The Activism Industry

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

You've seen them before. The crunchy-looking college-aged twentysomethings who knock at your door on summer evenings or stand on street corners across the country. Dressed in the T-shirts of progressive organizations like Save the Children or the Sierra Club, clipboards in hand they step into your path, smile, and make eye contact: "Hey there, how's it going? Do you have a minute?"

This type of grassroots outreach was born on May 27, 1971 when Marc Anderson, a former encyclopedia salesman, decided to combine his door-to-door sales knowledge with the political experience he gained volunteering for a local candidate's campaign. Harvard law student and self-described "Nader's Raider" David Zwick became intrigued by Anderson's efforts while he was trying to fund his newly formed group Clean Water Action. Learning the technique from Anderson, Zwick used issue-based canvassing to develop and sustain his work, which is now supported by 700,000 citizen members around the country. Zwick notes that all of the issue-based groups that have canvassed in the past 30-plus years can be traced back to Anderson's work, either via his direct management or through people he trained spinning off to run canvasses for other groups: "Virtually all... today are either imitators or direct descendants."

During the 1990s, as the funding for progressive causes waned, many national progressive groups were forced to tighten their belts and close their local field offices. Like corporations that hire workers in India to run their call centers, the canvassing, phone banking, and direct mail outreach that sustains the fundraising and membership base of progressive organizations and campaigns in America were outsourced to national groups that emerged to fill the gap on the left. As word spread of this efficient and cost-effective way to develop and maintain a grassroots base, national groups that had never worked at the grassroots level also decided to outsource. Today, progressive groups have only to sign up with an intermediary organization and trained canvassers will go door-to-door or work the sidewalk traffic on their behalf, dressed in the group's T-shirt and armed with pitches that work.

The system is indeed more efficient. Unfortunately, this type of outsourced politics increases the distance between members and the progressive national groups that claim to represent them - and has proven no match for the kind of political institutions on the right that are locally rooted and turn citizens into engaged activists.

One of the largest of the progressive grassroots clearinghouses is the Fund for Public Interest Research*, which currently runs campaigns from numerous progressive groups simultaneously. In summer 2003, for example, the Fund ran campaigns for more than fifteen organizations around the United States, including the Sierra Club, the Human Rights Campaign, Save the Children, and Greenpeace. Their model of grassroots politics is very successful at recruiting members and raising funds. Sally Green Heaven, the deputy field director of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), reported that their membership has grown from 200,000 to 600,000 members since the group started outsourcing to the Fund in the late 1990s. According to John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA: "[The Fund] helped us build our new financial base...It gave us a new base and it paid approximately 25 percent of our yearly income from monthly electronic donations, which is huge."

Canvassers at the Fund are expected to bounce from one campaign to another. In the words of HRC president Joe Solmonese, "The person who is out standing on the street corner trying to sign you up to join HRC... they honestly, like the next day, might be doing the same thing for [a different organization]." As a result of their short shelf lives and having to juggle multiple campaigns, most canvassers do not become particularly committed to the cause. (Turnover is notoriously high.)