The topic of civic engagement—defined broadly as the ways people connect to one another and become drawn into community or political affairsFootnote 1—has recently aroused much scholarly and public concern, particularly among those who bemoan its decline in the contemporary US. Many, following the lead of Robert Putnam, argue that civic participation peaked in the 1960s and has decreased ever since.Footnote 2 Recent empirical research suggests that ordinary Americans' knowledge about politics, trust in political institutions, and voting participation have declined significantly, and as a result participation is increasingly the domain of the educated, affluent and politically interested.Footnote 3 The American Political Science Association's Committee on Civic Engagement summed up this prognosis in 2005 by stating:
American democracy is at risk. The risk comes not from some external threat but from disturbing internal trends: an erosion of the activities and capacities of citizenship. Americans have turned away from politics and the public sphere in large numbers, leaving our civic life impoverished. Citizens participate in public affairs less frequently, with less knowledge and enthusiasm, in few venues, and less equally than is healthy for a vibrant democratic polity.Footnote 4
Among the many explanations for this disturbing “disappearance of civic America” is that membership in civic organizations—ranging from local bowling leagues to voluntary and fraternal organizations like the Kiwanis Club and Elks Lodge—has experienced a long-term decline.Footnote 5 Although involvement in such organizations does not always lead to political participation,Footnote 6 scholars such as Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol praise them for serving as “schools of citizenship”Footnote 7 that foster democratic engagement for broad swaths of the population by providing spaces where individuals develop civic skills and connections to the community.
If we accept this connection between membership in civic organizations and political engagement and are concerned about the decline in both, how may other locations in the American civic universe gather and engage individuals, especially those from marginalized communities? Exploring this question is important if we are concerned with understanding and broadening the scope of political involvement in America. As the economy falters, the numbers of poor and marginalized individuals are growing. As Frances Fox Piven has recently (and controversially) argued, these individuals are increasingly isolated and reluctant to protest collectively in order to have their voices heard in the political process.Footnote 8 If they are not protesting or joining traditional and civic political organizations, it therefore merits examining whether and how other previously overlooked sites might gather marginalized individuals and promote democratic engagement, especially if the organizations we traditionally revere for fostering this are declining.
In line with scholars such as Jeffrey Berry,Footnote 9 I propose here that nonprofit organizations offering health and social services, often through partnerships with government agencies, may provide such sites of civic engagement. Why nonprofits? Quite simply, they are a significant and growing part of the American civic universe. By 2008, there were approximately 1.5 million tax-exempt nonprofit organizations (up from 1.16 million in 1998),Footnote 10 and they employ nearly 8.6 million paid persons full-time and 7.2 million volunteers.Footnote 11 Currently, 44 percent of charitable nonprofits deliver health and human services,Footnote 12 and many Americans depend on them, including some of the most politically marginalized persons in the nation: those at high risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, including members of sexual and racial minority groups who live in poverty, gay men, African Americans, transgendered individuals, intravenous drug users, and street-based sex workers.Footnote 13
Given the scope of the nonprofit sector and its capacity to gather otherwise under-represented groups, we cannot ignore Berry's claim that nonprofits are at the very core of civil society.Footnote 14 However, there remains little information about how nonprofits are involved in the political process.Footnote 15 At first glance this is understandable. In many cases grant-seeking and service provision are their main activities, and the management and administrative hierarchies they put in place to facilitate these concerns often limit their capacity to provide the face-to-face interactions needed for social capital and civic skills development.Footnote 16 Moreover, tax law (particularly Section 501c3 of the Internal Revenue Code [IRC]) restricts certain forms of resource aggregation and participation in political activities, such as lobbying and campaigning, all of which makes nonprofits more conservative in their tactical repertoires.Footnote 17 Therefore if one looks at the universe of nonprofits, most—such as local soup kitchens and Red Cross chapters—are “not really challenging the system; most are fairly conventional in their political orientation, and their general role in society is already embraced by political elites.”Footnote 18
However, scholars are beginning to reconsider this non-political understanding of nonprofits in light of growing evidence that their service-provider relationship with government requires them to maneuver politically and that their relationships with the citizens who are their clients also have political dimensions.Footnote 19 I seek to build on these insights by analyzing how nonprofits' engagement with (marginalized) communities promotes both social capital and civic engagement, which I define broadly to include indirect activities (such as empowering a constituency) and direct involvement with formal political institutions (such as lobbying legislators or participating in political campaigns and policy development). To illustrate, I focus on what I term social movement-borne nonprofits. These organizations are typically created by activists involved in oppositional social movements and, at the same time, they are registered as nonprofits, and are funded by government sources to offer health and social services to constituents represented by their activist interests.Footnote 20 Specifically, I draw on the experiences of two such organizations formed by sex workers involved in Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), the nation's first prostitute-rights group: the California Prostitutes' Education Project (CAL-PEP), which conducts HIV/AIDS prevention outreach to sex workers and other street-based populations in Oakland, CA; and the St. James Infirmary (SJI), an occupational health and safety clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco.Footnote 21
Drawing on multi-method qualitative research on CAL-PEP and the SJI,Footnote 22 I argue that social movement-borne nonprofits engage in political activities through a process of radical institutionalization, whereby they incorporate and advance activist goals through their organizational practices, and thus serve as sites of both service provision and civil association. Here “radical” refers broadly to a fundamental challenge or opposition to state policy and the dominant socio-moral order it reflects. “Institutionalization” is defined in spatial terms, indicating the creation of a space that reflects radical political goals and promotes within it a commitment to gathering and empowering its (otherwise marginalized) constituency as claims-makers.Footnote 23 In what follows I will argue that as such radical organizations formalize and become legally registered, they continue to serve three broad civic functions: “oppositional implementation,” “community engagement,” and “claims-making activities.” In so doing, my goal is to move scholarship beyond asking whether nonprofits are capable of community engagement and participating in political activities, to identifying how they do this, perhaps paradoxically, within the constraints of their nonprofit status. Case studies such as the ones that follow can never firmly establish general theoretical propositions. But they play a crucial role in building knowledge and in highlighting important dynamics and processes. Scholars can then test for and further define these properties in other similar settings, and thus broaden our understanding of nonprofits' evolving role in politics and processes of social change.
