How to Maintain an Alternative Library: The Civic Media Center Six Years On
by James Schmidt
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In the beginning, in 1993, a group of independent publishers and supporters of alternative media came together in Gainesville, Florida to launch an information insurgency. They decided to name their effort the Civic Media Center and Library, Inc. (usually shortened to Civic Media Center, or CMC). Originally conceived as a public archive and clearinghouse for independent, non-corporate print and recorded material, including a lending library, the CMC has grown in six years into a vital, progressive, community-organizing and education space. These days the Media Center provides the services of a library, meeting space, office space, music hall, youth center, arts center, and free school all rolled into one. It has been a fun but sometimes hectic and trying six years. There are some important lessons that folks interested in building and sustaining alternative libraries and community education centers can learn from the Gainesville community’s experience with the Civic Media Center. The CMC Philosophy: Popular Political Education
The CMC’s mission, as stated in the informational handouts we give to visitors and new members, is as follows: “To provide community access to information and points of view not carried or incompletely carried in the for-profit, corporate media. To provide a place for this information to be exchanged, in the form of books, papers and reports, talks, videotapes, audiotapes and periodicals. To provide support for projects that do this, particularly independent newspapers and magazines locally. To collect enough money from operations to be able to continue this mission.” This mission statement was drafted by Jenny Brown, co-editor of The Gainesville Iguana, a progressive political news-monthly that was one of the six independent publishers—five newspapers and one press—whose members founded the Center.
The Gainesville Alternative Press (GAP) group, as they called themselves, took as a point of departure for their project the Left/populist critique of the mainstream media put forth by commentators like Noam Chomsky and Jim Hightower, who have been sounding the alarm with increasing urgency in recent years about the ways in which the establishment media serves the interests of the corporate world’s economic elite at the expense of the public mind. The media, these critics say, dumb us down and distract us, in the service of the corporate bottom line, when they ought to be enlightening and informing us for the greater good, in the service of democracy. As Chomsky says in a quote often used in CMC literature, “Public relations—including the press—has become an industry spending a couple of billion dollars each year. They present the propaganda that insulates the centers of power from the anger of the people. Most of the people don’t know what’s being done by the corporations and don’t even know they don’t know.”1
In this critical view, new communications technologies such as satellite television and the Internet, combined with the ever-increasing trend of corporate conglomeration, are hyper-accelerating this dimming and cluttering effect on the popular consciousness of the developed West, particularly in the U.S. It is a truism in both the popular and the critical/intellectual spheres these days that television and the Internet are swamping us with material that amounts to not much more than colorful, clever distraction at best, and vicious, hateful misinformation at its worst. In books, magazines and newspaper editorials, in popular songs, and even on TV itself, the critics bemoan the “more TV, less content” phenomenon. Despite the vaunted “democratic” nature of the Internet and its demonstrable usefulness as an organizing tool in campaigns such as the protests against the World Trade Organization’s Millennium Round in Seattle, many progressives and radicals remain wary of becoming too dependent on it. They are skeptical that a medium developed by the U.S. military-industrial complex and currently overrun by advertising, misinformation and faddish get-rich-quick schemes can ever be anything more than the kind of tool that other mainstream mass media outlets have proven to be—sometimes useful, but usually suspect and subject to dangerous “backfires” when the democratic impulse runs up against the big-money bottom line. There is also, of course, the economic gap wherein high-tech access and expertise remain concentrated, despite some popularization, in the hands of upper- and middle-class elites.
Even public television and radio are increasingly beholden to corporate sponsorship for their very existence, and their programming reflects this change, with a shift away from progressive, populist educational and political programming, and towards more entertainment and business-oriented material. In recent years, public TV and radio are increasingly subject to the “creeping advertising” phenomenon, with more and longer slots devoted to plugging the corporate sponsors and their products in between programs. On the domestic scene, government budget cuts and the threat of outright defunding of arts and education programs including public media, and blatant corporate invasions such as the infamous Channel One “TV’s-in-schools” program, combine to further restrict any options for reasonable critical thought and dialogue in the public sector. On the international scene, corporate merger-mania and economic globalization, with their attendant increases in government/business collusion and all-out scrambles for markets and resources, are raising the stakes in the struggle for economic and political freedom and environmental preservation worldwide. In doing so they raise the stakes in the struggle for democratic communications as well.
