Working Group on Organized Labor and Community
By Susan Chinn

“Thank you for organizing the Working Group and inserting a union voice into our conference workshops and discussions. It is a very important perspective, and I appreciate being able to hear it,” commented Bettie Hodges of the Marin Community Foundation, Larkspur, California, after a presentation by Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union, at the recent NFG/Grantmakers for Children, Youth & Families conference in Miami.

Bettie’s comment, and others like it, make the activities and efforts of our Working Group feel worthwhile. Since 1997, when Henry Allen of the Hyams Foundation and I founded NFG’s Working Group on Organized Labor and Community, we have tried to educate our colleagues and ourselves about the goals and objectives of America’s unions, particularly as they relate to low-wage workers and the communities in which they live.

We formed the Working Group in response to two things: the election of John Sweeney as President of the AFL-CIO, with his commitment to energize the labor movement, focus organizing efforts on the poor, women, and people of color, and work in a serious way with community and religious organizations; and the lack of information about unions at foundation conferences and gatherings. “An element of mystery, if not unfamiliarity,” still exists between many foundation trustees and union leaders,” foundation executive Dick Magat, author of Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement, said in a recent interview in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The Working Group’s goal is to familiarize funders with the contributions unions are making to issues of concern to the philanthropic community. These include poverty, welfare reform, health care, education, and workforce development.

During the past two years, the Working Group organized numerous workshops, plenaries and site visits for funders. This year alone, over 200 funders participated in face-to-face meetings with workers trying to organize a union in traditionally low-wage service industries (hotels, nursing homes, and child care centers) in New Orleans, Miami, and Seattle. [See pg. 7 for Janet Shenk’s article on the site visit to Miami’s Little Haiti.] Workshops prepared by Working Group members and featuring union representatives have addressed such topics as childcare, living-wage campaigns, economic development, contingent work, sweatshops, and income inequality.

Recently the Working Group hired Jim Sessions, former director of the Highlander Center in Tennessee, to assist us with several projects. Initially, Jim is compiling information about labor-related projects and activities supported by the philanthropic community. This strategic “mapping” or documentation project will help us to better understand collaborations between community groups, unions, and religious organizations on common issues and concerns.

In explaining foundation interest in labor, Seth Borgos, Senior Program Officer of the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock and co-chair of the Working Group, says, “…labor is the largest institution in the country that brings ordinary people into public life, and it’s the most powerful institution articulating the principles of economic justice.”
 

Susan Chinn is Executive Director of the Discount Foundation, a former NFG board member, and co-chair of NFG’s Woirking Group on Organized Labor and Community. To add your name to the Working Group on Organized Labor and Community’s mailing list, or join our listserv and receive interesting labor-related articles, please email us at nfg@nfg.org or call Margaux Harris at 703-448-1777.

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