Tag: nonprofit

Not pummeling, not coping

A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs everyday, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it.

Muriel Spark, The Portobello Road in All the Stories of Muriel Spark, page 5, New Directions, 2001.

When I told a friend who was just beginning to dip her toe into the pool of consulting and freelancing that “the full time job is a vestige of the 20th Century,” she laughed out loud. Months later, she approached me and said, “you’re right!”

“About what?” I replied.

After an incredible job that came to a shitty end after the man in charge rubber stamped the sexual harassment of at least two women. My 27 year old self was clear that I could not stick around no matter how incredible the three years prior had been. I refused to speak with or even look at the perpetrator, I was so livid that I’m surprised, in hindsight, that I didn’t agitate or create more unease in the final six months. I had sought to get the harasser fired or disciplined but he got a paltry, bullshit type of give-you-a-pass reprimand and with that, I quit.

The 403b pension, the travel perks, and lest of all, the health insurance, we’re not sufficient to keep me bound to a job or employer. The camaraderie and relationships that were the utmost of that job were transferable and s on begging that I was clear that I could take with me.

Within five years of working full time, I saw that the myth of health insurance coverage either HMO or PPO, did not outweigh the loss of autonomy and therefore the likely loss of my own dignity by clutching to a job that I thought I needed more than I needed my dignity.

That set me on my lucky path to not pummeling computer keyboards and incessant meetings. I loathe the ass-kissing that plagues too many workplaces where people in manager and supervisor positions resort to odd if not petty factors to determine the appropriateness of an employee and their evaluations of an employee.

Once I began freelancing, I began to extract myself from the habits of meeting for sake of making sure that people were working and therefore not goofing off. That didn’t make sense in the early decades of the internet before social media. In my first years freelancing, I was regularly astounded at how much people in FT jobs were posting inane shit on social media throughout their day. And I noted that people in FT jobs were posting so juicy as they didn’t have the autonomy to go for a walk when their morning or afternoon had a short or long window of flexibility.

I have wondered how I would be different if I’d stuck to more full time jobs over the last 2 decades: my physical health, my submission to meetings, if reaching 65 for the sake of retirement would be motivating me to excruciate for 2 decades more.

I’ve been lucky with a heavy dose of being wise.

Discerning diminishment

Multiple occasions this week left me feeling diminished. One type was undervalued, another type was discredited, and another was misunderstood. I’ve been considering how frequently and habitually I diminish others and how often I feel diminished by others for trivial, mundane, ludicrous, judgmental things, over misunderstandings.

I’ve been reading about projection and transference as interpersonal and psychological dynamics between people or within families or workplaces and communities for 14 years. And I wonder how transference undergirded the arbitrary yet painful episodes this week.

I felt sad and angry and disheartened with each. I don’t even know how I’d describe what the accumulated diminishment felt like as I was stuck in mundane in each and wasn’t whirring with analysis seeking greater comprehension or new insight. I was stuck in bothered.

Now, at the cusp of the weekend, I know that there will be plenty more diminishing in the weeks ahead. I may not notice three palpably painful instances as happened this week but I’ll have to figure out what my first reactions are when the diminishment comes.

And, I have to find how to feel feelings of confusing or offense without resorting to diminish others to find how to not collapse the vastness of who others are by belittling them or denigrating their conduct instead noticing my desire to withdraw or move away from without making up a story that justifies aversion and amplifies disgust. To notice my misunderstanding without filling the space inside myself and between me abd them with a few reasons why I’m upset. Instead just feeling upset, without more story, for 15 to 40 seconds. Then to return to my own feet, my own heart rate, my back without observing their shape, stature or feelings.

With this, I may acknowledge them as they are without diminishment.

For what it’s worth: I am aware that diminishment is not [yet!] a word in the dictionary. Though based on some similar words, the concept builds upon the following (italics added) —

  • Diminish, verb: 1) to make or cause to seem smaller, less, less important, etc.; lessen; reduce. 2) [architecture] to give (a column) a form tapering inward from bottom to top. 3) [music] to make (an interval) smaller by a chromatic half step than the corresponding perfect or minor interval. 4) to detract from the authority, honor, stature, or reputation of; disparage.
  • Punishment, noun: 1) the act of punishing. 2) the fact of being punished. 3) a penalty inflicted for an offense, fault, etc. 4) severe handling or treatment.

