Hey #YP4 Fellows, Alumni and Friends!

My 2008 fellowship with Yp4 gave me the tools and confidence to transfer my desire to work in social justice for the long haul.  After canvassing, training and field managing with Clean Water Action through my undergraduate years at Temple, my third summer with the organization introduced to me the opportunity to canvass direct the Philadelphia office for the month of August. 

Campus Camp Wellstone's Mattie Weiss just posted a scathing entry about the underresourcing of young voter organizing at a time when we have the potential to decide the presidential election.

She notes:

[N]umbers indicate that 6.5 million people under 30 voted in this year's primaries and caucuses, and that the overall youth vote has risen from 9 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2008.

Meanwhile, who are campaigns focusing on? Swing voters and “hockey moms.”

As I mentioned in parts one and two of this series, there’s power in funding your own movement and in having a broad base of support. When we support our own projects, we get to decide what we work on and our continued existence becomes less dependent on any single source.

As part of walking the walk here, we’re now accepting blogads in the sidebar of the YP4 Blog. We’re screening them for congruence with our values. Nonprofits, progressive blogs and socially responsible businesses? Absolutely. Soulless corporations? Not so much.

We intend blog advertising to become another intentional way to build our network and strengthen our partnerships.

As I mentioned in part 1, providing financial support for our own movements is key to their sustainability. In the words of Andrea del Moral, it can “keep us true to our visions, flexible in our goals, and relevant to the people who yearn and strive for justice.”

Sounds good, right? So how do we do it? Read on, friends, read on.

I recently read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, published in 2007 by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. One of the book’s arguments is that the ubiquity of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit model limits the political left’s imagination and “threatens to permanently eclipse autonomous grassroots-movement building in the arena of social justice.”

Maybe you've heard of it?

www.Kiva.org is a social change non-profit that empowers individuals with internet access and a paypal account with the capacity to microfinance directly to borrowers in the developing world through no-interest loans. It's the same basic principles of microfinance that Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

After easily raising over $450 online for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital through the elementary school where I have been a teacher's aid through AmeriCorps *NCCC, I was on a high. Not long after, I spoke with my sister's boyfriend (who also happens to be an Adam) and he reminded me about a site that we had talked about before, but that I had since forgotten - www.Kiva.org.

What would you do if you had $2.4 million dollars? Well, if nothing else you would have more cash on hand than the entire presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

Apparently Ron Paul, the Republican Congressman from Texas running a long-shot campaign for the nomination actually has more cash on hand than the Arizona Senator. And he isn't the only one: Rudy Guiliani raised some $17 million for the quarter, and Mitt Romney about $20 million (though to be fair, $6 million of that he gave himself).

But all that pales in comparison to thee leading Democrats. Although John Edwards struggled along with $9 million, Hillary Clinton rode along with $27 million and Barack Obama soared over the rest with a whopping $32.5 million.

Pundits are quick to point out that money does not equate with votes. But campaign donors are not saints, they're gamblers, and apparently no one is gambling on John McCain.