Money For Change: Social Movement Philanthropy at the Haymarket People's Fund

6. Organizational Restructuring and Democracy

6 ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURING AND DEMOCRACY P EOPLE AT HAYMARKET PEOPLE'S FUND, ALONG WITH MANY other people in progressive social movement organizations formed in the 1970s, increasingly saw problems with an informal decentralized collectivist way of operating a growing organization (Freeman 1975; Rothschild-Whitt 1979; Mansbridge 1994; Sirianni 1984, 1994; Staggenborg 1988).1 This chapter shows how and why this organization became more formalized, with clearer lines ofauthority , and more centralized, with more representative democracy and less participatory democracy. Haymarket was able to make these changes and still retain a structure true to its mission: building a society with a more equitable distribution of power as well as wealth. When contributions declined and a man-of-color staffmember resigned in 1991, people at the Fund attributed these two immediate crises in large part to long-standing problems in the organization's informal decentralized structure. They were especially concerned about the problems this structure presented for completing complex and difficult tasks, like fundraising, and for the obstacles it posed to maintaining racial diversity, especially among the staff. Copyrighted Material 106 Chapter 6 I emphasize here two major aspects of organizational change that occurred at Haymarket from 1990 to 1992 and in the years immediately preceding . First was the formation and ongoing development of a centralized governing board, signaling a shift from a direct-participation form of democracy to a representative one. This was accompanied by changing relations between the new governing board and the nine regional funding boards, and by negotiations about autonomy and authority. Second was the dissolving of the staff collective and the decision to hire an executive director , precipitated especially by the resignation of a staff member. An issue that emerged in the course of these changes was the process through which Haymarket was going to make its decisions. Were they going to use consensus or vote? Historically, Haymarket had a commitment to the consensus method, and that was how they usually operated. Some people thought votes were being taken more and more, and they saw this as a problem. I discuss the issue ofconsensus decision making as it came up during discussions about the governing board and the staff collective. Haymarket's governing board had been restructured and given more authority just before I began my fieldwork. This board (called the Coordinating Council, or CC) was still in the process of establishing its new authority during the years 1990 to 1992. A number of the issues that arose at this time were about defining the responsibility this governing board would have, especially in relation to members of the nine regional funding boards and to the staff. Some members of the staff had been concerned for several years about what they saw as the declining effectiveness of their working collectively. Increasingly, their efforts to function "as a collective"-cooperatively in a peer relation to one another, with some sharing of tasks-seemed to be yielding more and more problems. Similar to those at other organizations growing in size and complexity, they were finding it harder and harder to determine whose job it was to do what, how the work was to be coordinated , and how staff were to be evaluated. In the face of a staff conflict of crisis proportions, they were especially troubled about where they could go for support and resolution of problems and for clear policy decisions and direction. From May 1991 to May 1992, Haymarket engaged in a critically important process to develop a five-year plan for the organization. It was durCopyrighted Material ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTlIRlNG AND DEMOCRACY 107 ing this period that people decided to make organizational changes. While they understood the value of standing back and looking at the big picture, what they wanted to develop was, as one staff member put it, "a strategic plan, not a visionary goal plan." In other words, they wanted something practical, something that could help them strategically, not something that emphasized longer-term goals. They hired an outside consultant to facilitate the planning process. The chair of the governing board gave voice to the primacy of political philosophy and political mission when he said in February 1991, "We need an organizational plan, a management plan ... [and it's] important that [whoever we hire as a facilitator] shares our politics." After interviews with several potential candidates, the organization chose an African American man, a local community activist, to guide their planning process. It is...