(Excerpted
in part from a discussion on www.lifering.org)
Letter
from Mark Page, July 15, 1998
Dear Marty,
I
am addressing this letter to you to share with whatever program committee
exists for planning the conference. It seems to me that there are several
issues that we need to address as we move ahead with planning the future of
SOS as an organization and probably need to discuss in some detail before the
conference. …
First
of all, who is meeting in September? That is, what is the SOS that is meeting?
Is it the subcommittee of CSH that is holding a national convention? What will
those of us who congregate represent?
As
I understand it, officially, SOS is a subcommittee of CSH? Are we an
independent group of SOS’ers meeting sort of like an SOS Club? I know this
is addressed in your business meeting notes but we really need some
preliminary discussion on these issues.
We
have talked about "transitioning" the Clearinghouse to
"internal support." Meaning? Do we separate from CSH? Do we commit
to paying Jim Christopher a salary? If we split from CSH do we take our name
with us? What is the status of the name "Secular Organization for
Sobriety?" How do we achieve the status of an autonomous world-wide
organization? Personally I think we need to get out from CSH and become our
own organization.? (I would also appreciate knowing just what the nature of
that relationship is. What does subcommittee of CSH mean. Does is fall under
the corporate umbrella of CSH as a whole?) That decision needs to be made at
this meeting with a plan on how to do it.
There
are also issues of leadership involved in these decisions as well and how to
address the leadership vacuum that exists at the Clearinghouse. You know by
now my favorite question is "What does the Clearinghouse do anyhow?"
This
all relates to larger issues of just who are we? I think one of the problems
we are experiencing with growth is due to the fact that, as an organization,
there is nothing to which one can commit. People in SOS can commit to personal
sobriety but few commit beyond that, partly I think because we don’t give
them anything to which they can commit.. …
The
issue of organizational finances is related to all the above. Personally I
think there are source of money available that we haven’t looked at because
of our relationship with CSH , not the least of which is the contributions
that local meetings could be making to a national office. I know that our
meeting does not want to support a subcommittee of CSH but would send much
more in the way of contributions if it felt the money were going to accomplish
something tangible like supporting a new meeting somewhere, or helping to
publish pamphlets and brochures, etc.
[…]
Best,
Mark Page
Response
by Marty N.
Dear Mark:
Thank you very much for getting the ball rolling
about these issues. I hope what
follows is responsive to your points.
Our current situation: Financial Sponsorship.
Legally, "SOS International Clearinghouse"
is the trade name of a corporation called Secular Organizations for Sobriety,
Inc., which owns the registered federal trademark "Secular Organizations
for Sobriety," or what's left of it (see name change story, below). This
corporation was chartered in 1991 in Buffalo, New York. The incorporators were
Paul Kurtz, Tom Flynn and Jim Christopher.
Kurtz is chairman and Flynn is an officer of CSH
(Council for Secular Humanism, which was then known as CODESH, Council for
Democratic and Secular Humanism; it dropped the "Democratic" in
1997). Jim Christopher is of
course the founder of the SOS
movement. CSH appointed him and
employs him as Executive Director of SOS Inc.
There are two types of nonprofit corporations,
"membership" and "non-membership." SOS Inc. is a
"membership" type. In the membership type of corporation, the
members elect and remove the Board of Directors. The SOS Inc. bylaws specify,
however, that there is only one "member" of the corporation, and
that is CSH. This means that CSH casts the sole vote for the election and
removal of Directors of SOS Inc and the sole vote on any other substantive
issues on which the "membership" can vote. In other words, SOS Inc.
is totally controlled by CSH. This is the legal basis of the statement
appearing on the CSH web site for SOS that
"SOS is a subcommittee of the Council for Secular
Humanism."
The major points of CSH's financial involvement are
these:
·
CSH has since June
1990 paid Jim C.'s salary and health insurance.
Paul Kurtz, chairman of CSH, is Jim's boss.
Jim has indicated that his annual salary is currently around $24,000.