In response to the increasingly dangerous and transparent role of both public and private media outlets as conduits for corporate propaganda, activists and thinkers on the Left are calling for a strengthening of what media critic Edward Herman has called the “civic sector,” the independent, non-profit, grassroots-oriented media outlets such as alternative newspapers and magazines, cable access television, and community radio stations. In an article entitled “Democratic Media” written for Z Papers, an off-shoot of the Left journal Z Magazine, Herman asserts that “the very process of building a media civic sector is important in the learning process of democracy and as part of community mobilization.”2 It was in this spirit of expanding the opportunities for public political education and democratic participation at the grassroots level, in their own community, that the GAP group decided to open the Civic Media Center. History of the CMC
The Center opened its doors on October 16th, 1993. Two years earlier, during the escalation of the Persian Gulf War, the Middle East Peace Group had invited Noam Chomsky to come to Gainesville to speak on behalf of their efforts to organize local opposition to the war. Chomsky was so sought after at the time that the Fall of 1993 was the earliest he could come. The GAP group organizers decided to use Chomsky’s impending visit as an opportunity to highlight the opening of the Civic Media Center. Professor Chomsky was the guest of honor at the opening ceremony, and spoke later that evening to a standing-room-only crowd on the University of Florida campus. CMC activists passed volunteer recruitment sheets through the crowd that night, and many, myself included, enthusiastically signed up, thrilled to see that the incisive critical perspective Chomsky brought to his talk was going to be translated into hands-on direct action right here in our town.
The Media Center was originally housed in a small suite of rooms on the second floor of a building directly across the street from the University of Florida. It was hoped that this physical location would help further the Center’s educational mission by making it easy to interface with students and faculty at that institution. However, with no storefront and a dark, steep flight of rickety old stairs between us and our public, we soon discovered that it was nearly impossible to get anyone other than activists who were already “in the loop” to come up to our space. In early 1994 we discovered an available store-front space only a few blocks away, right on the main drag between the University and downtown, within easy walking and biking distance from the school and surrounding neighborhoods. This new space was immediately attractive because it had a huge front window, right on the sidewalk. It had the added bonus of being about twice the size of the old space, for significantly less rent. This location has housed the Center since May of 1994. The CMC as Community Education Space
The CMC’s lending library, based conceptually on the example of the Alternative Reading Room in Asheville, North Carolina (no longer in existence), is still the anchor of the project. Thanks to generous donations of material from local radical publisher CRISES Press and many other organizations and individuals, the library has grown by leaps and bounds, and now includes more than two-thousand books and hundreds of video and audio tapes. The collection also includes dozens of magazine titles as well; these are available for in-house use, with the Alternative Press Index as a research guide and photocopies available in the back room for five cents each. One of the most unique parts of our collection is our Zine Library, which features a sampling of dozens of titles from the underground micro-publishing movement that has swept the world in the last decade. Books, videotapes and audiotapes are available for checkout to our members, and all materials, including an Internet-equipped, public-access computer, are available to the general public for in-house use. Our collection is primarily political and is divided by subject into sections with titles such as “Women’s Studies,” “American Studies,” “Ecology,” “Middle Eastern Studies,” and “Resistance and Revolution.”
One of the most exciting features of our alternative library is the fact that our book collection is included in the electronic card catalogue of the local public library system. Through grants from Gainesville’s Friends of the Library organization, we have been able to pay to have our books entered into the Alachua County Library District’s computer database so that folks who do electronic searches of the county’s system can be referred to the Civic Media Center for books that are often unavailable anywhere else in the area. This project is ongoing, and we believe it represents a unique and easily emulated cooperative effort by the public and “civic” sectors to better serve the people.
