I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the experiences I've had in the past few years. I've written little about it here, but I've spent much of the last fifteen years as what you could call a serial entrepreneur, but in an unusual way -- starting up nonprofit and advocacy organizations.

In the summer of 1994, while on the road with my new wife as we moved to Boston, I read the Senate Banking Committee’s report on Gulf War illnesses and found myself overcome with anger. Why? Because they lied. The Pentagon had sent various officials to testify before the committee who claimed, bizarrely enough, that Iraq had no chemical weapons anywhere south of Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War.

I knew for a fact that this was a lie. Buried in my bag was a copy of my battalion’s operations log from the 1991 ground war, including the reports that scouts had discovered chemical weapons during one of their missions.

A few days after we arrived in Boston, Veronica laughed at me as I made up fake letterhead on my computer and wrote letters to both Massachusetts senators announcing an “organization” called Gulf War Veterans of Massachusetts and asking for a meeting as soon as possible.

There was no group. We had no money – in fact, I was barely making $10 an hour in temping jobs at that time. I didn’t actually know any other Gulf War veterans in Massachusetts (though I soon would). Gulf War Veterans of Massachusetts was a fiction that I modeled on Paul Sullivan Gulf War Veterans of Georgia, which was only then beginning to take off in a real way.

Despite the lack of funding and resources, and the opposition of a $130 million Pentagon public relations campaign designed to discredit us, we had one critical factor: a core of dedicated activists who were willing to get out there and make things happen. By Memorial Day of 2000, only six years later, I was invited to the White House for the first time to shake hands with President Clinton. I’d testified before Congressional committees and Presidential Advisory Committees, travelled all over the country working with other vets, and our national organization, the National Gulf War Resource Center, had helped push through legislation which not only recognized the undiagnosed illnesses of Gulf War Veterans, but authorized research and medical benefits which would total more than $6 billion. Never once in those six years did the Resource Center have a budget that topped $100,000 a year.

Years before my own arrival in Washington, Bobby Muller and John Terzano, two Vietnam veterans, came to Washington with similar motives and launched a national organization of Vietnam Veterans that eventually created both the Vietnam Veterans of America, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (now known as Veterans for America). They faced similar long odds, lack of resources and opposition from the Pentagon and federal government. By 1997, VVAF’s International Campaign to Ban Landmines won the Nobel Peace Prize and more than 100 nations had signed the treaty they had worked to pass. Today, their organization has programs spanning the globe in both former and currently hot war zones, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

Over the years I’ve read a lot of books about how to run nonprofit organizations, with details on obscure topics – things like major donor cultivation, and how to organize a local event, but I’ve found few resource which really cover the broad nuts and bolts involved with running a tiny, one or two person organization. The big tomes on fundraising, for example, have great advice, especially if you have a development staff of five. But if you are like I was when we ran the Gulf War Resource Center out of my apartment in the early 1990s, you are simultaneously the communications staff, management, and the person who sorts the mail, pays the bills (often out of your own pocket), and stuffs envelopes. It’s a big job, much like launching a small business. And, as statistics will tell us, 4 out of 5 small business fail in the first five years.

So, I got to thinking, maybe I should write that book. Something like "Saving the World on $20 a day!" A guide for really really small (or nonexistent) advocacy organizations on how to deal with the "business" side of getting up and running. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting some of my thoughts here. Please -- send feedback! Let me know what you think of the things I'll be writing about here. And, I'd be interested in what you've experienced too. I'm hoping to collect ideas and thoughts and experiences from other people who've worked in very small advocacy and nonprofit organizations. What worked? What didn't?