(At Roger William’s own First Baptist Church in Providence, RI) I owe an update on the situation that I reported yesterday. I am attending the American Democracy Project meeting, which is taking place in the Westin Hotel under a union boycott. I have spoken at some length to three union organizers (one of whom had also read my blog post) and several Providence-based colleagues who are well informed about the situation. I attended a union rally at 7 am. I then crossed the picket line and moderated a plenary discussion at which colleagues addressed how to handle such controversial issues. Union leaders attended–as they had every right to do–and answered questions from the floor. In the afternoon, I marched on the picket line. I have also spoken separately with many fellow ADP colleagues and participated in a breakout session devoted to the labor dispute.

For what it’s worth, my views are:

1. The workers are being treated with gross injustice, and illegally.

2. When you cross a picket line, you are taking a position and having an effect. The effect in this case is favorable to the hotel’s owners and damaging to the union.

3. I happen to have moved my own room to a different hotel, but that by no means gives me clean hands, because the ADP would lose its deposit unless a minimum number of participants stayed at the Westin. I am in support of the ADP, and I am attending the conference. Thus I am basically free-riding on my colleagues who stay in the Westin. There is no moral difference between me and them, although I am glad that some of us moved our business away.

4. I continue to believe that ADP should not have to cancel the meeting and lose its deposit. Union leaders are correct to say that people must sacrifice rather than participate in unjust situations. But the sacrifice in ADP’s case might well be fatal, and justice does not demand that the ADP close down. All pro-democracy organizations are struggling to survive in the current climate.

Conservative critics of higher education–and especially of “civic engagement” projects–might assume that participants at an ADP conference would be automatically and reflexively pro-union. What I actually perceive is a lot of deliberation and openness to diverse ideological perspectives. Conferees know that a labor dispute is a complicated business–it can cause collateral damage to third parties, for example. And we have come to this conference under all kinds of complex circumstances, not having individually chosen or paid to attend.

But none of that erases the individual obligation to make a decision. If you attend the ADP conference at the Westin, you have decided to cross a picket line. No amount of rumination on complexities and analogies negates that complicity. Yes, the hotel management and various other parties have perspectives that one can listen to. Yes, you should study and respect libertarian and other forms of conservative thought. But in the end, you have to decide. You can’t take refuge in intellectual neutrality or in the other work you do–like educating young people, or creating open spaces for democratic dialog. A commitment to teach democracy back on your own campus doesn’t make things any better for Local 217 of UNITE HERE in Providence. You own what you do–it’s as simple as that.

Many friends and I are converging on Providence, RI for the annual American Democracy Project conference. It is in the Westin Hotel, which is subject to a union boycott. Unite Here called a boycott when the hotel cut salaries and raised health care premiums. Just last week, the Westin laid off 50 workers, who will be replaced with contractors. The boycott has a Facebook page that you can visit.

The union is understandably calling for ADP to join the boycott. According to an email that I have received with identical text from 18 different individuals (so far), “The American Democracy Project is supposed to promote democracy, but patronizing this hotel supports the Westin Providence’s violations of democratic rights. Please boycott this hotel and please do not cross the union picketlines there.”

The problem, however, is that canceling the hotel contract would cost ADP so much money that I believe the organization would die. A boycott, as opposed to a strike, does not release ADP from their legal obligations to pay the hotel. And ADP is a small, scrappy, nonprofit outfit that serves public colleges and universities, with a strong emphasis on low-budget, non-selective institutions.

I have therefore decided to stick with the conference, although I am minimizing my own payments to the Westin. I will attend the union’s teach-in and rally, but I will also enter the hotel for several sessions, including a plenary discussion on Friday morning about how to address issues like this one. Indeed, I will moderate that plenary. I plan to encourage participants to think about what we should do in the future.

This has been a tough call, and all of us are complicit–whether we patronize a hotel that exploits its workers or potentially kill an important nonprofit. I may have made the wrong decision, or there may not be a right one. I believe that all our work in democracy education is serious business. We do not just discuss, observe, and study institutions and teach young people to do the same. We populate, fund, profit from, and run institutions that regularly make and break human lives. Without taking ourselves overly seriously or giving ourselves too much credit, we need to recognize the heavy responsibilities we bear.

I am in a retreat with leaders who work with young people (ages 18-29) who have not attended college–basically, America’s working-class and marginalized youth. Our colleagues provide a diverse range of opportunities, but all have civic or political engagement as one of their purposes. CIRCLE is the main organizer of this retreat, although we collaborated closely with our practitioner partners to design the agenda and facilitate the discussion. The conversation so far has been theoretically rich and challenging. I won’t be able to reflect on it for some time, because my first task is simply to take it in. Most of our own research on this topic is collected here.

(On an AirTrain flight, Logan -> BWI): If you’re a nonprofit that tries to run solely on grants and contracts from the federal government and foundations, you basically can’t make it work. The grants and contracts will cover your expenses for funded projects, plus an appropriate share of overhead (also known as facilities & administration costs). But those revenues cannot be used to cover the cost of grant-seeking, which is time-consuming work, especially since no fundraiser succeeds with more than one proposal in three. Also, the grants and contracts basically will not cover R&D or public relations. But you cannot run a nonprofit enterprise without spending significant funds on development, R&D, networking, and PR.

Many nonprofits survive (and even flourish) by adding profitable fee-for-service work or by soliciting private donations by mail, in person, or in annual banquets. Those are appropriate strategies, but they can detract from an organization’s mission if, for example, it starts serving clients who can pay its fees, or if its energies go into private fundraising.

Overall, I think Dan Palotta is right in his book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential. It’s too common to view all “overhead” in the nonprofit sector as waste, whereas R&D and development are treated as investments in the for-profit world. If the government and foundations want to help build and sustain institutions that do good in the world, they should be willing to pay the real cost of business, not just the itemized cost of each particular project.