Nonprofits and Civic Engagement
Many civic engagement scholars are skeptical about health and social service nonprofits' civic and political capacities because of these organizations' proximity to government. In his work, Robert Putnam argues that civic organizations' separation from government makes them fertile sites for political development and democratic engagement because they foster social capital: the “features of social life—networks, norms and trust—that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue their shared objectives.”Footnote 24 Nonprofits arguably do not fit this profile: as government funding becomes a larger share of their budgets over time, they are prone to professionalization, bureaucratization, and formalization to maintain grants.Footnote 25 As a result, they provide less of the face-to-face interaction needed for social capital and civic skills development, and therefore are minimally capable of generating the same levels of civic and political activity among their constituents.Footnote 26
However, terms such as “civic organizations” and “civic engagement” are extremely broad and encompass a wide variety of groups and activities, making it difficult to determine what fosters civic engagement specifically, and whether this leads to political participation.Footnote 27 Evidence also exists that civic organizations do not all develop social capital and promote civic and political engagement in positive, pro-democratic ways.Footnote 28 And furthermore, few civic organizations are actually autonomous from government and the political process. Theda Skocpol documents extensively how American civic activity was never predominantly local and independent of government and politics.Footnote 29 Here she cites examples such as Parent Teacher Associations (PTA), which—while mythologized as local, independent groups—were actually part of a national PTA organization that was established to resemble the US federal structure and make policy demands at all levels of government. Consequently, as more government power was concentrated at the national level, civic organizations reconfigured themselves accordingly. As a result, today a proliferation of national, professionally-managed advocacy groups without chapters or members, and nonprofit organizations with paid staffs now define and dominate the civic universe. The outcome, Skocpol argues, is a diminished democracy dominated by professionalized organizations less likely to facilitate participation for the disadvantaged.
Given the diversity of civic organizations and their proximity to government, I argue that we must seriously consider nonprofit health and social service organizations if we are concerned with promoting and expanding civic and political engagement. The first reason for this is the growth and size of the sector. Nonprofits have a long and varied history in service delivery, policy advocacy and social movements,Footnote 30 particularly since President Johnson's War on Poverty extended the devolution of government service-provision to nonprofit organizations. In the mid-1960s, Skocpol writes, the federal government began using grants and contracts to induce non-federal actors to pursue desired goals.Footnote 31 In particular, amendments to the 1967 Social Security Act (Title IV-A) provided heavy inducements to encourage states to enter contracts with private agencies to provide services.Footnote 32 In turn, state and local governments often designated private nonprofits to run social programs, making the nonprofit sector the “theatre of operations for the enlarged welfare state.”Footnote 33 By 1975 government funding replaced private donors as the largest source of nonprofit revenue.Footnote 34 This growth continued with the rise of the New Right and Ronald Reagan's election as president on a platform advocating a major retreat from government intervention in social policy and the economy, and an ideological opposition to social spending.Footnote 35 To the Reagan Administration and others on the Right who decried government involvement in the economy, nonprofit organizations offered flexibility and new ideas for delivering services, and they also were a means for bringing unaddressed problems to public attention.Footnote 36 As a result, from 1974 to 1995 federal support to nonprofits increased from $23 billion to $175 billion.Footnote 37
Today, nonprofits are effectively “co-producers” of government policy and programs,Footnote 38 which is the second reason we must consider them as sites for civic engagement. In addition to gathering (often marginalized) individuals, nonprofits operate as intermediaries by linking those too poor, unskilled, or overwhelmed with problems of their own to the political process as they interact with government agencies to deliver services.Footnote 39 Research indicates the value of this connection. Mark Warren's work on the Industrial Areas Foundation, for example, shows that poor and marginalized persons must not only mobilize their own internal resources to help their communities; they must connect their civic institutions to the political process and institutions to effect change.Footnote 40 Carmen Sirianni's Investing in Democracy also demonstrates how, when their civic organizations (including nonprofits) are connected to government through a process he terms “collaborative governance,” citizens become involved in the process of addressing problems in their community and developing a political culture that engages communities from the bottom up.Footnote 41 In so doing, Romand Coles notes, Sirianni's work shows that governmental systems may be reciprocal and communicative with citizens, making them key agents in a process where they are proactively engaged in limiting, shaping, and co-producing government behavior.Footnote 42
Within the universe of nonprofit organizations, I focus on a type particularly capable of this intermediate, empowering function: those that emerged from the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Created by activists engaged in oppositional political movements, these organizations are registered as nonprofits and often accept state and other mainstream funding to “do the work of the movement” by offering health and social services to their constituencies. Some examples of these include the War on Poverty's Community Empowerment Programs;Footnote 43 women's health clinics formed by reproductive rights activists;Footnote 44 and, Gay Men's Health Crisis and other similar AIDS service organizations.Footnote 45 Using CAL-PEP and the SJI as illustrative examples, I posit that by engaging in policy co-production with government agencies to offer services, these organizations offer their constituents opportunities to develop civic skills and connect to the political process. In stating this, however, I am not idealizing nonprofits' capabilities: while government may rely on these organizations to provide services, it is always the stronger partner in these relationships.Footnote 46 Government particularly has the power to limit nonprofits' political activities through Section 501c3 of the IRC and grant agreements. More broadly, it also has the power to limit their promotion of social change.