Media Center memberships are available on a yearly basis for a sliding-scale donation of $10-20 and entitle our members to check out materials from the collection and receive our newsletters and other mailings. There is no “average” CMC member—our ranks include students and professors from local colleges, working people of all stripes, professionals such as doctors and lawyers, small business owners, full-time community activists, retirees, artists and homeless people. People use our collection for a variety of educational purposes. Sometimes professors interested in exposing their students to alternative points of view will assign whole classes to come down and do research in our library. Activists use our resources to gather information in support of their causes. Alternative journalists and local zinesters drop in to get the latest word from other independent writers and publishers. Very often folks just drop in to browse the collection, looking for some new source of information about issues they’re interested in that runs counter to the deluge of entertainment-oriented, profit-driven corporate radio, television, and print matter that we are swamped with in our daily lives.
Many of the people that Media Center volunteers interact with on a daily basis say they are refreshed and inspired to find a place where people who are concerned about truth, justice and freedom can get together and share information to help build positive social change. Among volunteers and members alike there is a sense that what the Center represents for the Gainesville community is something rare and precious, a chance for “we the people” to “do it ourselves,” to teach each other and work with each other, without the corrupting influences of power and profit that are built into so many other institutions in our society, from the workplace to the university to the local newspaper. Media Center member Stephen Roe had this to say: “The CMC gives the independent media of this country a palpable face; it gives access without the necessity of technology and spawns an information network throughout the community itself. It does not cure the ills of our society, but [it] makes the fuel available to help the group or individual in that task.” Jason Tompkins, famous among our volunteers for having methodically listened to almost every audiotape in the Center’s collection, says of his time at the Center:
“Having been a member of, and currently a volunteer at, the Civic Media Center for four of the five-and-a-half months that I’ve lived in Gainesville, I can say that the variety of material offered there is extremely useful when wishing to delve deeper into the understanding of events than [what] is offered by our mainstream media outlets. Through my own experience I have grown quite fond of the CMC’s audiotape collection, a collection covering topics from weapons trafficking and Latin American studies to U.S. foreign policies and the role of multinational corporations in them. Nowhere in all of my travels, both at home and abroad, have I come across anything as comprehensive and informative on issues of economics, labor studies, revolution, methods of nonviolence, and community organization.”
Local activists appreciate and respect the effort that CMC workers put forth in building and expanding the Center’s role as a base of support for local progressive thought and action. “The women’s liberation movement in Gainesville is strengthened and inspired constantly by the activism and solidarity of the Civic Media Center staff and volunteers,” said past president of University of Florida/Santa Fe Community College Campus National Organization for Women and CMC member Candi Churchill.
People around the country and around the globe feel similarly about the need to promote “civic media,” and are taking the same kind of direct action, creating similar “information insurgencies” in their own communities. From cooperative activist information spaces like Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley and the Autonomous Zone in Chicago to collectively-run booksellers such as Bound Together Books in San Francisco and the Wooden Shoe bookstore in Philadelphia, grassroots activists are getting together to make information for political action available in their towns. We here at the Center feel that we have been able to make a unique contribution to this movement, by showing that a grassroots-funded, progressive people’s library can survive and grow to serve a truly “civic” role in the community. When San Francisco Food Not Bombs organizer Keith McHenry came to the CMC to do a workshop on vegetarian cooking and homeless people’s rights as part of his 1996 tour of the continent, he told us that the Civic Media Center was one of the largest and most successful “infoshops” that he had seen in North America.
