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Dismantling Peace Movement Myths

Every movement and issue has its deeply held tropes that have not been well tested against reality. Here's a great example of someone working to address that dynamic. In a speech for Peace Action Maine in April, in an effort to help inspire new strategy, Frida Berrigan talked about Dismantling Peace Movement Myths. She addresses five of these tropes (which she calls myths): (1) In the 1960s, the peace movement was so much more powerful and so much cooler than we are today. (2) There are no young people active in the peace movement. Don’t they care? (3) We are marginalized and we are not having an impact. (4) We are not smart enough to end the war. (5) We can elect our way to an end to war. Posted: 5/19/08; 7:04:34 PM #

Webby Winners 2008 in Activism

The 2008 Webby Award Winners in Activism and other categories were recently announced. I'm not really sure that the Webbys matter overall or that their winners should be emulated, but they are no doubt valuable in some way to the organizations that win them and the designers they hire. The winners in activism include Love is Respect, Invisible Children, Eyes on Darfur, Fashion Against AIDS, and Make It Right. Posted: 5/19/08; 6:59:16 PM #

Going Postal: Mailing Rate Hikes Pinch Small Magazines, Thanks to Time Warner

I have been known to mock the way it sometimes seems like the only issue that really unifies nonprofit organizations is the matter of postage rates. (Why they can't seem to care about net neutrality, which is essentially the same issue, really baffles me.) But I paid close attention to the recent rate hikes affecting independent publishing, because they were less about the right of nonprofits to send gobs of solicitations than about the ability of small organizations (nonprofit and for profit) to be able to publish successfully in print. In Going Postal, Callie Enlow describes how Time Warner ramrodded through a proposal to drop one of the essential premises on which the U.S. Postal Service was created - promoting the free flow of ideas by giving preferential treatment to their most common method of conveyance: the printed pages of periodicals - in a complex overhaul of the rate system that would favor their publications over those of anyone smaller than them. Posted: 5/19/08; 6:53:31 PM #

What Does Gartner Really DO?

How much of technology consulting is really CYA for anxious IT staff? I remember attending a few Gartner conference calls (offered for free to nonprofits with much bowing and scraping by the latter) and wondering what all the fuss was about. The calls were absurdly focused on brand oriented buying decisions and making people feel like they were behind the times. Where was the real strategy, I wondered. Well, I'm guess I'm not the only one who wonders this. Bob Cringely's recent column asks: What Does Gartner Really DO? How much of this same critique can we level at portions of the nonprofit tech field that doesn't have anything like Gartner's stature, but often seems to wish it did? Posted: 5/19/08; 6:42:01 PM #

Domestic spying under Bush; Al-Haramain in Oregon, NSA warrantless wiretapping

Despite the continuous stream of stories about the Bush administration's spying on domestic organizations and U.S. citizens, we've only touched the tip of the iceberg on this piece of the decline of American civil society. In Blacklisted by the Bush Government, part of a Salon Magazine investigative series on the topic, you can learn more about the case of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Oregon. It's ugly and getting uglier. Are you really certain none of your staff or members are on a government list? Posted: 5/19/08; 6:36:43 PM #