IRC 501c3
Since donations to organizations registered under IRC 501c3 are tax deductible, the government restricts how they organize, govern themselves, and act, particularly when it comes to influencing legislation.Footnote 47 In 1995, questions about the extent of government oversight amplified when Congressman Ernest Istook (R-TX) initiated a debate about changing how the nonprofit sector is regulated and monitored. Istook was concerned that nonprofits were using federal funds for lobbying, and so his amendment would lower the amount of money they could spend on advocacy, which he wanted to define as any attempt to influence policy (including education and awareness activities). The Istook Amendment rallied nonprofit organizations of all types, and while it was defeated after each introduction, it always led to bitter debate.Footnote 48
Despite the failure of the Istook Amendment, 501c3 nonprofits remain closely scrutinized by government agencies, most notably the IRS, which strongly encourages nonprofits registering as exempt entities to “be thoughtful about the governance practices that are appropriate for the charity in assuring sound operations and compliance with tax law.”Footnote 49 To demonstrate compliance, the IRS requests documents describing the organization's governance and management (commonly prescribed by state law), and encourages the formation of “an active and engaged board … to effectively make sure that the organization obeys tax laws, safeguards charitable assets, and furthers its charitable purposes.”Footnote 50 However, monitoring does not end when nonprofits attain tax exemption. In 2007, the IRS redesigned Form 990, the annual tax return form nonprofits must file, to include a section on governance to “help ensure that the organization's assets will be used consistently with its exempt purposes.”Footnote 51
IRC 501c3 also restricts participation in lobbying and election campaigns—the two most common ways organizations and individuals seek to influence the political process in the United States.Footnote 52 Treasury Regulations (501c3-1c3ii) describe a wide range of activities that count as lobbying,Footnote 53 including engaging in grassroots lobbying via appeals to the electorate or general public for the purposes of advocating, supporting, opposing, or proposing legislation.Footnote 54 The Office of Management and Budget reinforced these lobbying restrictions further in 2004 with Circular A-122, which established what costs nonprofits can charge to federal grants, contracts, and other agreements.Footnote 55
Funding Agreements
In addition to constraints posed by IRC Section 501c3, nonprofit service providers must devote time and resources (staff and otherwise) to obtaining and maintaining funding in an increasingly competitive grant environment. According to Steven R. Smith, “since the 1960s government funding of nonprofit agencies has shifted from grants with relatively loose accountability to increasingly specific contracts and requirements.”Footnote 56 Today, governments at all levels regularly renew grantees based on their performance,Footnote 57 meaning nonprofits must submit increasingly high-quality grant proposals and engage in extensive program monitoring and reporting activities.Footnote 58
Nonprofits funded for HIV/AIDS prevention (like CAL-PEP and the SJI) face particularly acute pressure to devote resources to program monitoring and reportingFootnote 59, due to the decentralized and politically contentious nature of the field. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) distribute 80 percent of their HIV/AIDS prevention budget externally through cooperative agreements, grants, and contracts to state, local, and territorial health departments that often subcontract service provision to nonprofit community organizations.Footnote 60 As a result, the variety of funded programs crosses a range of geographical areas, and so the CDC's ability to monitor and evaluate grantees' performance was compromised by a “lack of standardized sets of HIV prevention variables and adequate data collection systems for managing and reporting such data.”Footnote 61 However, these concerns about program reporting were also motivated by the ideology of the G.W. Bush administration, which was generally suspicious about community-based harm reduction-oriented HIV prevention activities, and pressured the CDC to improve accountability.Footnote 62 Consequently, in 2004, the CDC responded by creating program evaluation practices at the federal level that increased data collection requirements for nonprofits conducting HIV prevention work locally. Even if nonprofits do not receive funding directly from the CDC, data collection is a daily reality for them because many report data to their state and local health departments, which in turn report to the CDC.
Beyond Co-optation?
Given the restrictions IRC 501c3 and funding agreements impose on nonprofits, it is understandable why many scholars and observers of civic engagement and the nonprofit sector suspect that even nonprofits with the most radical origins sacrifice political activities for “don't-bite-the-hand-that-feeds-them resource dependence.”Footnote 63 But research shows that nonprofits are in a much more synergistic, reciprocal relationship with government, where their leaders often navigate restrictions on their political activities to influence law and policy development.Footnote 64 For example, Jeffrey Berry and David Arons' seminal study of nearly 2,500 nonprofits nation-wide compared the political activities of charitable nonprofit service providers who signed IRS Form 5768 to make the H election under IRC 501h with those that did not.Footnote 65 The H-election subjects nonprofits to an expenditure test, under which they may devote a percentage of their tax-exempt purpose budget to directly lobbying legislators.Footnote 66 Berry and Arons found the H-electors actually advocated for and represented their constituents' interests in the political process, while non-H electors did less (or none) of this.Footnote 67 In another study, Mark Chaves et al considered the effect of government funding on nonprofits' political activities by using a national sample of religious congregations and a longitudinal sample of nonprofit organizations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.Footnote 68 Their results showed government funding did not always suppress nonprofits' participation in the political and policy process. In fact, government's dependence on nonprofits and nonprofits' self-interest often combined to increase nonprofits' engagement in the political process in a range of ways, from simply informing their constituents of political activities and discussing politics, to registering people to vote.Footnote 69 And Nicole Marwell shows that nonprofit organizations may operate as the fulcrum through which patronage resources (i.e. grants and contracts) are distributed and nonprofit clients are organized as voters. Here, by engaging in electoral organizing and producing reliable voting constituencies, nonprofit leaders may in fact pressure political actors to make favorable contract allocations.Footnote 70
My research therefore builds on civic engagement and nonprofit scholarship that indicates that even when a nonprofit organization appears co-opted by government, there are ways it can retain or develop goals or features that engender oppositional stances or reactions.Footnote 71 Sex worker-run civic organizations are particularly valuable cases for examining this potential dynamism. Since they were developed by and serve one of the most marginalized groups in the nation, one may assume that as they grew more dependent on government they would quickly abandon their explicit support for prostitute rights; yet they have not done this, indicating the oppositional political potential of similar nonprofits across a range of issue areas. Additionally, my goal in using these particular nonprofits as case studies is to encourage more scholarly analysis of prostitution (and other forms of sex work) in political science. Although such research is common in fields such as sociology, criminology, and women's/gender studies, this has not been the case in political science, despite the political questions and controversies the issue raises.Footnote 72 Therefore, in what follows I draw on CAL-PEP and the SJI's experiences to specify how nonprofits with the following properties may engage marginalized communities in civic life, participate in political activities, and promote social change:
Oppositional implementation involves activists capitalizing on trends towards government-nonprofit policy co-production to implement a mission and method service delivery that directly reflects oppositional political goals. To clarify this, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein's work on feminist activism in the Catholic Church and US military is instructive.Footnote 73 By conceptualizing the process of institutionalization in spatial terms, she indicates how activists may establish “habitats”—“spaces where advocates of equality can assemble, where discussion can occur, and where the organizing for institutional change can originate.”Footnote 74 Although the individual nonprofit organizations I consider are not of the same scale as the church or military, their funding agreements place them within larger health and social service institutional structures; within these, they are also providing spaces for marginalized communities to gather and develop a sense of community.
Community engagement indicates a practice of involving nonprofit constituents in organizational management and service delivery. In the health and social services field, nonprofits may provide this opportunity by allowing constituents to obtain a qualification or credential demonstrating the possession of a special form of knowledge used to serve others.Footnote 75 At first glance, this skills development may appear more conformist than conducive to fostering and promoting political engagement (especially towards challenging the status quo). But for the marginalized groups many nonprofits serve, community engagement of this sort in fact creates opportunities for constituents to be involved and empowered in their own care and gain skills they may transfer to the broader civic and political realm.
