I'd like to say that I write and often work in nonprofits because I am an idealist. I'm often accused of this.
After all, this is a society where, if you think about the structure of your worklife at all, you are supposed to realize that you are only rewarded for entrepreneurialism or by being rewarded for building shareholder value.
Unfortunately, that isn't what gets me out of bed in the morning.
I grew up as the daughter of a small town Unitarian Universalist minister. Both my parents had education degrees. They met through labor union connections during WWII. My dad was a card carrying communist as a young man -- and quite a few people seem to forget how many of our young idealists were. Communism in the 30's was a sort of utopianism that threatened the status quo, and stood untried. A good testing ground for the young, philosophical, and disenfranchized.
Both my parents came from immigrant backgrounds. My mother never spoke English until she was seven, although her father spoke it fluently. The only language her parents had in common was Yiddish.
My father grew up in multi-ethnic slums in Cleveland, where he bragged sometimes that he was a member of the first integrated street gang. You had to belong to a gang in the depression in a poor neighborhood, or you got stomped. His crew was full of orphans, all the groups that didn't have enough kids to have their own gang -- rroma, poles, russians, jews, east asians.
He spoke seven languages, coming out of that -- which served him well learning Greek, Latin and Hebrew for his ministerial studies, years later.
By the time I came along, my parents were nearing 40 -- late to have a kid in the 50's, as normal as it is now! They had mellowed a good deal. Dad had long finished his education degree and was working on his divinity degree, rather late in life for that, too. Mom had two teenage boys and a baby girl on her hands, plus being a Jewish minister's wife. Dad was starting to get active in the civil rights movement -- probably all that multiculturalism on the ghetto streets in the 30's. It was a complicated time.
I remember when I was about four, my dad going off to a march with MLK and the SCLC, and I asked, "Why is it that people just don't understand this?" and my dad hunkered down next to me and said, "Well, Shava, when you explain it it seems pretty clear. If you could only get to talk to each person, individually, maybe someday you could change their minds?"
To him, it was a throwaway platitude, I think. To me, it became a mission from God. At four, I became obsessed with what I would need to learn to be able to pursuade people of what was right.
I would need to learn to write, and to do that I would need to learn to read well and broadly. I would need to learn to listen before I could learn to speak persuasively. I would need to learn why it was that other people clung to beliefs I found so unfathomable -- because my dad assured me that people are hardly ever truly evil, but simply see their interests elsewhere.
That was over forty years ago. I wrote my first published paper in 7th grade. I was writing for the local newspaper as a freelancer ("the cub reporter") soon after. In my senior year, I took a semester and got a paid internship with Vermont Life magazine.
But part of my teenage rebellion was this: I decided that my father hadn't had enough time for me. I needed to choose between being a parent someday, or being an activist. Parent seemed more fun.
About 25 years ago I discovered the Internet.
The Internet has always been a crucible for refining ideas. Our posts gather allies and opposition, and all their ideas refine our thinking, our writing and our advocacy.
Over the years my writing and my power of persuasion grew. I wrote technical papers, journal articles, and a lot of ephemera on USENET (an embarassing amount of which survives) as I honed my craft.
In 1996, I became general manager of Oregon Public Networking, one of the largest and oldest free-nets in the United States. I'd been working online about 15 years, and running campus networks or campus support for ten. I was an engineer and a manager. I didn't define myself as a writer.
In 1997, we were slammed by the IRS. The auditor was very blunt. "You can give poor people food, and you can give them clothing," she told me and my treasurer, "but you can't give them round trip tickets to Reno. And everybody knows that all the Internet is good for is online shopping and downloading free pornography. And the people you are serving don't have credit cards."
Today, the thought that providing Internet access to poor people might not have an educational or charitable value seems preposterous. It should have been in 1997. Regardless, I suddenly inadvertently found myself leading a controversial effort to save 350 American freenets, serving 650,000 disadvantaged individuals and thousands upon thousands of nonprofits, from being shut down by the IRS.
Suddenly, every lesson I learned about advocacy and organizing came back to me. But I was married, with a small child -- where was my determination to avoid becoming an activist? If I took this on, it would eat my life; I knew that.
As the rabbi says: "If not me, who? If not now, when?"