These days, the Civic Media Center’s various functions mean that we attract a very diverse mix of people to our facility. One of the strongest roles that the Center has come to play in the last three or four years is that of cultural venue. Our music shows, poetry readings and art openings appeal to Gainesville’s large population of university and community college students, high schoolers, and working-class youth. These events provide a creative outlet for artists, musicians, thespians, poets and others, young and old alike, who are just getting started or cannot afford the costs associated with presenting their work at other venues. The longest-running arts series that the Center hosts is a weekly open-mike poetry and performance happening, the Thursday Night Poetry Jam. The Jam has become one of the area’s most well-known and productive grassroots-level arts events, providing a space for local spoken-word artists and musicians to get to know each other’s work, and sowing the seeds for collaboration on other projects. The Center’s role as a music venue has similarly enriched the Gainesville scene, providing a smoke-free, “music-first” listening room that many musicians see as a positive alternative to the cloudy, clamorous atmosphere of the bar circuit. We have hosted shows by a wide variety of local, regional and even nationally-known performers in a broad range of musical styles, from acoustic folk to rhythm and blues to punk rock.
Our political lectures, meetings, discussion groups, and presentations appeal to Gainesville’s large progressive and radical activist community. Grassroots groups as diverse as Campus NOW, Food Not Bombs, Anti-Racist Action, and the Gainesville Committee for Democracy in Mexico use our space for their meetings and events. Many of the events that happen at the Center are organized by CMC staffers, who reach out to people in the community who have ideas to share or causes to promote and ask them to consider holding a public informational event in our space. Others are organized by folks who come to us with a request for use of the space. Most events at the Center are aimed at political education of one sort or another, but we also make time for events that are of a more general educational nature as well. We’ve hosted a wide variety of events, from slide shows of photographs from the HUBBLE space telescope presented by University of Florida astronomers, to lectures on the history of the U.S.-supported genocide in East Timor given by local members of the East Timor Action Network, to videos on childbirth and midwifery presented by students and faculty from the Florida School of Traditional Midwifery, to a “Philosophy for the People” class led by a local poet, to workshops on holistic pet-care led by a local veterinarian. Other examples of events at the CMC include: progressive-oriented forums for candidates in local elections; activist training workshops on how to handle various aspects of movement work; “community dinners” at which folks share food and political discussions facilitated by activists from local groups; “video nights” at which we show political movies from our collection and local independently-produced films and videos; consciousness-raising meetings on women’s and workers’ issues; and press conferences put on by activists with any number of grassroots causes, from Free Radio advocates to local government whistleblowers to a women’s “top-free equality” activist who recently won her case in court.
One type of educational event that has been extremely successful at the CMC is the “Teach-In.” Civic Media Center Teach-Ins are modeled on the grassroots political education actions that became popular in the 1960’s. They are usually organized by local activists who wish to reach out to concerned citizens, and sometimes the media as well, with a detailed historical perspective on issues and current events that are being covered in an incomplete or problematic fashion in the news. Over the last couple of years Teach-Ins on the “low-intensity conflict” in the Mexican state of Chiapas, the Free Radio movement of radical unlicensed FM broadcast stations, and the effects of the U.S. bombings and United Nations sanctions on the people of Iraq have been particularly successful, drawing standing-room-only crowds of between 50 and 100 people and encouraging a stepping-up of local action on those issues.
Another very successful attempt at public political education is our “First-Hand History” series. We try to organize as many as four or five of these programs each year. First-Hand History talks focus on the personal experiences of individual activists, conveying their unique perspectives as participants in movements and activities that have made our history as a community and as a people. These talks are followed by question-and-answer sessions and discussions wherein the audience can expand their knowledge and understanding even further, by connecting the speaker’s personal narrative with facts and ideas that they may otherwise have known only through print or broadcast media. A few of the folks who’ve shared their histories with us over the years are: Bill Edwards, a retired Steelworkers’ union organizer; Harriet Ludwig, a career journalist and civil rights worker (and CMC co-founder) who continues to write and organize on local welfare and poverty issues; and Charles Chestnut, a Gainesville city commissioner and community leader who in his youth sat on the board that oversaw local school desegregation efforts. Gettin’ By: Fundraising
Individuals and organizations do not pay set fees for use of the Center’s space. Instead, we ask for small donations at the door at performance-type events, and groups pass the hat to collect donations for the Center at their meetings and political events. A varied calendar of events serves as an outreach and fundraising tool for the Center itself, exposing new groups of people to the space and the resources it contains, and encouraging them to sign up as members and give concrete support for our activities in the form of their membership donations. We emphasize this aspect in our cultural programs as well, asking for sliding-scale donations at the door, passing the hat, and encouraging folks to sign up for memberships rather than charging set fees for poetry readings, art openings, and music shows. It is our policy never to turn anyone away simply because they cannot afford to donate the amount we request. As a non-profit organization we are bound to this philosophy legally; as a political organization we are committed to it ethically. It is our goal to make the Center available and affordable as a space to help empower students, working people, artists and grassroots activists who might otherwise find it impossible to find a home for their activities. Some local grassroots organizations have even arranged to use small parts of the Center for offices and storage space. Currently, Gainesville’s Campus NOW chapter pays a small monthly donation to rent an office in one of the back rooms in the space, as does the Gainesville Women’s Liberation group’s “Health Care for All” project.