Claims-making refers to the ways social movement-borne (and other) nonprofits may circumvent the constraints that nonprofit tax status and funding agreements impose on them to challenge government policy and the socio-moral order it reflects. Although creating a “habitat” is valuable on many levels, engaging in political activities outside of the organization is ultimately necessary to improve the conditions under which many nonprofits' constituents live and work. Relevant activities that constitute claims-making thus include (but are not limited to) making the H-election; participating in approved election-related activities such as conducting unbiased and non-partisan public forums or meetings where candidates from both sides speak or debate; and conducting educational public policy advocacy, where they may express their position on a social issue in broad terms (but they cannot discuss or express support for a specific piece of legislation related to the issue).Footnote 76
CAL-PEP & the SJI: Illustrating Radical Institutionalization
Understanding the process of radical institutionalization in a nonprofit setting requires first understanding the nonprofit's oppositional origins. The nonprofits under study in this article—CAL-PEP and the SJI—were created by activists involved in Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), the nation's first prostitute-rights group. Formed in the mid-1970s, members and supporters of this movement opposed laws criminalizing prostitution and their enforcement by local police officers, and called for a broader social reconstruction of prostitution from a criminal activity to a form of legitimate work.Footnote 77 Through their publications (“COYOTE Howls”) and demonstrations at City Hall, among other measures, COYOTE demanded that prostitution be decriminalized and fall under the same tax, health, and other relevant laws that apply to other independent businesses. By the early 1980s, however, COYOTE faded from view as its participants moved to other pursuits. While some continued COYOTE's work through new protest-oriented organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) and the Desiree Alliance, others moved to nonprofit health and social service provision, in partnership with government agencies.
To some such as Robyn Few, a Bay Area SWOP leader, this latter shift signaled the end of oppositional politics. Here she stated that while the SJI and CAL-PEP do important work, “they [their leaders] shifted from activism to service provision because there was more money here, especially with AIDS. It's all about money … and now they won't do anything political because they're scared they'll lose money.”Footnote 78 While Few's point is well taken, it is also true that for activists in the prostitute-rights movement, their lack of material and human resources impeded their achievement of any significant legal reforms.Footnote 79 Furthermore, the advent of the AIDS epidemic also decreased support for their cause and threatened their community's health and safety. As Gloria Lockett, CAL-PEP's founder and current executive director stated,
We knew that in the very near future, prostitutes would be scapegoated for AIDS. At the time, all the attention was on gay men. [But] anyone with any sense whatsoever knew that [since the disease] was sexually transmitted … the next group of people they would target would be prostitutes.”Footnote 80
Lockett was correct; early media and government reports claimed that prostitutes were responsible for transmitting the infection to the heterosexual population.Footnote 81 And so with over 10 years' experience challenging the public's perceptions of prostitutes, COYOTE began its own HIV prevention efforts. On a shoestring budget COYOTE activists handed out condoms and informational fliers about HIV/AIDS, and they held discussion groups to inform prostitutes about the virus.Footnote 82
When government officials finally attended to the mounting prevention and care needs of those affected, they were interested in local, grassroots service organizations' efforts because they aligned with the Reagan administration's devolutionary agenda, and they appeared to be inexpensive, effective, and flexible means for delivering information and services to persons considered at risk for HIV.Footnote 83 Therefore, when the CDC began studying community-based efforts to prevent HIV/AIDS among prostitutes in 1984 through the Association for Women's AIDS Research and Education (known as Project AWARE), it collaborated with COYOTE. The CDC/Project AWARE hired three sex workers from COYOTE's active membership and trained them about HIV/AIDS transmission and risk reduction, and also certified them as phlebotomists.Footnote 84 They named this group the California Prostitutes Education Project. Although COYOTE activists assumed that CAL-PEP was temporary, incentives from health authorities for local, community-based health-service provision provided an alternative way in which prostitute-rights activists could continue their work. CAL-PEP received its first grant from the San Francisco AIDS Office in 1987, and incorporated as a nonprofit. Today, CAL-PEP is located in Oakland, CA, and distributes condoms and HIV testing and prevention information to sex workers (and members of other street-based populations) throughout the Bay Area.
Building on the experience and credibility they developed through CAL-PEP, many other prostitute-rights activists transitioned to HIV/AIDS service provision and policy development.Footnote 85 When they discovered sex workers held in jails were having their blood drawn illegally for syphilis testing in 1999, they presented the San Francisco Public Health Department's division of Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention and Control (also known as City Clinic) with a plan for a clinic that would provide much needed services to the sex worker community and a site from which prostitution research would be conducted and disseminated.Footnote 86 The St. James Infirmary, the world's only occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers, opened on June 2, 1999. It offers HIV/AIDS prevention and other health services to sex workers, by sex workers.
Oppositional Implementation: Prostitute Rights in a Nonprofit Setting
Despite their origins in opposing government policy, today CAL-PEP and the SJI are proximate to government in many ways. Both organizations are currently registered as nonprofits under IRC 501c3 and are funded primarily by various government agencies for HIV/AIDS prevention and education activities. Eighty percent of CAL-PEP's $850,000 annual budget is from the CDC.Footnote 87 Although CAL-PEP currently rents office space from a private landlord, their offices were previously in a former Alameda County Health Department building. Over half of the SJI's approximately $450,000 annual budget is from City Clinic for HIV/AIDS testing services, in-kind medical staff and supplies. The clinic is located in what was formerly the city's Disease Control and Investigation Division building.Footnote 88
Within these spaces, CAL-PEP and the SJI demonstrate how nonprofits may implement radical political commitments by offering occupational health and safety services to sex workers that are not conditional on their exiting the sex industry. They do this by creating “habitats”Footnote 89 that reflect a commitment to prostitute rights: through their missions and methods of service delivery, they create spaces where sex workers may congregate, free from (police and public) harassment, which in itself is a political act. Challenging historical conceptions of prostitutes as criminals or “vectors of disease,” CAL-PEP's philosophy has always been to help prostitutes “protect themselves, their partners and their clients from contracting AIDS.”Footnote 90 Today, sex workers still comprise up to 40 percent of their clients, and CAL-PEP also reaches out to politically and economically marginalized people left out of traditional health care channels: African Americans, parolees, the homeless, and those without jobs or health insurance.Footnote 91 The SJI's mission similarly reflects its COYOTE roots, seeking
to provide compassionate, non-judgmental health care and social services for adult entertainers and sex workers, while preventing occupational illnesses and injuries through a comprehensive continuum of services.Footnote 92
At CAL-PEP, services include HIV/AIDS/sexual health education, testing, and care. They carry out the majority of this work out on the streets, through their mobile testing service, where two large recreational vehicles bring HIV testing and counseling to communities where, because of socio-economic impediments and fear of health authorities, people may not otherwise be tested. The SJI's services include primary medical care; acupuncture and massage; transgender health care; peer counseling; substance use counseling; legal, housing and social assistance referrals; condom and lube distribution; a needle exchange; and a food and clothing bank. The SJI also publishes the “Occupational Health and Safety Handbook.”Footnote 93 In its third edition, it lists the SJI's hours and services, along with 260 other pages explaining where sex workers may access health, legal, housing, transportation, and social assistance, and other related services.
