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November, 2005.
Dear Friends,
After seven years, the Self-Education Foundation is shutting down as a grantmaking non-profit organization. Your enthusiasm and support over the years have contributed to an amazing example of young people's activism and SEF has been able to leverage your support by giving over $30,000 in grants to over 80 organizations, sending four local youth leaders to the 2005 INCITE! (Women of Color Against Violence) Conference, and supporting other organizations as a fiscal sponsor.
Why are we shutting down? A couple of reasons. The first is that it was hard work to try to create and fund an organization led entirely by young people. While the philanthropic community talks about wanting to support emerging leaders and new voices, the only grants we received were from other organizations with youth leadership. For example, we got turned down for one grant before even reaching the grantmaking committee, because they didn't see us as having enough resources. That was after we had a demonstrated five year history of grantmaking! To be sure, SEF was a small foundation. We were run almost entirely by volunteers, and our highest total annual budget (including grantmaking) was under $35,000. Even though we did receive nonprofit status, we still functioned much like a grassroots volunteer project. We needed a funding boost to take on more non-profit-style work, and to offer salaries that would free up our time to really do this work... and that funding wasn't there.
Another reason I personally am ready to step out of this work is that I feel I've aged out. I started engaging in education activism at 17 years old. A decade later, my memories of compulsory schooling are fading. I don't have children, so my relationship to schooling isn't kept fresh by daily experiences in or out of the system. Like any self-educator, my passions have shifted and turned and grown over the past ten years. These days I'm attending Goddard's Individualized BA program, which is something of a deschooling way to attend college, and studying Jewish feminist and queer history. I believe in self-education and youth activism, but I don't think I'm currently suited to speak to those communities' needs or act as a "talent scout" in the way I did when we started the organization.
One more reason for the end of SEF is a bit more complicated. With so many crises in the world, it has been difficult to build a movement around a long-term strategy. Our mission, misquoting Paulo Freire, says "We believe that self-education is the practice of freedom." We believe that people who know how to educate themselves are able to gain real information about their world, read between the lines that corporate media and State-directed school systems offer us, and challenge oppressive institutions while building alternatives. With this kind of organizing, it's hard to demonstrate or prove results. People change, are changed by their learning, slowly and deeply. We can track some of the impacts of SEF's work, but many of the real successes and challenges lie in the life stories of individuals and may take decades to manifest. I know that the Self-Education Foundation changed my life. How about you? I'd love to hear peoples' stories and reflections on their own life-learning-paths and the impact of SEF. For those seeking self-education resources, our resources are still available, check them out.
Thanks for your support over the years,
Emily Nepon
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