9 months later, and 10 years on

May 2015. Today is Mike Brown’s 19th birthday. This I learned from the political education and relationships that I have benefitted from through the It Starts Today campaign that ends today on Mike Brown’s birthday. April 2005. Ten years ago, I was invited by John, Courtney, and Jamie to apply to join the Advisory Board at Resource Generation. I did so. I entered my first board meeting at the Walker Center in suburban Boston in a cohort of rookie board members along with Andrew, Ajita, Penny, and Meg. We were some kind of board Fab 5 heading into headwinds of organizational turbulence, interpersonal challenges, and divine breakthroughs that I could hardly fathom when I first walked through that doorway as board member. It was revolutionary to attend meetings where the culture was to introduce yourself by saying four things: Your name. The place you live. Your class identity. Your “PGP” (preferred gender pronoun). I’ve been more schooled in and on gender and sexuality from the colleagues, friends, comrades, and confidantes of RG than any Women & Gender Studies classes could have instilled. At the first RG conference that I attended (circa 2006), multiple RGers did not only talk about their inherited wealth but told stories of how they could trace their white families’ wealth all the way back to slavery. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It rocked my world. And, I was hooked. RG gave me the tools, the political education, the camaraderie to be able to say that “my mom grew up in a working-class, white family” for the first time. I had never understood this, nor seen this facet of my family tree before being immersed in spaces that were explicit and unapologetic about class, classism, capitalism, and class dynamics. Not by being outwardly focused and waxing philosophical about class in society, but by being inwardly focused on families and the belief systems and biases that color my choices. I have been off of the board for just about four years and forever give thanks and have multiple, daily appreciations for the gifts that having been a board member at RG has bestowed upon me. Wisdom, love, patience, courage, trust in others (in their anxieties and their daring feats and so much more), impatience, humility, a yearning to tell stories and write blog posts among them. And ask others questions so they will write their blog posts and tell different versions of their stories. Today, I honor the life, the premature death, and the legacy of Mike Brown and all the people of Ferguson, Missouri. As one more name, place, and episode in the long legacy of lynching and the addiction to violence that discolor the US Constitution. I had not known the name of Ferguson before last summer. The people and popular outrage of Ferguson compelled me to figure out how I could act where I was and with those people that I already knew. To inquire who were the small group of people that I could band together with in such a nauseating, perplexing, horrifying time. If you’ve got some change in your pocket, some discretionary dollars in your bank account then go and invest in Black liberation, in Black leadership, and in Black dignity. By investing in Blacks in America, we are investing in all humankind. Thanks, yall. And, praise Jesus that I’ve learned to see that those who believe in freedom are of all races, of all classes, of all nationalities. And, I will continue to seek out those who believe in freedom and civil disobedience.

Malnourished in the midst of plenty

I watched A Place at the Table a few weeks ago. Yesterday, a friend mentioned the adage that if you are not at the table then you are likely on the menu. In this society of excess, imbalance and unroofed eating habits that is not a desirable place to be.

It occurs to me that the same imbalances ailing food systems affect the nonprofit sector and civic life. Both have a dire unevenness of diet, there is a fixation on certain elements to the detriment of the broader, holistic wellbeing, and we chase some short-term goals that afflict harm when not aligned with long-term health and vitality.

The ills of the corporate good system are reasonably well known. My focus here is how the food system is a metaphor for a cancerous, blighted nonprofit sector.

Inputs: The over-reliance on foundation grants equate to the dominance of carbohydrates in nonprofit’s heavy and heavily imbalanced diet. Instead, of a plethora of sources for nourishing foods, fresh foods rich in vitamins and minerals, most nonprofits depend on a few starches. Grantwriting is essentially highly processed foods composed with strange ingredients, cumbersome production processes and deceptive packaging. What goes into an organization’s coffers is the result of great manipulation resulting in an unnatural shelf life, where the taste, texture and quality are an afterthought.

Energy: This imbalanced diet is exacerbated by where most nonprofits direct our attention. Evaluation is the nonprofit form of cholesterol — it is talked about a lot, with little bearing on overall vitality. In nonprofits, certain information gets monitored and is the basis for evaluation. The fixation with an academic style of evaluation is a distraction from the original factors motivating a small group of people to start an organization. Book knowledge trumps street smarts because there is a logic mind bias against learning from our lived experiences as much as from books. And in a crisis-saddled society, we scurry from one crisis to the next giving ourselves little space or patience to reflect on how we use our energies.

A Place at the Table summarized the profound changes to the food system that have occurred in the last 30 years. Hunger and food insecurity have skyrocketed in spite of the proliferation of food pantries, soup kitchens and emergency food providers, which numbered [a few dozen?] in the early 1980s and exceed [40,000?] today.

The most insidious manifestation of the food/nonprofit mimicry is our habitual concern with problem diagnosis, rather than problem solving. Instead of pursuing solutions, the sector is mired in recording social dysfunction. This mirrors the national attention on illness and manifestations of physical health, environmental degradation and how sick, obese, diabetic, cancerous we are.