Crucial to the idea of “oppositional implementation”, the sex-worker-friendly environments at CAL-PEP and the SJI radically challenge the nation's predominant criminalizing approach to prostitution,Footnote 94 and in so doing create habitats that foster a sense of community amongst a marginalized constituency. I argue that this demonstrates how nonprofits may provide a base from which stigmatized and politically marginalized communities (lacking few resources or allies) may at least begin their political engagement. As SJI founder Carol Stuart succinctly stated,
while people [will] say they are not political or doing anything political [at the SJI], the fact that [prostitutes] can sit in a room together without the threat of arrest is in fact a political act … especially in a state where two or more people in a room talking about/doing prostitution can land you in jail for conspiracy [to promote and/or engage in prostitution].”Footnote 95
Furthermore, here they are exposed to political discourse—such as the banner in the SJI's community room that reads “outlaw poverty, not prostitutes”—which begins conversations needed for further engagement. And so, according to David, a former SJI staff member, “the waiting and community rooms at the SJI are one of the most powerful things about the clinic.”Footnote 96 Here, states Aly, a former research project director at the SJI, the SJI is indirectly politicizing sex workers by providing a space where a marginalized population can gather and share information in a protective environment, which “brings a lot of self-efficacy and social capital development as a result of feeling and being part of a community.”Footnote 97
Community Engagement through Service Provision
Beyond creating a space that reflects a commitment to broader political goals, social movement-borne nonprofits also potentially promote civic and political engagement by offering their constituents an opportunity to engage in service provision and organizational management. In many ways this is a practical matter: for CAL-PEP and the SJI, their founders knew from experience that sex workers, as a community traditionally skeptical of health and other governmental authorities, are more likely to trust their peers for health and social service provision.Footnote 98 As Lockett stated about COYOTE's initial HIV/AIDS prevention efforts, “we needed people who were comfortable going into crack houses, housing projects and out on the street at night,”Footnote 99 and so today the majority of CAL-PEP's staff are “exes” of some sort. Lockett is an ex-prostitute, as are two other women on CAL-PEP's staff, and many others are ex-prisoners and ex-substance users.Footnote 100 Similarly at the SJI (aside from the two physicians, a physician's assistant, and nurses who do not have histories of sex work), the paid and volunteer staff are current, former, or transitioning sex workers.
On closer examination, this peer-hiring practice also reflects and promotes a commitment to engaging and empowering their constituency. By hiring sex workers to deliver health and social services, CAL-PEP and the SJI first and foremost provide formal employment to a marginalized group. As Aly stated, peer hiring also allows sex workers to “get something (legal) on their resumes and gain other job skills.”Footnote 101 However, these jobs skills also translate into civic skills needed for broader societal and political participation. David cited an example here of the transgender population at the SJI, many of whom have trained as peer educators, outreach workers, and HIV counselors. Through these entry-level jobs in the HIV/AIDS prevention field, they organize patients, collaborate with other clinic staff, and complete paperwork to provide services.Footnote 102 Beyond HIV/AIDS prevention, these translate to organizational, collaboration, and writing skills, which are valuable for civic participation. As Gina, a 33-year-old African American female sex worker added, “it was through the [St James] infirmary that I got such [health] training. I believe the founders [of the SJI] thought providing such training to sex workers would be a good way to show sex workers had brains and also have the skills to help other sex workers.”Footnote 103
The social capital and civic skills that nonprofits' constituents develop may also foster their broader democratic engagement. The majority of the staff and clients I interviewed at CAL-PEP and the SJI stated that they have drawn on the self-efficacy developed here to become more politically active in some way. In just one example Emily, a sex worker and SJI staff member, was employed by a Bay Area political candidate's campaign. She explained that working at the SJI motivated and provided her with the skills for this involvement, stating “No one sees themselves as having political worth if they don't feel respected in society.”Footnote 104 Since the SJI grants sex workers respect by not delegitimizing or judging them and by hiring and training them to provide their own health care, “this makes them feel entitled to make decisions in the world that they didn't feel entitled to make. Political action requires a sense of entitlement.”Footnote 105
Grant, a former CAL-PEP outreach worker, further demonstrates this link between nonprofits, civic skills development, and political engagement. In many ways, Grant characterizes the least likely citizen to engage in political life. Prior to working for CAL-PEP, Grant, an African American male, sold drugs and said he had “one foot in the grave and one foot in the pen [prison].”Footnote 106 After spending time in prison, he had difficulty finding work, and so he applied to CAL-PEP when they were doing outreach in his neighborhood. He was hired as an outreach worker, and after six months he was state-certified as an HIV testing counselor. Overall, he says, “I am proof that you can change your life,” and with CAL-PEP he wanted to give back to the community that he had affected by his drug dealing, by becoming politically engaged by participating in the AIDS Lobby Day in Sacramento, where nonprofits and other service providers are invited to inform lawmakers about their work and advocate for funding.Footnote 107 Grant described how he wore his “street” clothes—baggy jeans, a sweatshirt, and a cap—to speak to the state congress and show he was an advocate for HIV funding, as the “voice from the street.” He said that despite his appearance, his presentation showed the legislature that “he had the language to state what his community wants and needs to be safe.” As Grant described CAL-PEP, it was his “bull horn” that gave him the skills and the chance to “go out and speak and wake up the community and the world.”Footnote 108
Claims-making: Knowledge Production and Policy Advocacy
For the class of nonprofits under study, creating space for their constituents and providing opportunities for skills development play an important empowering role. However, this does not guarantee that they will engage in political activity outside the organization. In the case of sex-worker rights activists, numerous studies indicate that decriminalizing prostitution will lead to better health and safety outcomes for this population, for example by making it easier for them to call the police if they experience violence at the hands of clients.Footnote 109
When they operated apart from government, CAL-PEP and the SJI's founders were able to challenge government and focus their efforts on decriminalizing prostitution. But today, although CAL-PEP and the SJI reflect and implement these early political commitments and have the affected population (sex workers) gathered inside their doors, devoting sustained resources to this cause is not a main focus of their activity. As Berry and Arons write, many nonprofits believe they cannot (and do not) engage in political activity because this will compromise their nonprofit status (and capacity to raise revenue).Footnote 110 CAL-PEP and the SJI illustrate these misconceptions. When asked directly if CAL-PEP engages in political activity, broadly defined, Deputy Director Carla Dillard-Smith responded, “we do not do this because we get federal funding [from the CDC].”Footnote 111 SJI staff also expressed similar reluctance. As a long-time staff member stated, while the SJI seeks to provide a space for healthy opinion and debate so people can “think a bit differently when they leave than they did before,” they do not want to jeopardize their status as a 501c3 health service provider.Footnote 112
Yet upon closer examination, CAL-PEP and the SJI's experiences indicate that nonprofits—particularly those borne of social movements with broader claims to make—often are politically active. Through what I term “knowledge production” and “policy advocacy,” they challenge government in ways that will not compromise their nonprofits status or service provision.
