By 1976 EFA had 100 members and was holding its general
meetings in a school cafeteria in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The
leadership group, called the Planning Committee, was concerned primarily with
increasing membership, providing benefits, and meeting EFA’s financial needs.
The organization also produced a rudimentary membership directory and a
monthly newsletter.
During the late 1970s EFA continued to grow steadily. It
became clear that a more formal structure was needed. Organizing that
structure took two years. A Structure Committee wrote bylaws and created the
Board of Governors, which was to be headed by two co-executives, one female
and the other male. It also created the positions of secretary and treasurer.
Charles Carmony, an indexer, and Elaine Chubb, a copy editor, were the first
two co-executives.
By holding general meetings in a variety of places, such as
the Carnegie Center, the Women’s City Club, and the Stephen Wise Free
Synagogue, and using a mail drop and answering service in the Flatiron
Building at 175 Fifth Avenue, EFA was able to increase its membership to the
point where enough revenue was available to rent an office. Finding an office
had become a top priority: EFA needed a place to keep membership records and
receive mail.
Our Own Office at Last
In 1979, EFA opened its first office, a small, dark space in
a funky building on East 20th Street in Manhattan. It was furnished with a
combination of luck and charity. "We found some furniture in the office we
moved into, and some came from a vacant office across the hall. The landlord
told us to help ourselves. We also found some of it in the street," says
Rogers. EFA now had somewhere to offer courses, hold Board and committee
meetings, and keep its records.
Within a few years the organization outgrew the 20th Street
office and moved to bigger and brighter quarters—with more reliable heat and
adequate wiring for air conditioning—on East 23rd Street. With the move came a
new computer system and a more professional approach to office management. The
new space was large enough to hold twenty to thirty people comfortably,
allowing EFA to hold courses and affinity group meetings without having to
arrange for outside space. However, general meetings continued to be held in
more ample spaces like the nearby Women’s City Club.
Even though EFA is still using some of the same furniture
that was scrounged for its first office—in particular, a massive mahogany
partners’ desk that is very
hard to move—the association’s current headquarters on West 23rd Street is
indicative of how far it has come. The offices consist of a spacious central
area for general meetings and three smaller rooms housing the business office,
a library, and committee files and mail bins.
Hiring Some Help
In 1985 came the novel (for EFA) idea of hiring an office
manager to answer the phone, deal with the mail, and handle the variety of
chores required by a professional organization. But even more important were
innovations that came from volunteers.
Job Phone
The first, the Job Phone, was modeled after a similar
service run by Washington Independent Writers (WIW). But instead of
charging a percentage from each job a freelancer got from the service, as
WIW and other groups do, EFA decided to charge subscribers a flat,
one-time fee of $10, which can usually be earned back in the first hour of
an assignment. The Job Phone’s founder, Trumbull Rogers, suggested the
idea to the Board of Governors, then set up the service and ran it from
October 1981 until June 1988, by which time there were nearly 400
subscribers. (Today, the annual fee to members is $25, and the
JobList is administered through e-mail.)
Although the availability of work is obviously vital for
freelancers, knowing what the market wants is equally important.
Affinity Groups
Affinity groups for members working in such fields as
medical editing, computers, textbooks, desktop publishing, and public
relations were begun in 1989, when medical writer and former Program
Committee chair Walter Alexander began the first such group, for
nonfiction magazine writers. Meeting about once a month, each affinity
group features speakers discussing topics ranging from what kind of ideas
a magazine might be looking for to the latest computer software for
indexers. The value of having an editor or a director of communications
discuss a company’s editorial needs is inestimable, as is the ability to
question that person more closely after the presentation.
Affinity groups for new freelancers (who may in fact
already have many years of editorial experience) provide the neophyte
independent contractor with the basic skills and knowledge that can make
the difference between success and failure. "I think it’s a really
important part of the experience for a lot of people and it’s unleashed a
lot of creativity. In the past few years, affinity groups have been a
major factor in our growth and provided an impetus for moving to our new
offices," comments Program Committee chair Sheila Buff.
Regional Chapters
Regional chapter development was initiated in 1997 to
enrich the EFA experience for members outside the New York headquarters
area. The first EFA regional chapter, EFA Mid-Hudson Valley in upstate New
York, had its inaugural meeting on March 20, 1999 in Red Hook, NY.
All of the innovations, leadership, and plain hard work that
have kept EFA growing for the last thirty years came from volunteers. Some
freelanced for a while and went back to full-time positions; others continued
freelancing on a permanent basis. As Rogers points out, the freelance life
doesn’t suit everyone: some people prefer the structured environment of an
office, or can’t deal with the uncertainties of freelancing. But whatever
their preference, the freelancers in EFA have always managed to find time for
their organization. "A core group of about fifty or sixty volunteers year
after year were the ones you could count on to really pull the weight and do
the work and keep the organization running and growing."
EFA was a pioneer in organizing freelancers into a network
for mutual support and advancement. Today it is recognized throughout the
publishing industry as the
source for professional editorial assistance. And as editorial
freelancing—indeed, freelancing in many fields of endeavor—becomes more
prevalent, EFA can look forward to an even brighter future.