Jim's salary as an employee of CSH is his only source of income. Jim received
advances but has received no royalties from his three books (1988, 1989, 1992)
which are published by Prometheus Press, the CSH book publishing house. Jim's
salary and health insurance make up the largest single item in the annual CSH
budget for SOS.
·
CSH has since
February 1988 published the SOS Newsletter. Jim collects stories and does
initial copy-editing in Los Angeles, then forwards the manuscripts to St.
Louis, Mo. to a layout shop headed by Brent Bailey, a former CSH staffer on
contract with CSH. Bailey produces the complete camera-ready copy and sends it
to Buffalo for printing. Newsletter
circulation is substantially fewer than 1000. The CSH office in Buffalo
handles the mailing and business end of the operation. CSH also publishes or
published the SOS brochures and other literature and produced the SOS video
and audio tapes. CSH owns a bulk mail permit which is used for SOS mailings.
·
CSH has since 1990
provided office space and office supplies for the Clearinghouse. CSH pays the
Clearinghouse rent, utilities, and phones, and provides office supplies and
equipment other than what is donated from other sources.
·
SOS Inc. is a nonprofit corporation and is eligible for tax
exempt donations under Sec. 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. CSH has
since 1990 provided all administrative and financial services for SOS Inc and
for the Clearinghouse. CSH maintains the bank account for SOS Inc. Neither SOS
Inc nor the Clearinghouse have bank accounts in their own names. Every cent
donated to SOS and every cent sent in to pay for the SOS Newsletter or SOS
literature published by CSH goes into the CSH account for SOS. CSH collects,
controls and disburses all funds in the name of SOS. Jim C does not have
signature authority to write checks on the "SOS" account. CSH or its
contractors prepare the SOS Inc tax returns if any and audit the account.
Whatever budgeting and bookkeeping is done for the Clearinghouse, is done by
CSH.
·
CSH has in the past provided meeting space at hotels for SOS
conferences to "piggy-back" on CSH's own conferences, most recently
in Mexico City in 1997.
There
are undoubtedly other CSH involvements as well.
Some other SOS activities, by contrast, have never
received CSH funding and are as completely independent of CSH control as the
local meetings themselves, namely:
·
Tom Shelley's email list.
·
The www.unhooked.com
web site
·
The Sobriety Handbook
·
LifeRing Press
To my knowledge, CSH has never published an
accounting showing how much it has received in donations and literature sales
in the name of SOS, and how much it has spent.
We are told each year that SOS runs a deficit and that CSH is
subsidizing it, and that the deficit must be reduced, or else.
Thinking the unthinkable
For the past several years, CSH has indicated that
its own finances are under stress and that it is reviewing its financial
sponsorship of SOS on an annual basis. Threats
by CSH to withdraw its financial support of SOS have become a recurrent
feature of the relationship. Every
time Paul Kurtz becomes upset with SOS he threatens to take CSH's money and
walk away. In view of these
threats, and on general principles, it would be prudent for us to "think
the unthinkable" and ask what our situation would be in the absence of
the CSH financial sponsorship.
National Leadership and the Clearinghouse
The biggest budget item is full-time paid national
leadership in the person of Jim C. Given
the present very modest size of the SOS organization,
[1]
no
reasonable pass-the-basket donation could replace the CSH salary and health
coverage for Jim C. With the end
of CSH sponsorship, Jim would have to get another job and would have to serve
SOS on a part-time volunteer basis like everyone else.
Jim's editorial work on the quarterly newsletter and his prisoner
outreach project both appear within the range of feasible spare-time
activities and ought to continue.
The immediate impact of autonomy on this very
important individual might be severe. However,
the enormous gratitude that I feel toward Jim as the founder does not alter my
conviction that the impact on the organization as a whole is likely to be
mild.
During my knowledge of it, going back about six
years, the Clearinghouse has not seen itself as playing an active role in the
life of the organization. Open
Letters to the Clearinghouse from SOS convenors go unanswered.