Knowledge production
Knowledge production refers to conducting, publishing, and disseminating non-partisan issue research and analysis to inform the public and policymakers about their constituents' needs. Often, however, these activities are not conducted solely for this purpose, but for grant maintenance, as noted earlier. As the older and larger of the two organizations, CAL-PEP illustrates the extensive data collection requirements HIV/AIDS service nonprofits often face from government agencies (the SJI has a smaller grant base and therefore fewer data collection requirements).Footnote 113 Today, CAL-PEP uses six forms to collect a range of demographic, substance use and HIV prevention information about their clients. They also collect data about their program activities, such as the number of HIV tests administered. All of this is variously submitted to the City of Oakland, the Alameda County Department of Health, the California State Office of AIDS, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the CDC.
At the same time, they may use the data they collect for grant accountability for continuing political projects. As COYOTE founder Margo St. James declared, “basically, the way now for prostitutes to get respect is to have a clinic and publish research and information out of it.”Footnote 114 CAL-PEP and the SJI are certainly following this advice, illustrating that nonprofits can use the data they collect in the process of co-producing policy to influence and inform policy actors.
The CDC-funded Women and Infants Demonstration Project was CAL-PEP's first experience using research and data from a policy development and implementation project to promote nonjudgmental, sex-worker-positive health and safety approaches. This project ran from 1991 to 1995 and aimed to decrease pregnancy and increase condom use among women and their partners considered at high risk for HIV (namely women aged 15–34 who were sexually active, used crack cocaine, and exchanged sex for cash, drugs, or other trade, and who were likely to have unprotected sex with multiple partners). The project's results challenged status quo understandings of prostitution policy by highlighting the value of non-criminalizing approaches to prostitution by showing that prostitutes' involvement in the implementation and diffusion of the Project minimized their stigma in the community. Since publishing this study in the journal AIDS Education and Prevention, Footnote 115 CAL-PEP has bolstered its expert status in the HIV/AIDS prevention field by publishing research extensively.Footnote 116 As a result, Dillard-Smith noted, they are often “first in line” for funding and programs because “they test, document, report and evaluate what they do.”Footnote 117
The SJI also demonstrates how nonprofits may use data they collect to make and support oppositional political statements,Footnote 118 in this case regarding current approaches to sex worker health and safety. Through the Sex Work Environmental Assessment Team (SWEAT) study, which began in 2003, the SJI explored the ways social capital impacts the health of biologically-born female sex workers, not inclusive of transgendered women. In the first phase, an observational study was conducted with SJI sex workers.Footnote 119 The second phase looked at how criminalizing prostitution affects health.Footnote 120 Data here revealed female sex workers “prefer removing statutes that criminalize sex work in order to facilitate a social and political environment where they had legal rights and could seek help when they were victims of violence.”Footnote 121 According to Aly, who oversaw this study at the SJI, they published this material and make it available through conference presentations.Footnote 122 She added that other individuals and groups could use this information to make their own political arguments in support of decriminalizing prostitution.Footnote 123
Policy advocacy
But solely publishing research is not often enough to inform and challenge policymakers and the public's conceptions of their constituency and its needs. As CAL-PEP and the SJI's experiences demonstrate, nonprofits make such claims through what I term policy advocacy—testifying before government bodies and engaging in public policy development processes, as permitted by nonprofit law. As an older and larger organization, CAL-PEP (represented by Lockett and Dillard-Smith) has a long history of such policy advocacy on many levels (at the SJI, the majority of their policy advocacy to date has involved testimony at SFDPH budget hearings when their funding was up for renewal). Locally, Gloria Lockett was the chair of the regional Ryan White Council, where she helped to ensure that the Ryan White Care Act was re-funded.Footnote 124 Lockett and Dillard-Smith also sit on the local HIV Health Services Prevention and Planning Council, which helps set the county's HIV/AIDS prevention budget and planning priorities. Federally, Dillard-Smith participated in Congressional hearings on HIV/AIDS in Washington, DC, in 1998 when Alameda County declared a State of Emergency regarding the high rates of HIV/AIDS in the county's African American community.Footnote 125 As well, CAL-PEP attended the National Conference on AIDS, hosted by the National Minority AIDS Council, which works to develop leadership among communities of color to fight AIDS. Internationally, CAL-PEP has been active at the International AIDS Conferences in Japan, Geneva, and Toronto, among other locations.
All of this illustrates that despite perceptions that they must avoid political activities, nonprofits often represent their constituents' interests in the broader political arena.Footnote 126 Yet questions arise whether this advocacy serves more than organizational self-interest. Is it done mainly to secure funding, or might it actually increase policymakers' understandings of the client population? Admittedly, CAL-PEP and the SJI engage in policy advocacy largely to protect funding streams; however, this also has educated policymakers. In fact, CAL-PEP and the SJI demonstrate that nonprofits may successfully educate government actors about their constituents and the issues they face through the process of policy co-production.