Funding has been the most consistent and most daunting problem that we at the Civic Media Center have struggled with. We are well aware that money is the bane of many a grassroots organization, no matter how visionary its goals, and we feel the pressure every month when the bills come in, when the rent is due, when it’s time to pay the staff. In our small college town, the yearly economic cycle ebbs and flows in accordance with the schedule of the University that is the community’s economic base. This is the case for our little non-profit project just as much as for the local merchants who are our neighbors. At certain times of the year the Center is bustling with activities and money-wise we’re fairly flush. At other points the people and the money are both scarce, and we have to get creative just to come up with the cash to pay the bills. The Center has not yet risen above a hand-to-mouth mode of economic existence. Many of the people who’ve been involved in the Civic Media Center are relatively inexperienced organizers, and even the seasoned activists in our ranks have been more involved in shorter-term, less-costly campaigns. The Center is somewhat unique in Gainesville’s progressive community in that it is place-based and (we hope) permanent, so strategizing on how to raise funds in a sustainable fashion is an on-going learning experience for all of us. For a long time now we have tried to maintain a low-key, locally-focused approach to both our fundraising and our expenditures. It is only within the last year or two that we have begun to seriously consider going for more long-range, extensive fundraising projects, such as grants from national and international foundations.
It is important for folks considering a similar endeavor to understand that the Center was very lucky to enjoy an initial funding push that consisted of substantial out-of-pocket donations from individual local supporters, in particular CRISES Press publisher and CMC treasurer Charles Willett, who almost single-handedly paid the larger bills such as rent and utilities for the first year of the CMC’s existence. This one-man bankrolling of the project was not what the organizers had planned. Mr. Willett decided to step in and donate as needed, at great personal expense, when the membership and community outreach fundraising programs that were initially set up did not bring in the revenues needed to keep the place open. It was only after changing locations that the Center really saw an increase in memberships and other income, as more people became aware of the space and got involved. For groups in communities where grassroots alternative education projects may not enjoy such generous support from individual donors, it is important to consider the option of going for large grants from outside sources to supply the initial start-up costs. However, we at the CMC have followed the advice of our comrades in other organizations, whose experience has taught them that too much reliance on fickle grant money can prove disastrous to a grassroots project. We have applied for and received a few small grants over the years, but have always concentrated our fundraising efforts in the local community. Our advice, based on our experience: build your roots up strong in the soil of your community! If you do your work well and provide services your community needs, the nourishment that flows in through those roots will sustain your organization and allow it to grow. From an initial budget of $20,000 per year we have grown to almost $25,000 per year.
