressing clearly the mission of the organization, or that inefficiencies and inconsistencies are built deeply into the structure of the organization or that the group isn't getting its message out clearly and powerfully to the desired constituencies or that it has clumsily built alliances when skill was called for, etc. The structure of my mind and memory is that I conceptualize and I act. And, I do it all with humor, simple explanation and a collegial spirit.

An Example--From The Death Penalty

An example of the wedding of these two capabilities is in my work with the Oregon death penalty. I first entered the issue in 1999, as a law student, when I wrote a book (published in 2001), which subsequently won an award, on the history of capital punishment in Oregon. For several years after that I "laid low," because I really didn't understand what the movement "toward abolition" was trying to accomplish in the state. When NJ abolished the penalty in Dec. 2007, however, my attention was piqued to activate my activist side on this issue. So, I began to attend a meeting or two of the OADP (Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty) to see what was happening. Follks from NJ visited us in March 2008 to tell us what they accomplished. We then had a few meetings and nothing, seemingly, was moving forward. We scheduled a "step up" meeting for Sept. 26, 2008 to try to get other organizations to join us in an effort for abolition but, as the day drew near, I became more restive. Finally, at a specially-called meeting on Sept. 22, I said that unless we had a group whose major task it was to put energy into repealing the death penalty, we were bringing people to the meeting of the 26th under false pretenses. Right there on the spot someone suggested that I become chair of a committee on abolition (a committee of OADP, which is concerned also with prisoner support issues and education about the death penalty in Oregon).

My first inclination was to decline. After all, I knew what it would take to "build a movement." I had chaired a movement in 1985-86 in Oregon to increase the tax base at the community college whose board I sat on, and I knew the effort that must be expended in raising money, recruiting volunteers, honing a message, developing a speaker's bureau, forging coalitions, having literature, etc. etc. Yet, I was successful in chairing that effort in 1985-86, and I thought I knew what would lead to success in 2009 and beyond for the death penalty. I was losing money daily in the markets (and I continue to do so), knew that I wouldn't get paid a dime to chair the effort and, in fact, would end up donating money, but still I said "Yes." It was a job that needed to be done, and I didn't see anyone else coming forward.

Conceptualizing the Task

I won't go through every task that has occupied me in the two months since I took the helm. But I will emphasize the importance of two things: hiring and working with a staff person and building a "hub and spokes" model of the organization.

The first thing I recognized was that we had loads of things that needed to be done that required a part-time staffer or a full-time volunteer. The latter wasn't forthcoming or, if s/he was, it consisted of retired people who wanted to put their efforts into areas of their own concern rather than in thinking through and volunteering for the 'unsexy' jobs of data base organization, fund-raising, etc. I told the committee (I managed to get six other younger professional people to join me on the committee; the board of OADP was people mostly in their 60s to 80s) that we needed to hire a 1/2 time staffer, whose job it would be to help in data base creation, community organizing (even before Barack Obama used the term in his public presentations!) and fund-raising. Thus, we needed money. No one was our "deep pockets" for the organization, though we had a person or two who could give $1,000. I said that we needed to hire a half-time staffer and raise the initial money to support a staffer from ourselves alone or from those who already had a long-term commitment to abolition. It was not the right time to go out to churches or write grants or throw up a "hail Mary" to a rich person or two that some of us knew. We had to sacrifice our own money first before we could leverage it from others. So, they agreed.

I also said that we needed to have at least six months of salary "in the bank" before the staffer actually started work. Then, we had to commit ourselves to raising a one-month salary each month so that we had a permanent six-month "cushion" on funding. Finally, I knew that even though I had a committee who would "buy into" all of this, I had to take the lead, after discussion, in defining the position, putting out the ad, sifting through applications, getting someone on the committee to help me in interviewing, hiring a person, coming up with a contract and employment plan, etc. That is, my view was that until we were "off the ground," I had to donate about 10-20 hours a week to make sure that we started well.

As anyone who has worked with starting up a nonprofit knows, there are tons of unexpected difficulties and conundra that arise even in doing the simplest tasks. For example, the new group had to define itself in relationship to OADP. Then, we had to have some sessions on our priorities. Then, we had to go to our second choice for staffing the committee after our first choice, the day before he was to start work, told me that he had been offered and had accepted a full-time job with the county. Mundane tasks such as setting up new bank accounts, finding old federal tax ID #s, getting someone to be a second signer for checks, finding an appropriate "independent contractor" contract, figuring out how to "train" the new employee--all these things took time on my part. I knew that no one else was going to do them, and I was happy to do them.

The next essay describes how we came to a focus for the work of the committee.

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