Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is

By Jeanne Alexander

The Noe Valley Voice, June 1994

PHONE BILLS and credit card charges—they come due every month without fail.  But if you’re a member of Working Assets Funding Service, you can pay the bills and help change the world at the same time.

Working Assets—a “socially responsi­ble” long-distance telephone provider, credit card company, and travel agency—was co-founded six years ago by a group of ten people headed by 28th Street resi­dent Peter Barnes.

Barnes, who served as the company’s president for six years and is now its political director, built Working Assets around a philosophy that combines daily practicality with visionary idealism.

Every month, the company’s 200,000 members donate 1 percent of their phone bill, 5 cents for every Visa or MasterCard purchase, and 2 percent of the cost of travel tickets, to organizations working for peace and environmental issues, hu­man rights, and economic justice.

Last year they contributed well over $1 million to 36 national and interna­tional nonprofit organizations, ranging from Ancient Forests Alliance and the American Civil Liberties Union to Oxfam America and Youthbuild USA.

“This a million dollars in change,” says Barnes.  “The money starts to add up when lots of people are doing the same thing.  We’ve shown it’s possible to do well and do good at the same time.”

Twenty-eighth Street resident Peter Barnes has come up with a hassle-free way to donate to progressive causes.

 

 

 

 

 

TOPPING the 1993 list were contributions were $46,000 to the International Gay and Lesbian Rights Commission, $50,000 to Greenpeace and $56,000 to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“One of the things we take some pride in is the fact that AT&T used to give Planned Parenthood $50,000 a year until they caved in to pressure from the Chris­tian Action Coalition and pulled the fund­ing.  We’re obviously a much smaller phone company, yet we’ve been able to replace their support and even exceed it,” notes Barnes.

“We make it easy for people to make a difference through transactions that they do every day,” he explains.  “We believe that change occurs one step at a time, and that by being conscious of what means you use to shop or buy an airline ticket or talk on the phone, you can actually make an impact.”

“We’re an unusual phone company,” he adds, “and page one of our phone bill is not your typical phone bill.”  He’s referring to the fact that every Working Assets bill contains summaries of two pending national issues, along with the names and phone numbers of key people to contact.  If members call those key people—usually legislators—on a Monday, “free speech day,” Working Assets pays for the call.  On every other day, the company gives members a 25 percent “citizenship discount.”

Those who prefer to express their opin­ions in writing may check a box authoriz­ing Working Assets to send an already-prepared “citizen letter” to the designated recip­ient, in their name.  The charge—$3 for one letter, $4.50 for two—appears on the next phone bill (printed with soy-based ink on unbleached, recycled paper).

Members most recently spoke out about the proposed ban on automatic assault weapons, as well as such issues as waste dumping near Yellowstone National Park, whale slaughter in Norway, and “Joe Cam­el” cigarette ads that target children.  They also tossed around the idea of boycotting Florida orange juice for as long as Rush Limbaugh remains its spokesperson.

BARNES, who says he inherited his liberal political views from his parents, was born and raised in New York City.  Now a lean 51, he was a freshman at Harvard when John Kennedy was elected president in 1960.  “As the ‘60s went on,” he recalls, “everybody in my generation got a little more radical, including me.”

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in history, he went into journalism “to be near the center of the action and advocate in one way or another for my views.” In his first job as a cub reporter for the Lowell, Mass., Sun, he typed side by side with the paper’s sportswriter, Jack Kerouac.

He later went to work for Newsweek in Washington, D.C., and was transferred to San Francisco in 1968.  “It was the height of all sorts of radical goings-on—People’s Park, Black Panthers, Haight­-Ashbury—and I covered them all.  Those were the good old days,” he says with a grin.

He also did a stint as West Coast cor­respondent for The New Republic (“it was a bit more liberal in those days”), and flirted with politics when he worked in the presi­dential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and Fred Harris (“a little-known populist candidate”) in 1976.

He has lived in Noe Valley since 1969 and in the same house on 28th Street since 1974.  “I love 24th Street—the cafes, the diversity of people, the old houses, the lack of pretension,” he says.  “I just like the neighborhood.”

By the late 1970s, Barnes had come to the conclusion that people needed to take their progressive politics into the busi­ness sector, “because unless we change the way America does business, we’re just going to be whistling in the wind.”

Having no knowledge of how to run a business, he look courses in accounting and management and “after mid-life cri­sis number three or four—I have them every year when things get dull,” he chose to leave journalism in favor of the solar energy busi­ness.  He and five friends then co-founded the Solar Center, a solar energy company that flourished “until the whole solar industry died, thanks to Deukmejian and Reagan,” he says.

Undaunted, however, he got together with a friend, Jerry Dodson, then the presi­dent of Continental Savings Bank, and the two started the Safe Energy Fund—a loan program through Continental Savings that provided property owners with financing to install solar energy systems in their homes (“expensive to put in, but from then on the fuel is free”).  Safe Energy was the forerunner to the Working Assets Money Fund, the mutual fund Barnes co-founded with Dodson and eight others in 1983.

“This was the beginning of what has since become a movement toward social­ly responsible investing,” he says.  In 1986 he added the credit card program, and in 1988 the mutual fund and credit card companies separated and Barnes became president of Working Assets Funding Service.

Last year Working Assets’ members made 126,000 calls and sent 225,000 let­ters to the powers that be.  “It’s a way that busy people can participate in organized political action in less than five minutes a month,” he says, while lamenting that five minutes is about all conscientious citizens have to spare these days.

“You go to work, you come home, you have your family.  You don’t have time to go to meetings, and you don’t know what to do because there’s so much about the world that is distressing.  It’s hard to get organized and focused,” says Barnes, who’s no foreigner to the de­mands of domesticity.  He got married last February, and has a 6-year-old son, Zachary, from a previous relationship.

JUDGING FROM its growth spurt over the past two years, Working Assets has def­initely struck a chord with people trying to tune up their philanthropic activities.  The com­pany’s revenues climbed from $2 million in 1991 to $35 million in 1993.  Last year, Inc. magazine dubbed it one of America’s 500 fastest-growing private companies.

“We’re one of the few businesses in San Francisco that is actually creating new jobs,” says Barnes, noting that Work­ing Assets had hired 15 people in the last three months.  And women, under the leadership of 34-year-old chief executive officer Laura Scher, hold the majority of the sixty staff jobs.

Barnes relinquished his post as presi­dent of Working Assets last winter and moved into the position of political direc­tor.  He’s now concentrating on the com­pany’s next moves, but readily admits that Working Assets’ political stance could limit its potential for growth.

“Obviously, not everybody agrees with our point of view.  The goal is to serve and empower the progressive community,” he says.  “We’d be happy to come up with half a million members who share our values.  A network that size, of like-minded people, could be a rather potent force for change.”