The Clearinghouse has not in years maintained an accurate census of SOS
meetings; its published claims about the number of SOS meetings have been far
from reality. Nor is the Clearinghouse an engine of meeting construction.
For example, the metropolitan area where the Clearinghouse is located,
Los Angeles, has only three SOS meetings, as many as Gray's Harbor,
Washington. Despite adequate
equipment, the Clearinghouse has been incapable of playing any role on the
Internet, the area where SOS has experienced its biggest civilian growth in
the past few years.
The Clearinghouse serves the organization today
principally as a national answering machine.
Many of the other useful functions of a national office are performed
elsewhere:
·
The Clearinghouse
email is actually handled by Tom Shelley in St. Petersburg.
Tom screens it and faxes it to Los Angeles;
·
The administration
of the SOS email list is handled by Tom Shelley in St. Petersburg;
·
The for-real
national nonprison meeting list is actually maintained by me in Oakland;
·
Communication among
SOS convenors is mainly by email, bypassing the Clearinghouse.
·
The place where
current literature is being produced is not CSH or the Clearinghouse but
LifeRing Press;
·
All of the
"live" SOS web sites, beginning with www.unhooked.com,
are operated without Clearinghouse initiative or involvement.
·
The Clearinghouse has taken no initiative in
planning past national retreats in Florida or this national assembly of the
organization in Berkeley. The Clearinghouse has no track record of sponsoring
activities that might result in a democratic process or in greater member
empowerment inside SOS, and there is no reason to believe it will ever do so.
It may be time to rethink
the entire "clearinghouse" concept in favor of something more
constructive and positively service-oriented.
Possibly a series of function-specific service centers in different
regions of the country, reflecting the actual division of labor today, could
better serve our current needs.
A National Literature
Until
LifeRing Press, all of our literature was produced for us by CSH/Codesh. Apart
from the quarterly newsletter, most of this literature is today at least seven
years old. The four existing SOS
brochures are dated and there is a widespread feeling that the organization
deserves and is capable of better.
The
SOS email list, the Sobriety Handbook, LifeRing Press, and the
unhooked.com web site are examples of what can be done by our own part-time
volunteer efforts independently of the Clearinghouse and without CSH
involvement.
Producing SOS literature in house -- doing it
ourselves -- is wholly feasible. It
has resulted in an improvement in the freshness and quality of the product.
We have in LifeRing Press a proven production and distribution house
that can handle our current needs for books, pamphlets and brochures.
Budgeting, Finances and Administration
We have had no experience as an organization with
budgeting, finance and administration. All this has been done "for
us" by our financial sponsor. We
have had no say in how our contributions are spent. The rule has been donation without representation.
Years of effort have gone into attracting foundation
money to SOS, without result. As
a wholly controlled subsidiary of our financial sponsor, we are quite unlikely
ever to attract significant funding from third party foundation donors. They
would give us money only if they would give CSH money, and if they would give
CSH money, CSH would absorb whatever they have to give.
Being a subcommittee is financially a no-win situation.
If we want to attract foundation money for our public-interest
projects, we will need to first become financially independent of CSH.
We have capable financial people in our ranks, but
there is nothing for them to do in SOS besides the Sysiphean labor of raising
money for CSH. Such individuals
can find a far wider range of application for their talents with LifeRing
Press and LifeRing Secular Recovery.
Unless SOS creates meaningful service opportunities for individuals
with professional, technical and managerial capacities, such people will be
lost to the organization.
Support for Promotion and Special Events
Our financial sponsor's assistance with promotion and
special events was very important in the earliest years, but its significance
has declined in the more recent period. The most recent conference that the Clearinghouse sponsored
was held as a "piggy-back" event on a CSH conference in Mexico City
in 1997. It drew only six SOS
attendees. Co-participation with
CSH convention-goers is clearly not a draw for SOS members, and the location
and timing of CSH gatherings do not necessarily reflect SOS members'
priorities.