From a critical perspective, experts who’ve done workshops on grassroots fundraising for CMC staffers have told us that we may be too cautious when it comes to taking risks and going for larger funding sources. They have recommended, and we are gearing up to pursue, a long-range strategy of grant-writing and other larger-scale fundraising programs to help us move beyond our current mode of just “getting by,” and into a mode of growing and building our programs. It is our goal to do this in such a way that we remain consistent with our ideals of being grounded in and responsive to our community. I must admit that we are cautious, probably to a fault, in this endeavor, knowing all too well what happens to “grassroots” groups that lose touch with their home-base constituencies. Despite a move towards seeking outside funding sources, at this writing we are still concentrating on “keeping it local.” Grant-writing and other fundraising schemes still take a backseat to our pursuit of individual donor/members and fundraising events in the local community.
The aspect of the original Civic Media Center design that has helped us the most in our efforts to build strong roots is the creation of our lending library as a kind of information cooperative, in which use of the collection is facilitated through paid memberships available for a yearly donation, as mentioned above. This membership program supplies us with a direct financial link between our project and the constituency that benefits from it. It has enabled the Center to have a concrete record of its community base of support. By keeping detailed records of how much and how regularly folks are willing to pay for their memberships, we are also able to know whom we can reach out to for increased support over the years, and whom we can contact for emergency donations when funds are short. Some of our members pay more than the requested $10-20 for their memberships, and some pledge to make regular donations on a monthly or quarterly schedule. Others have made larger “spot” donations to help us through funding emergencies, such as repairs to equipment and facilities. From barely managing to scrape by our first year on the generosity of one big-money donor and a small pool of members we have built a membership base of over 700 individuals, approximately 350-400 of whom are paid-up current at a given time. This includes dozens of folks who generously give higher amounts ranging from $30 or $40 to $1,000 at a time in addition to their yearly membership donations.
Occasionally we organize special fundraising drives to pay for improvements to the space, such as fixing up the floor in our main room, or building a wheelchair-accessible addition to our building’s back porch. We are working on writing grants for projects like these, but so far have been successful at raising the funds through donations from individuals in the community. Periodic membership renewal drives by phone and mail accomplish the same goal of stepping-up our level of fundraising in a more measured, sustainable fashion. Our membership database functions as an organizing tool as well. By sending out newsletters that include updates on the Center’s functioning and a list of planned events, we are able to bring people back again and again, to share information with them, and to get their input and participation in local political and cultural happenings that we help organize at the Center and at other sites around town.
Even when we decide to engage in a more large-scale (read: expensive) production, such as bringing a high- profile speaker to town or renting a local theater to show an important new documentary, we try to build on the well-established progressive community tradition of cooperative organizing. By co-sponsoring larger projects with other groups and engaging in cooperative exchanges of time, energy and resources, we are able to be a part of a wide variety of projects in the community and get our name and our message out in different public arenas. We always try to construct projects like these in such a way that they are either self-funding or actually generate additional revenue for the CMC, even if it’s as modest as being able to take donations for bumper-stickers and buttons at our table at the back of the room. The Freedom Crew: CMC Organizational Structure
Once the Center got up and running and was beginning to be a self-sustaining project, the organizers turned their attention to internal structure and long-term planning beyond the basics of daily operations. Incorporation as an official 501(c)(3) non-profit organization was one of the first hurdles to clear. With a commitment to grassroots, not-for-profit economic practices established from the beginning, and a clearly educational mission, the Center qualified easily for official non-profit status. The organizers secured pro-bono legal help with the necessary paperwork through the local legal aid organization.
The precise configuration of the relationships among the board of directors required by law for incorporation, the paid staffers, and the volunteer staffers has been one of our longest-running confusions. We’ve intentionally kept our organizational structure flexible and inclusive in order to accommodate the varying degrees of commitment and availability among our corps of volunteers. This is usually an advantage for us, as it has allowed the Center to change and grow in response to the needs and interests of the community. Sometimes it can be problematic though, when we find ourselves once again reshuffling responsibilities and trying to rethink the way we’ve been doing things so as to avoid reinventing the wheel or letting important work get lost in the shuffle. Non-profit corporate status gave the CMC’s founders a basic idea of how to structure the group, but as Charles Willett states in his 1994 article “How To Start An Alternative Library”: “Corporations need officers and a board of directors, but operations may be handled better as a collective.”3 Our experience at the CMC has proven that a collective model is the best basic structure to work from for a group of our size and with our goals and budget.