According to program officials from the San Francisco AIDS Office who assist the SJI with program implementation, they learned “the SJI is a place where you can totally be who you are and not be ashamed. The SJI takes cultural competency to another level—whatever level of sex work you do is OK, and they don't exclude anyone.”Footnote 127 In learning about the value of nonjudgmental approaches to prostitution, the officials now share information with other governmental entities, such as the police. To illustrate, the program officials described how the SJI had problems with “outreach workers distributing condoms getting picked up by the police.” In response, the AIDS Office educated the police about the fact that “condoms are not contraband or a reason to arrest someone [for prostitution].” Since then, according to the official, “this seems to have cleared up the problem and [the SJI] now ha[s] a good relationship with the police, who now see condoms as a harm reduction tool.”Footnote 128
In Oakland, similar reciprocal learning relationships exist between government officials and CAL-PEP. According to Supervisor Keith Carson, Alameda County supports CAL-PEP, and because of them, “the county has not shied away from sex work issues.”Footnote 129 An official from the Alameda County AIDS Office, which funds CAL-PEP for HIV testing, describes how their relationship with CAL-PEP has grown.Footnote 130 Since she came to the Office of AIDS, she met with CAL-PEP over time to understand how they could connect people (particularly sex workers) with existing services, adding that, “nonprofits like CAL-PEP are the real experts.”Footnote 131
Radical Institutionalization beyond CAL-PEP and the SJI
The experiences of CAL-PEP and the SJI are not universal, and while some nonprofits born of social movements display the properties of radical institutionalization, others do not. For example, many domestic violence shelters created by feminist activists found their political activities compromised as government funding agreements for “service only” precluded social change activities.Footnote 132 Similarly, nonprofits created by activists concerned with homelessness often, over time, found themselves focusing on grant-maintenance and housing service provision as opposed to advocacy for broader housing policy reform.Footnote 133 To note this is not to devalue the very important service work such organizations do, but merely to indicate variation even within a category of nonprofits.
At the same time, while not universal, radical institutionalization is something that can be observed in other nonprofit contexts. The nonprofit Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), for example, indicates that while it focused service provision, it implemented the political struggle against stigmatizing persons with AIDS by creating a safe space where they could gather, free from harassment, and receive services from their peers.Footnote 134 It also engaged in claims-making activities by mobilizing civic networks and engaging citizens in collaborative public work with health professionals and institutions.Footnote 135 Similarly, studies of Community Empowerment Programs that emerged from the War on Poverty demonstrate that women used the civic skills and political efficacy they gained through them to resist the oppressive structures of the state and to redirect and rechannel social policy in ways that inadvertently challenged the separation of paid employment and nurturing activities for women.Footnote 136 And Sandra Morgen's study of women's health clinics illustrates how, by empowering and educating women about their bodies and health care, these clinics challenged the historical precedent of (male) doctor-asserted control over women's bodies.Footnote 137
Understanding and analyzing nonprofits' civic and political capacities also expands conceptions of how activists make radical claims and promote social change. Despite activists' widespread adoption of the nonprofit form, social movement scholarship has paid little attention to them, if not dismissed them altogether.Footnote 138 This is because much of the focus of this scholarship is on social movements that flourished in the 1960s (and those more recent movements modeled on them), characterized by their visible protest activities against the state and dominant norms, and loosely organized structures.Footnote 139 When these activities were no longer sustainable, protest either fell into abeyance, to be reignited in a future protest cycle,Footnote 140 or became institutionalized within the constrictions of organizational normality as activists become preoccupied with seeking grants and contracts to sustain their existence.Footnote 141 In sum, institutionalization is often associated with activist demobilization, ultimately signaling “the end” of the movement,Footnote 142 all of which reinforces notions that oppositional politics are best advanced through the employment of non-institutionalized, disruptive action.Footnote 143
While this characterization of activist evolution is certainly accurate in many cases, it is limited in two key ways. First, it valorizes groups capable of highly conflictual, demonstrative public protest over those who advance oppositional political claims by other, less visibly disruptive means—namely those whose “arsenal of political activism” draws only fleetingly on demonstrative protest activities and, more rarely, on violent activism.Footnote 144 For socially, sexually and legally marginalized groups, such as women involved in the prostitute-rights movement, their arsenal was limited not only by traditional gender role stereotypes, but by their legal status, which made it difficult for COYOTE to raise funds and recruit large numbers of prostitutes, as many feared this would place them at risk for arrest.Footnote 145 Therefore, labeling their (and other) activists' shift to nonprofit service as depoliticization serves only to minimize their efforts and place a premium on disruptive, publicly visible, state-centered repertoires of collective political action.Footnote 146
A second limitation of the analysis above that associates the institutionalization of activist goals with social movement demobilization is it precludes examining and specifying how activists continue their work once the movement reconfigures into new, often more formal, institutions.Footnote 147 Even Piven & Cloward—arguably the staunchest defenders of visible, protest-oriented politics—acknowledge the reality of how activists often reconfigure and formalize their strategies. Here, despite their famous declaration that “organizations endure by abandoning their oppositional politics,”Footnote 148 they recognized that while activists may push for as much change as possible, “often the resulting changes that are implemented may only be modest improvements to the existing system.”Footnote 149 For prostitute-rights activists and many others, forming nonprofits represents such a modest improvement, but this does not necessarily signal the end of the movement. If we accept the definition of social movements as sustained challenges to power-holders by a disadvantaged population who live under their jurisdiction and influence,Footnote 150 then we should always be open to other venues through which activists continue these challenges,Footnote 151 especially given the unprecedented amount and diversity of new organizational activity by social movement actors since the 1970s.Footnote 152 By gathering and serving marginalized communities and engaging in the policy process, social movement-borne nonprofits like CAL-PEP and the SJI continue these challenges, even if incrementally.
