Herban Sprawl

This piece is dedicated to Marion Talbot and Ellen H. Richards. On November 28, 1881, they invited 15 alumnae of eight colleges to a meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. Their vision was to create an organization in which women college graduates could work together to open doors of higher education to other women and to find wider opportunities to use their training.*

It is also dedicated to Ethel Born, who has taught me the true value promise of AAUW, and you won’t find it in the official literature!

It all started out innocently enough. My niece suggested we meet up in St. Louis for the AAUW convention as a special time together. It was meant to include my niece-to-be, as well, but she wasn’t able to make it. So, my sister, her daughter, and me. I was really looking forward to it.

Sometime during the course of the early spring, I received an email from a branch member alerting us to the issue of open membership being on the agenda for convention - yet again. I gave the idea a lot of consideration, but overall, it didn’t appeal to me on a lot of levels. I’ve written in this space about that topic before, so I won’t go into my opinions today.

Later, I saw something on Facebook, and without really reading it carefully, posted something that stated my opposition. That set up what I call a firestorm of responses from the moderator of that site, who kept trying to tell me I was wrong. Details aren’t important here, but when she resorted to leaving me private messages on Facebook, I questioned it. She didn’t think I’d want it on my Wall. I had nothing to hide, I told her. Truthfully, she did, because she was doing exactly what I had accused her of doing: not listening and not allowing for a difference of opinion without chiming in with her disdainful and condescending insistence that people who disagreed were wrong. After all, our esteemed president had been in tears when she had to turn away a member who would have worked so hard for our mission. sighhhh Our president needs to put on her big girl panties and deal with it.

When I blogged about it, a member of the bylaws committee wanted to comment - three pages worth of commentary. I turned him down. First of all, I don’t know what the husband of a board member was doing on the bylaws committee to start with. That is about as blatant a case of conflict of interest as there is. You know, I didn’t need to have some man blithering away the party line on this “the-sky-is-falling-and-the-only-thing-that-will-hold-it-up-are-these-questionable-bylaws” story. I told him to boil it down to 50 words, knowing good and well he wasn’t even going to try.

My comments on the Facebook page drew the attention of some other AAUW people who had the same reaction I did and who also didn’t like the moderator’s comments. We hooked up.

Pretty soon, I realized that I wasn’t in a minority at all, and that’s when I learned the value they don’t tell you about, the value they will take away from us when they do away with conventions (if they succeed). I have met so many different women from different walks of life and different ages, stripes and colors! There is one thing that unites them, and that’s where Ethel comes into the story.

Ethel finished her college degree long after her children were out of college. For graduation, her daughter gave her a membership in AAUW. Ethel is passionate about how important it is for AAUW to stick with the statement of purpose in the original charter. When we seek to promote and facilitate higher education for women and girls, we raise their standards of living and increase their opportunities. This, my friends, is where equity comes into the equation. Equity is the positive outcome of education. Education raises the prospects of entire villages of women and girls. With education, we go far beyond the simplistic notion of “equity.” We go beyond the pay Lily Ledbetter was entitled to. With education, we prevent many forms of inequity. Equity? Too narrow a concept. Education? The world is your oyster!

I don’t need “value promises” from an organization that I belong to voluntarily. To engage in the mission, we have only to look at our charter. The mission is clear, and for 125+ years, AAUW has been working to fulfill that mission.

The problem is, this organizaton has been trying to remake itself and the new messages really don’t resonate. They are just window dressing. Redecorating. By diluting our original purpose, AAUW makes it difficult for members to recruit new members. I know this. I just recruited a thirty-something and a twenty-something, both professional women. They wanted to know what we stood for. I took them to the annual meeting -the one where we distribute our scholarships - and the purpose of AAUW became crystal clear. This, they said, was an idea they could get behind.

Ethel is the chair of the International Affairs Committee. They generally present three programs each year, and they are stellar. We learn so much about the ways in which other countries and cultures approach the issue of educating women and girls, and the extremely powerful impact that has on women’s rights and their opportunities. Sometimes I wish we could telecast her committee’s programs to other branches. (I know leadership is following this blog, so one of you needs to be taking notes.)