It was decided early on that for an operation as many-faceted and requiring such a large amount of fundraising, there should be at least one paid staff person. It was also decided that despite the on-paper hierarchy of board of directors and officers required by the state, decisions about policies and day-to-day operations at the Center were best made as a group by those who did the work, the volunteers and paid staffers. Despite the reality of a high turnover rate among the mostly college-aged pool of volunteers, and an unfortunate tendency towards burnout among the usually solo paid staffers (there have been some periods in which two persons have shared the paid position), this philosophy and practice of collective group process still governs CMC operations. We have experimented with various formats in terms of committees and officers, and have settled into a flexible collective structure that incorporates the varying levels of drive and availability among our volunteers by delegating responsibility to individual “mission chiefs” and a series of ad hoc committees.
Currently the paid staff-person keeps tabs on the various projects that the mission chiefs and committees are charged with, acting as a hub for CMC workers and their work just as the Center itself serves as a hub for local organizations and their work in the community at large. He or she also does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that keeps day-to-day operations running smoothly, from training new volunteers to changing the message on our answering machine to include the new events for each week. Our board of directors meets several times a year and does community outreach and fundraising work, including organizing large fundraising events that raise significant amounts of money towards our yearly budget. We make collective decisions about day-to-day operations at weekly volunteer meetings, and policy-making and long-range planning decisions at a series of biannual retreats, which we jokingly refer to as “CMC Bootcamps.” We use a decision-making process that is best described as “informal consensus,” and have developed written policies detailing a group decision-making process of formal consensus, with a provision for voting if necessary, for handling more contentious issues.
We are working on developing a long-range fundraising and organizational readjustment strategy to help make the CMC more sustainable. Right now, with a shoestring budget and a constantly-changing corps of volunteers, most of the work of trying to maintain cohesion, coherence and continuity for the project falls on the paid staffer(s) and a core group of dedicated volunteers who’ve maintained their commitment to the Center over the years. It has been an interesting transition for those of us who’ve been around for the long haul to make the shift in consciousness from the kind of disempowered, reactive organizing mode that the Left too often finds itself stuck with in America, to the empowered, creative, proactive mode that a project like the CMC allows. One element of this transition is the realization of the pressing need for more people to be paid for this kind of work.
The CMC’s paid staffer, usually referred to as “coordinator” or “office manager,” was originally supposed to be paid a part-time stipend for part-time work. It quickly became evident, however, that the time and energy necessary to be our project’s “brain” was closer to a full-time job. Much Left/progressive organizing that is done at the grassroots level is done by volunteers, as a labor of love, “for the cause.” While fighting the good fight for freedom and justice can be one of the most fulfilling things that an individual can choose to do with his or her time, it can often entail a great deal of self-sacrifice. This is true even of the work that goes into relatively safe, staid “support” projects like the CMC. The Center is a complex, challenging project, and can be very demanding on people’s time and energy. There is a growing concern among the core group of CMC workers that our current structure, with only one paid staffer, whom we can afford to pay what amounts to only a part-time salary for full-time work, is clearly not sustainable in the long run. Both paid staff and long-term volunteers are vulnerable to a recurring cycle of over-commitment and burnout in this scenario. We are learning the hard way that if we are going to commit to having paid staff, we must look to the future and take steps now to build our fundraising and internal organizing up in such a way that more workers are paid, and paid well, for their labor at the CMC. When we see ourselves as part of a movement that is fighting for a just and sustainable society, in which all people have the freedom to live healthy, multi-faceted, fulfilling lives, we realize that we must do our best to provide those same conditions in the here and now for those who are willing to give themselves wholly to the work of trying to build that society from the bottom up.
