Author: Madeline Bisgyer

It isn’t easy to be a nonprofit organization. The state and the federal government have many layers of administrative requirements, deadlines, and qualifications. It is all with good intentions, but the bureaucratic maze is a challenge for many well-intentioned people who want only to do good in the world. During my time at United for a Fair Economy, I saw this dynamic play out and witnessed practices crucial to making the nonprofit structure workable.

United for a Fair Economy is a nonprofit organization with a pretty large staff capacity and a broad range of things that they do. While I was there, I experienced an audit, preparation for a 25^th anniversary celebration, a fundraising push at the end of the fiscal year, and social media publicity to keep supporters informed of the work that was being accomplished. While this work is what took up most of my time, it was second to the economic and racial justice work that is the core of UFE.

At the same time that I was entering donation records into the database and asking Massachusetts businesses to sponsor our upcoming event, UFE was also hosting popular economics education trainings for movement organizers, fighting for $15 minimum wage in North Carolina, and mobilizing wealthy people to support just economic practices. In many nonprofits and as nonprofits grow, these two tracks become siloed into departments or individual staff positions that seem to be lightyears apart. At UFE, we incorporated three practices that prevented that siloing from happening.

Firstly, UFE values collaboration. No project proposal, organizing graphic, or appeal letter will make it out the doors without the input of multiple people in the office. From the conceptualization to the final edit, ideas are bounced around the room during lunch conversations or over Zoom meetings with the staff who work in multiple different regions of the US. It is crucial that throughout this process the folks that work in development are aware of and feel part of the community work that is at the heart of the organization’s mission. Equally important is that the education team knows how their work is being presented to donors and is part of the vision in keeping their work sustainable.

Secondly, it is important that all aspects of the work is framed in a way that values its equal importance to the organization. An example of this is demonstrated in the term, “wealth reclamation” this term is used to think about fundraising and donor relations which can be a very large component of nonprofit organizations. It helps us think about fundraising as returning wealth to the communities where it belongs which is a curtail aspect in an organization with a mission of economic justice.

Lastly, the mission of the organization must be reflected internally. At UFE, this means including healing justice in the nonprofit work environment, and respecting the lives and wellbeing of the people who make UFE’s work possible on a daily basis. It also means holding themselves accountable to their value of language justice.

During my time at UFE I worked as a development intern, but at no time did I feel like I was doing less interesting or important work. By integrating these aspects into more organizations, maybe we can make my experience a reality in the taxing nonprofit world. I know that my experience was unique, but it doesn’t need to be.

Madeline Bisgyer ’20

Last semester I spent three hours every Wednesday in deep discussion about the future of the US and the policy that is going to get us there. My professor, nine graduate students, and I analyzed proposals from policymakers and economists, but we also put forth our own proposals. The course, “Political Economy of the Welfare State” at the Heller School, provided a new learning environment that I embraced.

I was taking the class with students who had life experiences to build from. Unlike most undergrads at Brandeis, I had a classmate with a baby at home who was experiencing the necessity of accessible childcare. I had a classmate who had bought a house and realized it was the worst decision she had ever made. Through sharing personal stories with each other, we were able to develop ideas for long-term policy that would benefit us.

Not long after I finished the class, I was seated at the Newtonville Diner with my advisor talking about the year and my ideas for the thesis that I am preparing to write in the fall. My advisor gave me a few words of advice: 1) find patterns in what you are told not to study and lean into them, 2) find what inspires you, but also what makes you angry, and 3) think outside the box, as fresh, new ideas are valuable. I left invigorated by her open perspective and her trust in me. My conversation with her helped me to understand why I liked the Heller class so much: it helped us tell our own stories, learn from them, and develop solutions that would work for us.

United for a Fair Economy fosters a similar environment through popular education. Popular education is an educational methodology that incorporates lived experiences and critical analysis with a race, class, and gender perspective in order to challenge systems of oppression and bring about social change. UFE supports movements for economic and racial justice by holding popular education trainings where organizers can develop facilitation skills, collective knowledge, relationships, and movement strategies that can be used to strengthen justice efforts nationwide.

Popular education incorporates personal experience into learning environments so that the content is relevant and the knowledge that participants already hold is shared and valued. This is done by sharing stories, looking for patterns, and challenging norms. This is ultimately what my classmates and I were doing as we talked about policy.

My internship at United for a Fair Economy has helped me find clarity. In many ways, it has helped me to build upon the knowledge that I have learned through my studies of labor and employment policy as well as my movement work for economic justice. It has helped me to value long term efforts such as education, healing justice, relationship building, and constant dialog. I am thinking about all of these components as I develop a plan for my thesis, and this understanding and knowledge will only continue to grow as I continue in this work.

-Madeline Bisgyer ’20

If an organization is able to live up to its core values even in the busiest of times, you know they are doing something right. United for a Fair Economy (UFE) is doing something right. I couldn’t think of a softer landing into a 9-5 office job than my last two weeks. I flew into the organization at a busy time: it is the end of the fiscal year and the team had just held a training and retreat in the weeks before Zach, a fellow intern, and I began. Despite the hubbub, the office feels like a community. People care that others take time for themselves, they check in on each other, share stories about life outside the office, and the work that we do is done in collaboration.

This atmosphere is important because United for a Fair Economy is an organization built on a long-term vision of challenging the inequitable concentration of wealth in the US, with an eye to the race, gender, and power dynamics at the core of this inequality. UFE understands that this long-term vision can only be accomplished if the people at the forefront of these issues and movements care for themselves and each other. The organization does this by training community organizers in healing and transformative justice techniques, but it also does this by integrating these practices into the ethos of the organization. For me, this was a breath of fresh air.

Healing justice is a newer addition to the work of UFE, but in September, United for a Fair Economy will be celebrating 25 years of movement-building for economic justice. They do this work through popular economic education, training of movement leaders, creative communications such as infographics and accessible publications on the racial wealth divide, a Responsible Wealth program that mobilizes the wealthy to advocate for economic mobility, and more. I am excited to spend my summer with such a driven, value-based organization that has been successful in turning that vision into tangible skills and action to move efforts forward in a broad, long-listing way.

I was drawn to UFE because of my studies and movement work in the area of economic justice, not only because it aligned with my personal and academic interests, but because the economic analysis and the broader picture have been missing from much of the individual campaign work that I have been involved in. The work that I will be doing this summer will largely be development work: helping to process donations, preparing for the anniversary celebration, and doing grant research, among other things. I am learning a lot about how an organization like UFE functions, which comes with valuable skills that I will take with me into other work environments. By interning at United for a Fair Economy I am able to support the work of an organization that is invaluable in a national effort for economic justice, an organization that I believe in.