Let the Work Speak for Itself |
Still from Where the Buffalo Roam.
Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.
Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.
I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years.
But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.
Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them.
Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”
The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.
This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his........