I never realized until then how much I had learned from my father. Within a month, we were sure that the goal of the IRS was to shut us, and probably other free-nets, totally down. Within a month after that -- and on $1000 budget from Aldus founder Paul Brainerd -- we had a cell phone, fax and postage budget, and instituted a successful national and international PR campaign.
We were on the AP International Newswire, PRI's Marketplace business news magazine, Business Week, the front page of the technology section of NYTimes.com, and in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
On the basis of that tiny budget, we set the groundwork to raise a bit more to do lobbying in DC, to rally the other free-nets and their memberships, and stave off the IRS with PR for three years. I even invented a new way to craft a letter writing campaign to the Commissioner of the IRS.
In the process, I learned how much the Internet could be used for organizing, building on the legacy from my father. I learned to truly advocate in my writing. I learned a lot of research and leadership skills. I started teaching organizing classes to nonprofit managers, elders, youth.
And, I got divorced.
I said it, didn't I? That I had a choice between activism and family?
Ah well.
So now, six years since the IRS closed our case "without decision" -- which means they didn't want to admit they were mistaken -- I am still a single mother.
I have gone on to sell my advocacy skills as a marketing and political consultant. I've written a curriculum on best practices for the use of technology in nonprofits. I was VP of Marketing and Business Development for the 3rd fastest growing private company in Oregon (also rated 100 best to work for!). I helped put together a digital divide conference the day before the 1999 WTO ministerial that brought together the most amazing group of 150 players you could imagine. I helped run the Dean campaign in Oregon. I helped Portland, OR transform their Democratic Party into a real fundraising machine for the 2000 election.
And, as a single mother, I've learned a level of efficiency I never thought possible, trying to be fair to my own ambitions and to my son.
But now that he's a teenager, and I can have a little more flexibility with my time, about my life. Should I return to hard core business, or create some program in the coddled insanity of the nonprofits? Should I try to get a job with my old department at MIT? Should I try to break into writing?
My motivation isn't so much money; money is necessary but insufficient. Here's what jazzes me: I want to have fun, to be engaged, to play fair with fair players. To think about big systems, and articulate big ideas.
And I want to talk to each individual, somehow, and help them understand what I think is right -- no, to develop a sense of right that will serve them, and my son's world, well.
That is why I write. But how should I make my living?
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Comments: 14
I don't know how you should make your living but I just want to tell you that your passion and conviction for your beliefs and how you came to be who you are really came through in your writing. Gave me goosebumps. Also, I read this because I was drawn to your title, "Why I Write." It seems to me that whatever direction you go, it would make sense that writing would be a part of it.
Thanks for sharing a piece of you here! I totally forgot that this was a two word challenge, so enrapt I was with your prose. Now, I'll have to scroll back up and see how you worked it in!
Lovely!
Too True, and unfortunately, not applied nearly often enough. I applaud you for your passion and your activism. Would that more people were like you!
And, there's a sort of deep ecumenist Christian mysticism to the New England Unitarians which I've found most consonant with the Hicksites. Except, they are simple and reserved people, and UU's tend to be loud and running off in odd directions. Like Quakers with ADHD, maybe? :)
What an inspiration you are Shava. Thankyou for this incredible story.
The prosaic quandry behind the prose is this: I can get about twice the money in marketing as in cause-related work. If the marketing/political/PR/bizdev work allows me time to write, should I make more money and write as a hobby, or should I find that place that lets me put more of the writing into changing the world?
Or, even scarier, do I start writing and try to sell it? I'm currently working for a kids' book on community organizing called "How to Save the World in Your Spare Time," based on classes I've been teaching since 1998. Should I be selling it, or putting it up on a web site so more kids can find it?
The market for progressive writers, even good ones, is pretty glutted. It's hard to get a job and distinguish yourself. It's even harder to get paid. (needless to say, leads are welcome! :)
As the cliche goes, " I don't know, but if you find out let me know". I share your desire to deal with the fair players in life. I also will never understand why the majority wants an uneven playing field that favors no one in the long run. It is really hard to earn a living and care about the big picture at the same time, maybe even impossible.
George, the current system is set up with the intention of making it impossible to earn a living and care about the big picture at the same time. Better to keep the masses distracted with survival so we don't notice the elite class making our survival more difficult so that they can hunt 400 quails in an afternoon.