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.”

The Baltimore Algebra Project is a student-led inter-school coalition of inner city youths in Baltimore, MD. Originally formed as a study group to help students learn after school, it has grown into an activist organization fighting for the right to a good education in inner-cities.

BAP has done a number of great actions and is finding widespread support of their cause (I mean really, who's against funding education for everyone?).

I congratulate Nancy Pelosi's accomplishments in the House.  I applaud the Senate for following suit.  These two bodies have managed to challenge the acrid policies of the Bush Administartion and its most conservative supporters.  From passing legislation to finally enact recommendations of the 9/11 committee to lowering interest rates on student loans, the Democrats have accomplished exactly what they said they would do in their campaign speeches.  (Few of these bills have become law, but I digress.)

This week, both the House and the Senate approved legislation that would require Iraq funding to be tied to a withdrawal date.  Again, bravo.  We know that this will be vetoed and that the future of the funding remains uncertain.  What we don't know is who Middle America will hold responsible when reports of troops being under funded start trickling in, which inevitably will happen: No armored humvees here, no night goggles there, etc.