We started this organization when we realized we couldn’t find organizations addressing all of the issues we thought were important or in ways we thought were necessary.
Many of our goals however overlap with many organizations who are working on parts that we feel critically need to be addressed. Organizations trying to address climate and environmental issues, others trying to address social and economic equity, and those working to address racial inequity, injustice, and related issues.
In talking about these issues with other groups it became apparent there was a defensiveness around a new organization coming in. We realized much of this is because of the scarcity of funds and support that was a primary limiting factor for the ability of many of these organizations to accomplish their goals.
We realized that if we were going to accomplish our collective goals that addressing this issue would have to be priority number one. Not only finding enough financial support to achieve our goals but finding a way to to help other organizations who were efficiently and effectively working on parallel goals to have the resources needed to accomplish their goals. After all none of these organizations were designed as fundraising organizations. They were designed to accomplish their goals and made some side effort to fund it. We also started to realize that significant funding often comes from corporations, wealthy and big dollar donors and that could and sometimes visibly did influence organizations to align actions and values that protected their donors even if that reduced their ability to fight for the people and or planet. It became clear that fighting for the people and the planet would be more challenging if the organization was beholden to big donors and financiers. If we wanted to fight for the people and the planet we would have to be beholden only to the people and the planet. To do that we would have to look for financial support that didn’t indebt us to the powers that be. But how to do that without asking too much of individuals who didn’t have a bunch of excess money to spend? Eventually a plan started coming together. The concept of many hands make light work began to unfold. Even in our conservative area many people voted for things like local carbon or environmental taxes or other taxes that would allow our government more resources to address many of these issues. The problem is that more often than not a small majority votes against tax increases of votes for lower taxes. This prevents the government from accessing this money that close to half the population would be willing to contribute. On the bright side it still means nearly half the population would be willing to pay more to address these issues and an NGO wouldn’t have to rely on a majority vote to see those funds. It would only need to convince those people willing to spend that money that the NGO would use it to address the issues they are willing to spend some of their income to address.
If we say there are roughly 50,000 adults in the RFV and surrounding areas then say 40% of them support spending more on climate and environment, racial, economic, and social equity, and efforts to reduce wealth inequality and increase upward mobility and say the average income is $50,000 then if people were willing to donate an average of half a percent of their income to addressing these issues or an average of $20 a month that would be $400,000 a month that could be used to address these issues.
Naturally we wouldn’t be hitting numbers like that quickly and may never get close to 40% of the population but with the right movement and community buy in perhaps we could.
We could also hope that many especially those more passionate and willing to get onboard early would be willing to contribute more.
Could you convince 10 people to contribute $20 a week? I think I could. Do you think you could convince a few of them to try to get 10 of their friends to do the same? I think I could. With just a small movement it shouldn’t be hard to reach 100-500 people and just with that real change could start happening. 200 people contributing $20 a week would start things rolling at $16000 a month. With that we could start accomplishing some small projects, or helping other organizations accomplish goals of their own and start showing to the community that their efforts are creating change. The goal from there would be to create a snowball effect.
The catch? This doesn’t work unless we get buy in.
The beauty though is that if we can get buy in we should be able to accomplish a lot.