At this point no one can reasonably argue that we are headed for anything but extraordinarily difficult times; about as bad as we imagine and definitely worse than we can easily come to terms with.
One of my board members recently sent me a note that analogized our situation to the “Wile E Coyote Effect.” You might remember the coyote running along and not realizing that he has run off the cliff. He keeps running suspended magically by denial. Then he stops. Wile feels around his feet for the ground, and then looks down to find the ground has disappeared beneath him. Well, here we stand in . Some of us are stopped on the edge of the cliff, some have kept running and are suspended way out over the cliff, and some of us are holding the anvil over our heads.
We should all begin to operate with two assumptions.
1. The decline in revenue is going to shred the progressive advocacy movement. The movement at the end of 2010 will look very different from the movement of September 2008. People, talent and assets that remain are going to be scattered across the landscape. We are going to need to remap and network those elements together in order to continue to mount successful campaigns.
2. For at least two years, the federal government is going to be dominated by Democrats. They are going to be able to move legislation and government action quickly. Legislative and policy opportunity is going to come in even tighter and more intense waves.
My intention is to present those assumptions and add to the ongoing conversation about what these changes mean from the viewpoint of the activist, executive director, network strategist and progressive.
We need a plan that can deal with these reductions in our capacity, staff and resources while also enabling us to capitalize on the opportunities the new political climate is going to produce. Our movement can not shrink from the opportunity the current climate has created nor can we run full speed off the cliff assuming we can run on thin air.
The plan we develop must be cheaper for our groups, protect as many of our talented people as possible and address both the opportunity and the chaos of our time.
We must rally the nonprofit sector to view this as our own strategic restructuring milestone.The moment the progressive advocacy movement figures out how to collaborate and synchronize on a scale never imagined. It is in this chaos that we are challenged to reorganize, retool, rethink and network in new ways. We have the opportunity to emerge as a networked movement that can solve the big problems including ones we could not solve in the past. After this depression, whatever infrastructure is in place will be the backbone for a new era of advocacy if we plan and execute our transition well it will be our greatest success.
We need to understand a little bit about what happened in the market? What is coming? How do we continue to fight for change and run our campaigns in difficult times? How does the economic and political change reshape our work, shift our day-to-day actions and force us to revisit strategy?
