Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
A few weeks back, Phil Cubeta his View from the Dumpster at GiftHub. In it he says, “…there is a need for a nonprofit membership association of funders, activists, and forprofits devoted to the public good, and supportive of grassroots efforts…”
This raises a heap of questions for me, all directly related to sCNN strategy. What I’ve been envisioning and developing here is a place where individuals (and organizations, if they like) can give to individuals (some of whom may have organizations chartered as non-profits). This necessarily swims a bit upstream, against the common assumption that you must organize a 501c3 structure in order to do good on any kind of meaningful or sustainable scale.
So as Phil talks about wanting to support non-profits to support grassroots, mostly I’m wondering if/how these two ways of being can play together.
- Are the skills and mindsets required to form and maintain the current structures dictated by 501c3-ness consistent with the skills and mind of grassroots movement?
- If sCNN is to run on the passion and responsibility of individuals, what role is there for large gifts and formal organizations to support it?
- Would establishing sCNN as 501c3 make it stronger or sell it out into the view that formal structure must precede all real action?
- Can little individuals organize significant and sustainable movement without bowing before the God of tax-deductibility?
I don’t assume for a moment that non-profit and grassroots cannot play together. Mostly I think they don’t, though. Perhaps that’s because I’m most often talking about a strong form of grassroots, where the little people are doing things, not just sending in their checks. In my view of grassroots, everybody moves. How do we organize that? It still sounds more like OpenSpaceTech and blogging than 501c3 to me, but I’m glad to bring it all together if we can.
P.S. to Phil… can you add sCNN to the GiftHub blogroll, please, thanks?
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