#organizations

The Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) says its current management has "discovered serious and significant financial irregularities" that its board was unaware of, as it shutters businesses and sells off property worth millions of dollars. The prominent national advocacy group has been engulfed in turmoil over the last year, but it now says it wants to return to collective advocacy, saying in an unsigned statement issued Tuesday that it's co-operating fully with a federal audit covering fiscal years 2018-2024 while conducting an internal review of its own. "We are committed to rebuilding NWAC as an organization of truth and transparency," the statement said.

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We are so excited to release our list of groups we are supporting with our first ever Fandom Does Tzedakah. You can take a look on tumblr or on dreamwidth.

I've been working on this graphic for a minute (in Word because it's the only software that would let me make a divided triangle???), and it's debatable to a certain degree, but I think it's finished.

It's a graphic based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs but for resource acquisition for activists/activist groups (this could apply to a singular person or an organization).

The easiest thing to gather or donate to a cause (for the average person) is manpower - just showing up and being willing to lift, carry, clean, pick up, etc.

Next is skilled labor that requires a specific background like trade school, law school, medical school, college, etc. This is harder to find/obtain because there are so many different skills people can pursue professionally, they may or may not be able to do them pro bono, and there are also barriers to obtaining them due to the cost of education.

Supplies is debatable because the difficulty of finding a given supply depends on what it is, but what I really want to highlight is that supplies are easier to come by than event spaces and direct donations. There are a lot of free or cheap options for supply gathering, whether that's scavenging dumps or curbs, thrifting, asking for donations of unwanted items, etc.

Storage and event space is something I think a lot of organizations should think about more, especially with a goal of owning those spaces, because it's a lot easier to run an organization when you have a dedicated space that you know you can access at any time and where people know they can access you. Having a central location for an organization's resources is also key. I feel like I've worked for a lot of orgs that are just before this stage with no plans to get there, and one of the big hiccups with them is having supplies for things stored in like 20 individual people's houses, resulting in loss of supplies when they accidentally get mixed in with personal items or when people suddenly have to drop from the organization for a bit + reduced accessibility to those supplies for other members because you have to wait for the availability of the person who has them to transport them to a given site.

I think going from having no owned, dedicated space to having any amount is a quantum leap for organizational effectiveness because it reduces the mental load for planning activities (no need to reserve spaces in advance for events or meetings, no need to coordinate with multiple people just to get supplies to the right place, no need to work around opening/closing times of storage centers or venues, etc.).

The hardest thing to get in my opinion is money, and I'm thinking in the sense of large donors or large grants. You can raise a few dollars here and there at a bake sale, but it's hard to raise the kind of money a full organization needs for projects, campaigning, etc. right at the start of said organization's life because it's unknown and untested - people will be skeptical about donating. But once you have that kind of money, it makes everything lower on the triangle much easier to get because suddenly you have more options for event space/storage (perhaps even closer to your area of activity or options to own instead of rent), more and easier options for supplies, and the ability to pay people for their skills/labor.