A Safety Net for Aging Activists

Coalition sets up first pension plan designed for social-justice crusaders

Charles Taylor has worked as an organizer for the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment, in Greenville, S.C., for 18 years, helping low-wage residents assert their economic rights. “This is what I love and want to be doing,” he declares.

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But a few years ago, Mr. Taylor’s wife, who was expecting their first child, urged him to change careers. She was concerned not only about his modest pay and long hours, says Mr. Taylor, but also by the fact that his employer — like many small non-profit grassroots organizations — had no retirement plan.

“We’ve got a family,” Mr. Taylor, 42, recalls his wife’s saying. “What about our long-term security?”

Now, thanks to a plan pioneered by a national coalition of social-activist organizations, Mr. Taylor’s financial future is on firmer ground. He is among 133 employees at 23 organizations that have joined the nation’s first retirement plan shaped specifically for activists, advocates, and social-justice organizers.

The plan is the brainchild of the National Organizers Alliance, a non-profit group with 1,000 members that represents the interests of people who work in fields as disparate as homelessness, race relations, the environment, and labor activism. The coalition, which was formed in 1992, has received $450,000 from seven funds to develop and implement the retirement program.

Non-profit organizations that join must contribute at least 5 per cent of employees’ total annual salary to the retirement plan, and workers must have at least one year’s employment at a social-justice organization to be eligible.

Observers say they hope the plan will focus attention on an issue they believe organized philanthropy has not taken seriously enough: the need for workers at small non-profit groups to have at least minimal employment benefits. No reliable data exist on what percentage of small charities have retirement plans, but many experts believe it is low.

What’s more, observers say, the plan challenges the hard-line view that activism and corporate-style retirement coverage don’t mix. People who toil at social-justice work shouldn’t have to sacrifice their financial security as proof of devotion to a cause, the plan’s advocates say.

“If you want more and more people to do this work, you have to make it possible for them to do it,” says Kim Fellner, executive director of the National Organizers Alliance. A survey of organizers conducted by the alliance in 1994 found that while up to 80 per cent of respondents received medical benefits, only about 25 per cent of them had pension benefits. The survey also found that many of those with pensions worked for unions or other large organizations. Even organizers who have worked for decades often lack retirement coverage or other basic job benefits, Ms. Fellner says.

Judy Hertz, a long-time Chicago organizer who helped set up the retirement plan, says: “It shouldn’t be a question of self-sacrifice to be an organizer. You shouldn’t expect to be on poverty wages and to work until you drop.”

Despite the compelling need for retirement coverage, however, the National Organizers Alliance plan, which formally began collecting money for benefits in 1997, initially met with skepticism from the very people it was intended to help. Many grassroots leaders had never thought about a retirement plan, and some didn’t think small organizations could afford to pay for pension benefits, Ms. Hertz recalls. “People looked at us like we were crazy,” she says.

But now, plan advocates say, the idea is taking root. While only a fraction of the nation’s organizers are covered by the retirement program, 12 more groups are in the process of enrolling. And those that already belong say that they are managing to find the money for the required contribution.

“We raise it as part of the overall budget, and so far we’ve been doing okay,” says Mili Bonilla, director of Mothers on the Move, an activist group in the Bronx.

Ms. Bonilla says her seven-year-old group has not lost an organizer for lack of a pension plan. But having a plan makes it easier to recruit employees, she says. “It’s unusual for an organization like ours to be able to offer one. It makes us a little bit ahead of the times.”

Some advocates say that without a retirement plan, groups risk losing their best and brightest organizers — seasoned employees who bring not only passion to the job, but also street smarts and strategic abilities honed over years of social action.

“Our biggest motivation for designing this plan is that we want organizers to be able to stay in the field so we can benefit from their accumulated years of experience, rather than having a brain drain even before people hit middle age,” Ms. Hertz says.

Certainly the low pay scale common to organizing scares off some talent. The average salary of organizers covered by the National Organizers Alliance retirement plan is only $20,000, notes Steven D. White, the group’s pension administrator. One group pays as little as $9,100 a year, he says.

But spartan salaries aren’t necessarily the reason many activists seek other work. Often, it is the lack of basic benefits, such as a retirement plan and medical insurance. The problem can be especially acute among young women and among minorities, who may have few financial resources to fall back on.

“A woman turns 35 and says, ‘If I want to have kids, I need to have them now, ‘” Ms. Fellner says. “With no health care or pension, she’s going to say, ‘Maybe I’m going to rethink my priorities.’”

Many older organizers also find themselves contemplating lives away from the hurly-burly of pickets and rallies.