The point is, the organization is probably in trouble. But the truth hasn’t been disseminated in such a way as to engender trust in the leadership. In other words, they haven’t told the truth, the WHOLE truth and nuttin’ but the truth. They have repeated the party line like a mantra, but their explanations are hollow and without substance they cannot expect the membership…. educated women (with a handful of men) who read and think to buy into the sales pitch.

The bylaws they are suggesting violate Roberts’ Rules. They are indicative of an organization in its death throes, and they are risky in that they easily pave the way for another organization to take us over. The structure of the board, with too many appointments that have no accountability to the membership, is such that it engenders mistrust. Without the intermediate layer of leadership, the structure they are proposing sets up a distinct we/they situation. And those rarely have a good outcome.

Additionally, open membership means the membership roster can be packed with people from another organization that seeks to seize AAUW and its lovely endowment. One member/one vote is problematic in terms of the way it will be set up. If we don’t like these bylaws, can we trust leadership to do the right thing with that process?

Bottom line: the current leadership has violated the trust of members across the country, and they aren’t happy that all these smart people are pointing out the situation to them. The recitation of the party line isn’t giving thinking women the answers they seek. There is too much latitude and too many opportunities for malfeasance. The leadership doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth here: there is something fishy going on, and something tells me it won’t provide me with my weekly dose of essential fatty acids. Carp doesn’t do that. Only fish that swim in transparent waters can.

The thing is, this reminds me of the leap churches are asked to make when their leadership tells them they have reached the size where they need to be a program church, rather than a pastoral church. Parisioners scratch their heads and wonder, “What the heck is that, anyway?”

Our branches are being asked to support a so-called mission, to give members value for belonging (sounds like a pitch for Sam’s Club), and to support an organizational structure that defies the standards and ethics of any good organizational strategist. The branches that include a lot of older women who have contributed heavily to the Educational Foundation aren’t so sure they like this. One younger president scoffed at the importance of the $140 million endowment saying it wasn’t really that much, and that the women who’d contributed to it were dead anyway.

[Oho! Marion?! Ellen?! Nell Murphy?! Helen Sweeney?! Joan Derenge?! Gertrude Camper?! Connie Anderson?! Would your spirits like to have some fun in St. Louis?]

So much for the dead ladies, but what about the very much alive ones in my branch, your branch and everyone else’s branch who have worked their hind ends off all these years to provide opportunities for women who needed that helping boost?

You would think that a younger generation whose backs are bowed by the weight of their college loan obligations would understand the VALUE in our scholarship programs.

As to conventions, Ethel says, this is where we renew our DNA. Think about that.

I really cannot wait to meet these women I’ve been corresponding with. I cannot wait to put faces to names. I feel like I’ve known some of them all my life. This is the VALUE of conventions. We get VALUE when we come together to share what has worked, and what hasn’t worked. We come together to hammer out best practices in membership recruitment, retention and fulfillment. We come together to share fundraising ideas that move us out of sorting books. We come together for fellowship and in friendship. Take away the opportunity to network and exchange ideas and processes and what are we? AARP? AAA? Those are organizations with huge staffs, boards and faceless members. If AAUW goes to being a virtual organization like they seem to be pointing us to, that’s exactly what we will become. Now what VALUE is there in that kind of organization?

Conventions are indeed expensive when the only place you hold them are hotel conference centers in big cities. College campuses in smaller cities host conferences with aplomb. Just ask the staff at Radford University about their annual blast of fun with the 1000 or so Unitarians who invade their campus at the end of July for a week of renewal, recommittment and respite. A whole week of that, plus workshop fees, is about the same as this trip to St. Louis is going to cost a lot of the delegates.

The last thing that worries me is this. In the event the bylaws do not pass, there is no provision advertised as to who will step forward to fill offices that exist under the current bylaws that the new ones eliminated. Hmmm Who wants to be treasurer? Secretary?  Furthermore, the people being considered for appointed positions are a deep, dark secret.

And they wonder why people like me don’t trust this whole mess…………..

*Paraphrased and sorta quoted from the AAUW.org website.