Rachel’s Musings

I just came home from the Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp. Unlike the (younger) women in my carpool, I thought it was good but not awesome, which is the word they used. I actually was a bit disappointed. Maybe I led myself expect too much - influenced by words like “empower” and “inspire” on the Boot Camp website. Yes, it was a good resource. Yes, I learned a bit more. But, no, I don’t really feel more inspired. I heard a lot of “build coalitions” today - but nothing about the how. And I think that’s where the crux of the problem is. As Frank J. Omowale Satterwhite put it: The difference between the 1960s and now is that during the 1960s, there were 5 gatherings with 10,000 people; today there are 10,000 gatherings with 5 people. We are spread too thin; we ignore the interconnections. And we are encouraged to do that. Emmett Carson, one of the keynote speakers, suggested that we need to do the thing we do best over and over again and not try to do too many things. But if we find just a little niche, we cannot affect social change on the big scale we need right now. Of course, we are more likely to have a successful nonprofit if we focus on one issue. For example, I was advised to focus on singles by choice to build advocacy amongst singles rather than trying to organize all singles. That is probably a wise approach but it’s only chipping away at one tiny issue. The danger, though, is that while I wait for the inspiration to find that One Big Issue that unites us all, nothing will change. Maybe it really is a matter of chipping away at one issue. Yet, social change occurs when many groups and people come together to move society in one direction: the movement to abolish slavery included very diverse set of people; so did the movement to get women the right to vote. The Wall Street Bail Out was initially defeated in the House because conservative Republicans built a coalition with liberal Democrats. Their reasons were different but their goal was the same.

Another thing a key-note speaker stressed (I can’t remember if it was Carson) was not to run out and start our own nonprofit without looking around if someone is already doing what we want to do. There seem to be a lot of organizations that essentially do the same thing with a slightly different slant (the Center for Inquiry and the American Humanist Association come to mind; or even more similar are the Skeptics Society and CFI). How much more powerful would we be if we’d stop splintering and unite? There’s that coalition building idea again…

So, where does this leave me? I would like to empower singles by choice to come out and let it be known that being single is a valid lifestyle choice that doesn’t say anything about us other than we’re single. That is a topic very close to my heart for very personal reasons. But it is certainly not an overarching issue. Maybe that is okay as long as I don’t focus so much on overcoming internalized singlism that I miss coalition building opportunities. Change starts somewhere. One of the most important things we need to work on is rebuilding community because the need for connections is being subverted into consumerism. Advertisers suggest to us that the need for happiness and fulfillment can be filled by product X. And a community can be the basis for a strong movement that takes the power back from the consumer-side to the citizen-side of our brain. Aside from consumerism, the idea of a nuclear family has contributed to our decrease in connections, to the deterioration of community. By emphasizing other ways of living - including choosing to be single - we can counteract that trend and promote valuing all relationships.

Maybe I got more out of this Boot Camp than I thought. If nothing else, it helped me clarify what I want to advocate for and why. I feel like I need to roll up my sleeves and get started!

I usually just delete emails from authors who contact me with information to add to my website but this book just sounds too great: Princess Bubble. It’s a fairytale where the princess is happily ever after without getting married. Here’s an interview with the author. She wants to encourage her readers to find happiness with or without a man. If you read the book, please let us know how you liked it and if there was any singlism in there. Accidental singlism, rather, because from what it sounds like Princess Bubble did face some stigmatization because she still hadn’t found her prince…

Living in a rather expensive area of the U.S. - the San Francisco Bay Area - I have thought about how nice it would be to share many of my expenses with someone else. Well, some of us might now have a way to do just that without having to commit to an intimate relationship: CoAbode is offering to match up single mothers for co-housing. What a neat idea! And you don’t have to share your living space either, CoAbode also has a Circle of Friends, which is more community building than house-sharing. I will have to check this out!

Well, I signed up… The SF Bay Area group hasn’t been active since 2006. Ugh. Of course, this might not mean much but it could mean that this is yet another idea that has fallen to the wayside of too much to do… The good news is that there are quite a few newly registered single moms, most of them looking for housing.

Hat-tip to Nancy Polikoff.

The Canadian 2006 Census uncovered an interesting phenomenon: Only 17% of same-sex couples took advantage of their legal right to marry (compared to 80% of different-sex couples). Jillian Deri analyzes why. The primary reason, as Nancy Polikoff also pointed out, is that same-sex couples in Canada don’t have to marry to get legal rights. So, there’s no need to marry. The same, though, holds true for different-sex couples, so there must be more. Deri stresses that same-sex couples are part of a movement that had to build alternatives to marriage.

Partly out of necessity and partly out of desire, we have built cultures and communities independent of the straight world, developing and adopting our own creative alternatives: chosen families, open relationships, multi-parent families and domestic partnerships, just to name a few.

Many feel that marriage is an assimilation step, which they want to resist, especially because the feminist critique of marriage is alive and well in Canada.      Continue reading this post » » »

Tired of stats? Yeah, me, too. So let’s take a look at one of the articles I mentioned in the Day 2 post: Marriage: the good, the bad, and the greedy by Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian.

The main hypothesis of their article is that marriage and community are competing for resources and that marriage reduces community involvement. There are a few theories of family and kinship out there that suggest this competition but

research on the costs and benefits of contemporary marriages largely ignores these theoretical suggestions.

So, Gerstel and Sarkisian start to take a look at the data gathered in a couple of surveys (sorry, I had to sneak stats back in…). What did they learn?      Continue reading this post » » »

Oh, oh, I started a trend - posting to the blog something related to singles for every day of singles week - and I am running out of time because I have other things going on.

Well, here are a few more stats from the 2000 Census:

• A little more than a quarter of all families in the U.S. involve no married couple.
• 7% of families are headed by a male householder, 49% of those include own
  children under 18
• 19% of families are headed by a female householder, 59% of those include
  own children under 18

That’s all for today… Sorry, I am tired…

Note:
These stats are now updated with the 2007 American Community Survey.

Also see the Alternatives to Marriage Project press release - lots more facts.