Gift Hub

The Swarm Meets the Powers that Be

The Revolution will Be Twittered on how the DNC protesters are using social media to coordinate and cover their own event. Meanwhile the "real media" stand down under duress. My hope is that for the 2012 conventions that philanthropists will fund Blackwater to patrol the streets to protect the rights of protesters under our Constitution, as they protect democracy in Iraq. 

Who Owns The Water Supply?

Who owns the water? Who negotiates to sell your watershed? As for the air, why not sell that too? Via.

Social Action Wiki

How best use the web in support of social action? That is the question being asked in theory and answered in practice by Peter Deitz and Joe Solomon at Social Action Labs. They have great ideas, are soliciting more, and have a little grant money to bring 3 -5 of the best ideas to life this summer  Contribute your thoughts to their wiki here.  See also.  If bottom up philanthropy/activism makes any sense at all, this is what it might look like. 

Low Wage Vocations

Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, points to a living wage calculator and suggests:

Use it to find out who’s eligible for food stamps on your campus — graduate employees, contingent faculty, gardeners, undergraduate carpenters, outsourced restaurant and cleaning staff are a good place to start.

Then, just for kicks, compare their sub-poverty wages against the salaries of the deans, president, and provost — plus the associate deans, associate provosts, financial staff, and business/law/medical school faculty.

When you’ve tabulated the results for your campus, go ahead and tell me education is rendering class struggle obsolete in the United States.

Among the attendees, almost all of them women, at the recent conference Tracy Gary did for fundraisers and nonprofit program officers, the conversation veered in the same direction. Why is that when something is said to be a "calling" it means you hardly get paid? Teaching or raising money are a great pastime for someone whose spouse works for Goldman Sachs.

Blessed Unrest

Paul Hawkin, Blessed Unrest, at Bioneers. See also the Blessed Unrest crowd sourced film project:

Essentially, BLESSED UNREST: THE FILM is created entirely on the film’s website. The site enables users to partake in collaborative editing in micro-communities devoted to certain themes set up by our directorial and editorial team. With the full resolution source tagging married to this collaborative editing interface, for the first time in history a film can jump from home page to the global stage with the click of a button.

Open Source Local Political Research

Mill U: Creating Community Under Duress:

Few realize how easy and effective open source research can be. I try to emphasize what a visit to the county courthouse can sometimes yield...Once I read the entire county budget in advance of hearings where the council was to explain why social and environmental programs were being cut, and handed out evidence of tax evasion through zoning manipulation and favoritism—with names of big shots who were sitting in the audience. People literally read from our flyer into the public record in front of the media.

Hedge Schools

Still crouching 'neath the sheltering hedge,
Or stretched on mountain fern,
The teacher and his pupils met feloniously to learn.

- John O'Hagan

Hedge Schools? First heard that term here. Nothing to do with Philanthropy, Officer, me and the children here were just passing the time of day.

We Are the New Radicals, Sung to the Tune of "We Are The Monkies"

We have seen grassroots political ferment evacuated from philanthropy, leaving Philanthrocapitalism, in which business will save us from its own excesses and injustices without assistance from government, good taste, moral traditions, or the people it saves.  Philanthrocapitalism has pretty well been debunked by Michael Edwards', Just Another Emperor. What are we to make, then, of We Are The New Radicals? Julia Moulden, author of a book by that title, is now writing a weekly column for the Huffington Post about how to save the world with love sweet love and without getting your nose broken, risking a stay in some government run Hell Hole, or even getting on a no fly list. It is all pretty much coming up roses in the world of The New Radicals. The cachet of social organizing extruded from venture philanthropy has now been nicely packaged and commodified in its own right.   

Advocacy 2.0

Advocacy 2.0 wiki:

This is a collaborative resource. Created by activists, for activists. We are discussing the basics of organizing loose groups of people.

Very promising matrix from within which activist networks may assist one another, learn, link, and grow.

Philanthropy in Support of Oppositional Networks

Jay Taber on the topic of fighting armed bigotry:

Part of the problem is that philanthropy in this country does not provide any infrastructural support for building and maintaining regional pro-democracy networks, where authentic activists can meet up and find mentors.

I can understand why the revolution will not be funded, but the pro-democracy movement? Surely, these are not the same?