The Canvass! Activist Dogwalker Edition.
The Canvass is a quick weekly roundup of jobs, ideas, campaigns and web-redesigns-gone-wrong from the non-profit/activist world. A love-letter to beleaguered non-profit crusaders, the Canvass will also feature gossip about international aid worker debauchery and blind items about D-list celebrities who drink too much at benefits.
Well this is pretty wild. Of all the non-profits I’ve come across, “activist dogwalking” is a first. They aren’t new - here is a New York Times profile from 2003 - but they’re hiring: the “Dogwalking for Rainforests Petservice Collective” is looking urgently for an activist dogwalker. Profits are 70/30 walker, with the 30 going to support a range of social justice groups.
Pros? It’s a logical extension of the doing-right by doing-well model. We should have progressive, politically-responsible options (Credo Mobile for phones, Better World Club, branding notwithstanding, for car service, etc.) and dog-walking is no different. I bet it’s a great way to meet like-minded people, and if the pay is good than it beats the hell out of canvassing. Why flack on a corner for the Human Rights Campaign when you can walk an awesome puppy?
Cons? Misspelling Gramercy; also the terrifying implications of these two sentences: “Carry a mug with you for your drink or what have you. Do not use any clients purchased baggies for dog poop.”
PinkoBen was in a “collective” once, in Philadelphia, so I cringe at the word. My experience involved some racy low-fi video, an open letter, two community meetings, failure to achieve consensus, a Western Massachusetts smackdown and much “calling out.” Eventually a team of radical lesbian lawyers had to sort it all out. Still, “Dogwalkers for Rainforests” seems like a worthy enterprise. If we could afford to (a) have a dog, and (b) live in lower Manhattan, than Dogwalkers for Rainforests could totally walk that dog and scoop its feces into a coffee mug and then donate it for social ju