What does soft money mean?
Hello, welcome back to my bi-monthly blog post (as in I post every other month, not twice a month).
No, but really, cut me some slack.
Between managing grad school, getting at least 9 hours of sleep, working 20 hours a week, working on my goal of reading 60 books this year, being a public health leadership development cohort member, and spending time with friends and [chosen and blood] family, I have been quite preoccupied.
But I wanted to extend a conversation that keeps coming up for me to this space. I think that I get really caught up in certain areas and topics and that because they continuously come up, I take it as a sign that I am supposed to do something with it. Whether that is just having a conversation or researching it and then tabling it as acquired knowledge or dedicating a portion of my career to it, that isn't always clear.
I also want to be specific about the amount of nuance I applied to that sentence. I don't fully ascribe to the belief that we are meant to do one thing for our whole lives in terms of a career. Not only do I find that option extremely boring, but I also think it isn't conducive to community care. I want to see a future where we are able to attribute our work to better our communities and the issues that are prevalent to them.
This leads me to what I wanted to discuss: funding structures. Something that anyone who wants to work in public health or even wants to do work to make a difference on a more broad scale in their careers runs into: will I make enough money?
This isn't a question reserved for the selfish and greedy capitalists or lawyer and doctor types who may only be "in it for the money". This is a valid and realistic question. As I myself got older and started to understand that I will actually have to pay back all these student loans, I began to freak out.
One of the main reasons why I was pre-med for so long is because it seemed like this happy medium: I get to help people by being a medical doctor and I also get to be financially comfortable. But when I switched to focusing my career on public and community health issues, I had an "Oh shit" moment in my head.
I don't want my salary to be dependent on what we refer to as "soft money". This includes donations, fundraising, and grant money. Many nonprofits are run by soft money and the thing about is that it is less guaranteed than other funding sources, such as the government.
Researchers and professors when they aren't teaching are also often paying their salaries with soft money. I even had a professor say that it is kind of scary when you think about it, that that money may not be there after the grant period is over.
Many people in my program toe the line of not wanting to work for organizations that rely on soft money but maybe not wanting to do government work or work in a for-profit corporation. It's especially difficult when you factor in the amount of money that goes into the nonprofit industrial complex that doesn't translate to positive outcomes for communities.
So, what do we do? What can we do?
Well, first I want to say that it is important that we acknowledge that this is an issue. It is one of those things where people will often rub their eyes, sigh, and tell me that this is just the way things are. While that may be true, it doesn't make it any less messed up.
This contributes to a lot of people not wanting or even being able to do work that benefits their communities. It also relates to the fact that oftentimes, there aren't LinkedIn job postings about changing systems, funding structures, and what money goes towards. If we know that there are really great community-based solutions that people need fair and equitable wages to implement and sustain, why shouldn't they be able to have that without navigating complicated and time-consuming grant applications where they are fighting so many others for oftentimes very small amounts.
I think that people are able to start to transform systems and funding structures through politics, but even the way that we have to finance political campaigns is classist and gatekeeping. Do YOU have millions or even the connections to fundraise millions for advertising? No? Oh, well, then never mind.
Yes, I know it is possible (I read like... 56 pages of Obama's A Promised Land), but it isn't accessible at all.
What I think we can do is bring attention to how effed up this is and advocate and organize towards changing it.
Honestly, my answer to everything lately has been to organize and change it, and that stems from my belief that sometimes if we fight fire with fire, meaning we make it unprofitable to not care for our communities, we will be able to force things to happen.
I had a conversation with my friends in Liberation in Action this week and we talked about how large-scale change is two-fold: changing hearts and minds and changing policy. Sometimes we need to change the culture before we can get elected officials to be on board. I see this happening with abolition and defunding the police. Minority communities have the lived experience of hell on earth with police and so abolition is not such a "radical" idea. For those whose lived experience reflects a different truth, however, it of course seems radical or unnecessary to even entertain police and prison abolition. Additionally, abolition requires a creative and collaborative community effort and without that being present, the idea doesn't even seem feasible.
We are required to think outside of what we have always known.
So, okay, let's recap:
We need to change the way people think about the things that underrepresented communities care about. Sometimes majority rule doesn't work in favor of the minority (shocking). Additionally, sometimes majority rule doesn't even matter when the elected official that utilized voter suppression and other unethical tactics to be elected votes in their own personal interest or in the interest of someone (read: corporation or interest group) who funded their campaign (double shocking).
Knowing that our political systems kind of suck, we still need to push as hard as we can with a concerted effort towards policy change if we want to change things for as many people as possible, especially because we know that money has more certainty than grant funding.
Soft money is not BAD, it's just unstable and gives me an air of... begging for money. Which is also not necessarily bad *gets on hands and knees*. Also, most funding bodies aren't going to make you grovel. It's just so competitive. It seems like if we really want to transform our systems and society to work better for everyone, we need to invest in the people, talent, and resources to do that.
Additionally, I want everything we do to be focused on capacity building. I don't want people to have to get an MPH to do this work. I support people with professional degrees making more than those without in some cases. Mainly because of loans, but also because the expectation is that they learned something *special* in that program. On the other hand, I will be 24 years old when I graduate with my MPH. There are SO MANY PEOPLE that will be eons more qualified than me just from their experiences and time in the field. Not everyone who is my senior, but a lot of people! And I think it is perfectly reasonable for them to make a more handsome salary than me.
That being said, people can be taught to do a lot of work in these fields. Community members, especially marginalized ones, should be taught how to do this work in their own communities AND be able to fill those professional roles. If what we really want is that revolutionary and monumental change, we shouldn't argue that it needs to be those who are privileged enough to access higher education to do it. It should be all of us, no matter what the career.
But if this is what you want to dedicate your life doing, you should be able to support yourself and your family and be able to fulfill your needs and some of those wants.
There is honestly so much I could say about this, but I want to hear from you. What are your experiences in working in those "bleeding heart" industries where people believe you don't need quality pay? I mean, even here in Minneapolis, teachers are striking for fair pay and mental health support for students. We still see nurses advocating for fair pay and working conditions.
How can we expect any of these big issues to see any progress if we don't value our most precious resource as what they are: human beings?
Cover photo from alicepaulpodcast.com
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