6 - Expanding the Movement from Below

Summary

Chapter 6 argues that bureaucrats helped new civic AIDS organizations develop the capacity and the incentives for political advocacy not through their direct efforts but by supporting bottom-up efforts at coalition-building. The older generation of pre-existing AIDS advocacy groups imbued the new generation of civic AIDS organizations with the capacity and the incentives for advocacy by building out the structure of the AIDS movement into a national federation of independent advocacy organization, and by engaging new grassroots AIDS organizations to participate in it. Yet federal bureaucrats also played an important role by helping to foster such coalition-building--providing them with the financial resources that allowed them to do so. By paying for space, food, lodging, and transportation, national bureaucrats provided critical assistance in helping AIDS associations overcome otherwise insurmountable costs to the development of formal, institutionalized structures for nationwide coordination.