Activism Inc. - How Canvassing is Sucking the Spirit out of Thousands of Young Progressives

Yesterday I read Activism Inc. I strongly recommend reading it. It's insightful and short. The thesis I got from it was that thousands of progressive-minded young people are joining canvassing operations, lasting an average of several days, and burning-out.

These young people could be forming the backbone of social movement organizations, however instead they burn out and find non-activist jobs (like being teachers).

The book argued that conservatives are succeeding in placing young people into conservative organizations, however the left is failing.

I'd be very interested to read a book on what the conservatives have done that works so well for them. I suspect part of the answer is that they may have larger sums of money that can create more organizations and better-paid positions (whereas canvassing jobs in particular, and other leftist jobs are generally lower-paid).

I think the solution is community organizing. You need to have people who are committed to living in a community for a long period of time (avoid all of this jumping around from one place to the next, which is detailed in the book). Then you need to build up deep relationships with people in the community, build long-lasting (e.g. 10 year long or more) coalitions between groups in the community, ultimately build a progressive third party (so you can take over city hall or at least have a strong influence on it, and help local groups win their campaigns), and so on.

Instead of canvassing mostly for money, you'd have people running local offices who would be "canvassing" or doing other forms of outreach to build up their organization - to solicit ACTIVE members who would participate in meetings, organize their neighbors, democratically set the organization's agenda, and in the process people would get trained and become leaders.

Another solution is to have people form organizations that fund themselves. For instance, several people could make enough money working 10-20 hours per week doing computer consulting on php/mysql (and/or drupal) and spend the rest of their time working on developing a software project like the Activism Network (if you are interested, email me). There is easily room for perhaps another hundred people doing activism tech projects, maybe even more. And there would be enough computer consulting jobs to pay everyone's way. Part of key here is being able to live on a salary in the $20,000 range, instead of $50,000 (which is what you could get with full-time computer work) and for people committing to things for the longterm so they don't just learn the skills and then leave to get a high paid job. Somebody could even set-up internships programs, equivalent to the DC unpaid internships, to teach people the basics of software development.