Conclusion
Using CAL-PEP and the SJI as case studies, I have demonstrated that social movement-borne nonprofits may provide important sites for fostering civic engagement and political activity, particularly among marginalized, under-represented communities. By expanding our study of these nonprofits, we can better encourage and expand democratic engagement, while also fostering just policy development. As Iris Young theorized, policies only have legitimacy when those with the most to lose from decisions on particular issues are treated as valued contributors to policy debates.Footnote 153 Although they often assemble large numbers of marginalized people inside their doors, nonprofits are limited in real (and imagined) ways from participating in these broader deliberative decision-making processes, and this limits—and ultimately devalues—the voices and concerns of those they serve and represent.Footnote 154
If we are concerned with increasing the involvement of such groups in the political process, how then may we enable nonprofits to facilitate such involvement? One immediate way is to encourage the H-election, which allows nonprofits to devote a specified portion of their resources to political activities like lobbying, without risking their status. However, such measures require most nonprofits to overcome significant knowledge and resource constraints. In line with Berry and Arons' findings, the SJI and CAL-PEP's are among the 97.5 percent that have not made the H-election.Footnote 155 At CAL-PEP, Lockett was not aware of the H-election, although she requested more information about it.Footnote 156 And while SJI Executive Director Akers initially stated the SJI was planning with the Board of Directors to make the H-election in the future,Footnote 157 when I asked her later if they had done this, she just laughed and said no, explaining that even if they did, there was no money to devote to political activities since the group's funding from the City of San Francisco had been cut.Footnote 158
Supporting and encouraging nonprofits' political activities is a worthy goal if we are concerned with increasing civic participation among members of marginalized, under-represented communities. Recalling Skocpol's finding that the most active groups in the political process represent the interests of the more advantaged, nonprofits offering health and social services are a potential antidote to this because they gather and serve some of the poorest members of society. Although CAL-PEP and the SJI are but two examples of these, there are many similar nonprofits across the nation. For example, Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS) in Washington, DC, offers harm-reduction services to men, women and transgendered individuals engaged in sex work, to help them protect their health and safety. In New Orleans, Women With A Vision engages in advocacy, health education, supportive services, and community-based participatory research to improve the lives of marginalized women, particularly those engaged in the sex industry. And Project Safe, in Philadelphia, describes itself as “an organization dedicated to ensuring the health, safety and survival of women on the street by providing advocacy, education and support using a harm reduction model” in an effort to reduce the transmission of HIV, Hepatitis C, and other infections among working women.Footnote 159
Beyond organizations gathering and serving members of the sex worker community, there also exists a range of nonprofits that are involved in a myriad of social welfare issues, and that serve a range of groups. Citiwide Harm Reduction in the Bronx, NY, for example, was founded by a drug user and offers services to other drug users, while also advocating for policies that protect the rights of drug users, the homeless, and people living with HIV. The Empowerment Program in Denver, CO, advocates for and works to decrease the poverty of women involved in the criminal justice system by providing street outreach, onsite education, employment training, counseling, and supportive services. And Bread and Jams in Boston, MA, seeks to promote empowerment, self-advocacy, and sense of community among homeless individuals through their drop-in program (that provides for basic needs, such as showers) and connections to services, while also maintaining a broader commitment to the eradication of homelessness.Footnote 160 Clearly this list is not exhaustive, but it demonstrates the range of organizations nationally that gather and serve members of marginalized communities and that maintain a commitment to advocating for their rights.Footnote 161 Through further study we may identify more like them and to analyze the properties that enable them to engage and represent their constituencies in the political process.
This in-depth study of two small, sex worker-run nonprofits represents a modest contribution to the broader political science endeavor to re-think civic engagement in the United States. Although the results of this study cannot necessarily be generalized to the broader universe of nonprofits (social movement-borne or otherwise), they reveal the potential properties and capacities of nonprofits for promoting civic engagement—an analytic task that is more difficult to accomplish through the larger-n quantitative research that has generally dominated this area of inquiry (if not the bulk of mainstream research) in political science. In so doing, this study also challenges Putnam's contention (which mirrors conventional wisdom) that civic organizations must be independent of government (and, one can extrapolate further, not focused on service provision) to engage their communities and promote participation in the political process. Instead, my findings reveal that nonprofits may implement oppositional political commitments within their operations and use their service provision methods to empower marginalized communities with civic skills. And in line with Sirianni's findings, through their collaboration with government, nonprofits may make claims towards broader social change through knowledge production and policy development.
In stating this, however, I am not glorifying nonprofits' civic and political capacities: these are service organizations, first and foremost. As such, they face very real pressures to maintain the favor of their funders, which are often government agencies with immense power to determine their budgets and activities. Additionally, many of these nonprofits (serving sex workers or otherwise) must compete with each other for grants, which may distract them from collaborating, particularly to address the “big picture politics” impacting and uniting them, such as the broader distribution of power and political and policy reform. Consequently, skeptics like Piven and Cloward are right to question what happens to these broader struggles when those who promoted them redirect their efforts to the nonprofit sector and collaborate with government in the process. But as valid as these concerns may be, political scientists concerned with civic engagement can no longer dismiss the nonprofit sector, especially in light of its growth and capacity to reach and gather marginalized constituencies. It is therefore imperative that we examine nonprofits more closely and further identify the ways they may engage in civic life, especially if we are concerned with expanding inclusion and justice through and in the democratic political process.
Appendix 1: An Explanatory Note on Methods
I draw on multi-method qualitative research in the San Francisco Bay Area from October 2006 to July 2010, which included 141 semi-structured, open-ended interviews (SOEI) with the staff and sex workers who used the services at SJI and CAL-PEP, city government and other public officials, and activists engaged with sex-work issues from a variety of perspectives. I also conducted archival and participant-observation research with both organizations. In all interviews, I used SOEIs to probe respondents about CAL-PEP and the SJI's history, operations, and relationships to and interactions with government. Sex workers using their services were asked about the role these organizations played in their healthcare and broader political and social lives. SOEIs were recorded, when permitted, and later transcribed and analyzed for various themes related to the interview questions. In most cases throughout the article, actual names are used for all public figures where permission was granted (organizational directors, board members, managers, etc). Pseudonyms are used for all other interviewees.
Archival research at the SJI, CAL-PEP, and the city archives in San Francisco and Oakland involved reviewing documents these organizations have produced (for example, HIV/AIDS informational flyers for sex workers) and broader media coverage of these organizations and sex work issues in the region more generally.
Participant-observation research at the SJI and CAL-PEP helped me to understand their organizational strategies and service delivery methods. For the participatory component, I volunteered with each organization. At the SJI, I completed an archiving project and helped them write a National Minority AIDS Coalition grant for a new computer. At CAL-PEP, I also volunteered as a grant writer, assisting with Pfizer Foundation and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administrations (SAMHSA) grant applications.
The observational component involved visiting and observing clinic nights at the SJI and participating in street outreach with CAL-PEP staff in various Oakland neighborhoods. Combining interviews with participant-observation and archival research techniques helped me locate CAL-PEP and the SJI's history and operations in their broader political-institutional context. I triangulated information obtained from CAL-PEP and the SJI's management and staff with sources (government, media, etc.) outside their organizations.