“People who were key organizers 10 or 15 years ago now are turning 40 or 50, and they realize that if they don’t start thinking about pensions and things like that, they are going to be in trouble,” says Stephen Viederman, president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, which has given $80,000 (and allocated an additional $25,000 for 1999) to help the alliance put the pension plan in place.

Ms. Bonilla, who is 42 and has worked as an organizer for 20 years, expresses mixed feelings about never having had retirement coverage until now. “In a way I love the work,” she says. “In another sense, now that I’m a little older, it makes me feel kind of saddened that I didn’t have a plan for that long, and concerned about the future.”

Mr. Taylor, the South Carolina activist, says his employer saw the need for a retirement plan in the early 1990s, after the organization expanded from one to seven staff members and drafted its first formal personnel policy. Part of the impetus to add retirement benefits stemmed from what Mr. Taylor calls a “moral question”: How could an organization dedicated to workers’ rights not protect the financial interests of its own employees?

Some critics say grant makers that support grassroots social-justice groups should also be wrestling with that sort of question. Foundations, they say, have not done enough to insure that experienced organizers receive basic benefits.

“The foundations are really the functional employers of these people,” says Randy Barber, president of the Center for Economic Organizing, in Washington, and an expert on worker pensions. “They provide the money, and if they believe in the types of things they’re funding, it’s in their interest and the interest of the program they’re pursuing to insure that the labor pool is sustained.”

Mr. Barber points out that retirement plans are common in other charitable arenas, such as symphonies and hospitals. But in the social-justice movement, “foundations have not absorbed the idea of an organizing profession. To some degree, they believe they’re funding casual labor.”

Felix Rivera, a 40-year veteran of organizing and a professor of social work at San Francisco State University, wants foundations to earmark a portion of grants to grassroots groups for employee benefits. He also wants the groups’ directors to insure that the money goes for benefits rather than general operations.

Still, he lays blame in both the grant-making and grassroots camps. “Why expect foundations and other organizations doing the funding to be concerned when we ourselves have not taken the initiative?” Mr. Rivera says.

Some foundations that support the National Organizers Alliance plan say they are reluctant to press individual grant recipients to start a pension program.

“We really do not impose our view on them,” says Regina McGraw, executive director of the Wieboldt Foundation, a Chicago fund that has given $40,000 toward development of the National Organizers Alliance plan. While the fund would encourage a grant recipient to join the retirement plan, Ms. McGraw says, “we would not tell them they had to as a provision of the grant.” She notes that many of Wieboldt’s grantees are new groups that may need a few years to mature before they are able to focus on the pension issue.

Elspeth Revere, a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, says grant makers should pay attention to efforts such as the National Organizers Alliance’s plan. Indeed, the MacArthur Foundation has given $150,000, and allocated another $50,000 for 1999 and 2000, toward its development and implementation.

But monitoring the benefit practices of individual grant recipients is another matter, Ms. Revere says. “It’s not our job to be assessing working conditions among grantee organizations and identifying problems and seeking to rectify them,” she says. “We keep enough of an eye to see if there are obvious problems, but we trust the grantees to manage the money, people, and work in a professional way. If there are needs, we also trust the grantee community to identify them and come to us.”

Ms. Fellner says the next three to five years will be “critical” to the long-term success of the National Organizers Alliance retirement plan. It needs 3,000 to 5,000 individual members to generate enough fee income from activist organizations to cover marketing and other administrative expenses, she says. Right now, the alliance is relying on grant money to subsidize those costs. “I don’t take our perpetual existence for granted,” Ms. Fellner says. “Anything can happen.”

Even if the retirement program were to end, however, people who have money invested in it would not lose their assets, plan officials say. Participants could roll their money into another qualified retirement plan without incurring taxes or penalties, they say.

It remains unclear whether the pension program will ignite a broader discussion about organizers’ wages and working conditions and the role of foundations in improving them.

Many advocates hope it does. They want to see the social-justice movement adopt flexible schedules for working parents, sabbaticals, and other employment practices that are sometimes found in the for-profit world.

Retirement planning is just one “piece of a bigger puzzle,” Ms. McGraw of the Wieboldt fund says. “Salary and the basic hardness of the work is also a piece of it.”

It’s a point that resonates with Mr. Taylor, who acknowledges the personal sacrifices that organizing requires.

“Getting married, having a kid, and getting older drastically changes the picture,” he says. “It brings stress and worry.”

An organizer who lacks a retirement plan, Mr. Taylor says, is forced to ask, “What happens 10 or 20 years from now?”

Mr. Rivera, the professor of social work, wonders about that too. “Why,” he asks, “should organizers have less security than someone cleaning the streets?”