That said, it remains that for now and for the foreseeable future, volunteers are the lifeblood of the Center. They staff the space and help members and guests during regular operating hours, set up and run events, maintain the membership, finance and collections records, assemble newsletters and other mailings, staff CMC tables at rallies, conferences and demonstrations in Gainesville and abroad, engage in fundraising phone drives, and perform many other tasks too numerous to list here, all of which are essential to making the CMC go. Most of our volunteers are students or college-aged young people, and many of them move on after a few months or a year, sometimes into career-type jobs or new educational endeavors, and sometimes into other kinds of volunteer political work. The Center often acts as a catalyst in people’s lives, opening their eyes to a whole world of information and experience that they never knew existed, and helping them to find their path in the world, as any good educational institution should. It is extremely rewarding to hear stories from folks who come back to visit us about how their time at the CMC inspired them to seek out similar grassroots projects in their new communities, or even helped launch them into careers in progressive political organizing and alternative media. All of us who’ve been with the Center for a while can recall such stories. It makes our hard work seem all the more worth while when we learn the many ways in which this project that we’ve all worked so hard to build has borne such successful fruit. One such success story is that of local activist Sand Wrenn, who had this to say about her involvement with the Center:
“I never saw myself as capable of contributing to political change. Then, after becoming interested in the indigenous people’s struggle in Chiapas, Mexico, I learned that a Latin American solidarity group held meetings at the CMC. I got involved, and through time the mentors in the group helped me to hone my leadership skills and assume an important role. Later, as a Civic Media Center volunteer, I was encouraged to express creativity in developing and coordinating a CMC outreach project [on the University of Florida campus]. My future has been galvanized by my CMC experience; I am now an organizer with a human rights group at the University of Florida.” People Get Together Now!
The Civic Media Center volunteers and staff have found fertile ground in which to plant the project’s roots in the many layers of Gainesville’s progressive community. It is these “people connections” that really make an operation like ours work. One of our greatest assets is the network of activists, union members, musicians, counterculture folks, professionals and small business people that CMC co-founder, former coordinator, and perpetual volunteer Joe Courter has cultivated in his twenty-plus years of living and working in the area. The struggle for freedom that drives projects like the CMC is really about people—their needs and desires, hopes and dreams--and Joe has taught many of us at the Center by his example that almost anything is possible, even on a shoestring budget, when you keep the positive, productive connections between people at the forefront of all your work. Cynics often say of business and politics in our society, “It’s not what you do, it’s who you know.” Looking back on the many powerful examples of organizing, education and community-building that I have seen in six years of participation at the Civic Media Center, I have to say that the work of folks like Joe and the CMC volunteers continually reminds me that in grassroots community organizing, it’s who you know and what you do.
The Civic Media Center is a heroic grassroots achievement. To the coalition of liberals, radicals and counterculture folks who hold it together and keep it going, the Center represents our little community’s contribution to the next wave of popular resistance to corporate greed and government abuse of power—that is, organizing around access to information and the use of alternative information as a launching point for direct action on issues that affect the everyday lives of people here in our community and around the world. Through the example of the CMC and the constellation of grassroots groups that have come to use the Center as a focal point for their activities, people see that the fulfillment of the promise of democracy resides first and foremost in the “civic sector,” the autonomous people’s organizations that work outside the locus of government and corporate control to meet the needs of the people, and to challenge both state and capital to answer their critique and match their forward strides. We hear it said time and again by folks who visit the Center: “I wish my town had a CMC,” or “Gosh, every town oughtta have a place like this.” We agree.
Civic Media Center
1021 West University Avenue
Gainesville, FL 32601
(352) 373-0010
cmc@gator.net
http://www.gator.net/~cmc
1. Harriet Ludwig, “Noam Chomsky: People Hungry for Real News,” F.A.C.T. Magazine (November 1993): 15
2. Edward Herman, “Democratic Media: Serving the People’s Needs,” Z Papers 1, #1 (1992): 23-30
3. Charles Willett, “Starting an Alternative Library,” Librarians at Liberty 1, #2 (January 1994): 6-7
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© Copyright 2000. James Schmidt - All Rights Reserved.
