Bal Harbour, FL
The AFL-CIO Organizing Fund is intended to increase the size and impact of organizing among national and international unions. Program support from the Organizing Department will complement and bolster the organizing activities designated for assistance.
Assistance will be targeted at organizing programs with the greatest strategic importance and with the greatest likelihood of success by focusing on specific companies, industries or geographic areas of strategic importance to the labor movement and with clear growth potential. Priority will be given to large multi-union campaigns that aim to build power in an industry nationally or regionally.
Assistance will be used to stimulate and support organizing at a scale otherwise not possible. Priority will be given to proposals that represent additional spending by unions rather than a substitution of AFL-CIO expenditures for union expenditures. The highest possible level of matching union contributions to AFL-CIO contributions should be achieved, with a goal of unions matching AFL-CIO spending by four to one.
Unions that receive assistance must be willing to share information, techniques, and results with other unions and the AFL-CIO. Applications for assistance will be confidential and there will be no publicity unless it is consistent with the campaign plan.
Campaigns receiving support will be overseen by the Organizing Department, and led by a Campaign Director mutually agreed upon by the AFL-CIO and participating unions. For each supported campaign, the Department will create a steering committee consisting of the Campaign Director, a representative of the AFL-CIO Organizing Department, and a designee from each union, with written understandings of each organization's responsibilities.
The AFL-CIO Organizing Department will work with unions that request assistance to develop campaign proposals that meet the guidelines for support.
Application Guidelines
- Applications for assistance should be directed to the President of the AFL-CIO.
- Each application for funding must include a strategic plan to build sufficient leverage to win recognition and a contract from employers that changes the balance of power in the region or industry. The strategic plan should include:
- A plan to mobilize existing members to strengthen the campaign, bring pressure on the employer, give public visibility to the cause, and tie the organizing effort into bargaining;
- A commitment to contribute the union's best organizing staff to the campaign;
- A description of how the campaign can be used for recruitment and training of new organizing talent, preferably developed with the assistance of the Organizing Institute.
- Each application for funding should include a detailed budget that indicates the commitment by the participating unions.
- Each application should provide a description of the staff structure of the campaign. Where more than one union is participating there should be a unified command structure.
- In order to put the proposal for assistance in the context of the union's overall organizing program each application for assistance should include background on the participating unions' organizing programs, the current organizing budgets, and the results of the most recent year's campaigns.