The current 1999 convention is the first such event,
apart from the Florida retreats, to be organized independently of CSH.
It is also the first to feature a national business meeting and an
attempt to create a national dialogue and a national representative assembly.
This is not a coincidence. CSH
defines us as its subcommittee and subcommittees do not run their own affairs.
The psychological impact of autonomy
The foregoing leads me to the conclusion that
termination of the CSH sponsorship of SOS is not an event that our
organization should fear, but rather anticipate with enthusiasm.
In addition to the financial and organizational
issues I already talked about, the move would be a powerful psychological
stimulus.
Although the newcomer may little know or care whether
there is a national SOS and how it is organized, those members who stick
around long enough to become involved in the organization generally feel
keenly about the issue.
Anyone who shares our basic philosophy and then
becomes aware of our organizational realities is struck by the glaring
discrepancy between them. Our philosophy is "Save Our Selves." But
our reality is that we rely on an outside "savior" to pay our
national spokesperson and our office rent and expenses, manage our budget,
print and distribute most of our literature, and generally determine our
organizational affairs.
Our philosophy is to be free of dependency, but our
national organizational reality is that we are a puppet on strings.
Our philosophy is recovery and self-empowerment, but
our reality is that we have been completely hooked on CSH money and we act as
if we were powerless to stand free.
The association with CSH was highly fruitful at its
inception. Jim Christopher's article in the summer 1985 issue of Free
Inquiry launched the movement out of which this organization arose.
Because of the CSH sponsorship early on, we were able to do many things that
we otherwise could not have done. There is much to be grateful for. However,
with the passage of time things can change. What was beneficial early on can
turn into a hindrance. A pleasant stimulus can turn into a paralyzing
dependency.
More service opportunities
Recently, Mark, you called for a discussion of the
role of service in SOS. I think
that our membership does much less service than we are capable of. In my
opinion, you accurately nailed the principal reason, namely that there are so
relatively few service opportunities outside the sphere of the individual
meeting.
In fact, in our existing national framework, the only
such opportunity is the SOS National Advisory Board, and I can tell you from
experience that the only function of this body is to adorn the letterhead and
dig in one's pocket. I am one of the very few people on this list who are
active as SOS convenors.
The
real service opportunities above the local level that exist today are those we
have created independently on our own initiative: Tom S. and the email list,
you with the convenor page and the convenor list; LifeRing Press, which has
created service opportunities for more than a dozen people and continues to
create others; and then the unhooked.com website, which has created a service
platform for MCH, Scott, Peggy and others who are coming aboard; and then the
new websites that have sprung up: Steve's in Brussels, Jim M's in Florida,
soon Mike's in Nashville, and like that.
Our members want to do service and will do it when
the opportunity is provided. But on the "official" national level,
practically every service that we ought to be doing for ourselves is blocked
by our financial sponsor.
We all ought to be participants in the government of
this organization; that is a kind of service, but it is rendered pointless by
the fact that we are merely a subcommittee.
We all ought to be raising money to support and
expand the organization; that also is a kind of service, but we don't do it
because we have no say in how it is spent.
The very concept that we, the members, ought to own
and control our organization collides head-on with our sponsor's definition of
us as its "subcommittee."
The bottom line is that participation in and service
to an organization are intertwined with the feeling of ownership.
We don't serve much and we don't participate much because we don't own
the organization. We are of it, but it is not of us. We don't even own our
name.
The concept of SOS is a good concept. Our dream is a
good dream. We have a vision of a rejuvenated addiction recovery movement, a
greatly simplified and reformed process of self-help, an environment that is
accessible to far greater numbers, and a self-empowerment approach that will
prove far more effective than the narrow methods that rely on religious or
"spiritual" conversion. We have the long-term potential of becoming
not only an alternative on the margins, but one of the mainstream currents.
But to move forward toward realization of our vision,
we must first stop being anyone's subcommittee. We will need to stand up and
empower ourselves.
Here in September '99, we can begin.
6/16/99