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Just as grassroots alternatives to the traditional food system of the late 20th Century exist, alternatives to a grant-heavy, evaluation-fixated and problem-saddled social profit paradigm are expanding.

Alternatives for the here and now begin with:

  • an asset-based approach (rather than problem-based)
  • recognizing access and privileges that each of us have (instead of running from or denying them)
  • embracing the many identities and multiple issues alive in each of us (instead of the myths that there is most important issue or single most affected community)
  • embarking on radical changes that occur at many levels simultaneously (rather than the faulty and imposed notion that change happens in an incremental, sequential fashion)
  • aligning efforts across different groups, populations and industries (rather than perpetuating silos)
  • recognizing that faith, people power and humility are as important, if not more so, than money
  • yet making tremendous financial investments in experiments to spawn wholly new approaches, ecosystems, paradigms, and ways of living, working and being
  • harnessing the lived experience of our bodies and the wisdom of the Earth (instead of preferring the logic-mind).

    • The choice is ours. To continue on the same old, same old do loop. Or we can embark on the paths less traveled.

on cholesterol rather than general

board service: misunderstood, vitally important

I saw this article, Three Myths About Joining a Board, written by a founder of Taproot Foundation on LinkedIn earlier this week.

Taproot has an intriguing idea, but in a nation of 300 million across 50 states, it has big name recognition with sparse presence outside a few select tier one cities. The needs for more spaces that convene people who want to give their time on a nonprofit board and the people who need more board members are tremendous.

It is a shorter complement to writing that I did last month called the why board service matters.

My original writing is below.
—–

Why Board Service Matters

At 26 years of age, I joined a nonprofit board for the first time. I was honored to be asked, because I had never done so and i was so young. It was a national organization focusing on youth leadership how to harness our social capital and finances to contribute to social movements. Youth, in this case, being young adults between the ages of 18-35. It was a commitment that changed my life in ways that i could never have fathomed when I signed up in the spring of 2005.
Over the course of six years, i gained life changing experiences by walking through that doorway. I tumbled into a rabbit hole once inside. What began as stumbling by learning-by-doing, proceeded to be a full-fledged rabbit hole within 15 months.

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In a little bit of math multiplication, I have served as a board member for 10.75 years over 7.5 years. I have been on two simultaneously for a few of those years. As an equation, that looks like: 6.5 + 4.25 + .5 = 10.75
Within two years, I anticipate that 10.75 will become 14.25 (i.e. 10.75 + 2 + 1.5). A numerical feat of years served over a nine year span. Gosh, I love math. How math defines, as well as provides a totally different paradigm of learning.
****

The three nonprofit boards that I have been on have been the best professional development that I have had in the 12 years of my working life. That is a criticism of a nonprofit sector that has done a dismal job of investing in its most important resource, the people who make up the workforce.
My economist self notes how the nonprofit labor market has scrounged, scrimped and neglected workers of all ages. At the organizations with sizable budgets, ageism has skewed professional development dollars to bosses in middle management and the top jobs. Oddly, the people who have received the highest salaries have been the recipients of the largest professional development line items, too. That is a failure of budgeting, which is a failure in part due to decisions made and approved by board leadership.
In spite of these systemic failings of the nonprofit industry’s inability to invest in people, I have found that being on boards is the spoon, pitcher, ice cubes and lemonade stand in a work life in a sector that had given me a bounty of lemons.
Board service has been my best professional development because of what I experienced. As a board member, I have had opportunities to pursue, challenges to learn, and crunch time to attempt, in ways that were unavailable to me through a day job or other voluntary roles. This has been especially true in the nonprofit sector, where there is a culture that tells 20- or early 30-somethings that we have to pay our dues before it is our time. This cultural idiocy is what’s deflated young people’s energy along with their fresh or innovative perspectives. Our cultural norms have become so skewed that people bristling with energy and lifeforce frequently get called “hyperactive” and we’ve established norms prescribing drugs as an attempt to tame or tamper young people who go against the grain.
I’ve had multiple instances in my work life where i’ve gone against the grain, and being on boards has provided me with a safety net of peers to catch me, support me and who I still get to collaborate with regardless of the tumultuous changes in my employment. Board relationships offer alternative bonds for me as a social being, replacing coworkers when I transitioned from one job to another. There have been select work colleagues that I have maintained connection to, because I have found people that I choose to forge a voluntary bond with as a board member, rather than people that I had been obligated to be around due to day jobs.
Now-a-days, i choose to work in jobs where I am surrounded by people that i want to be around. That is a result of being more deliberate of the choices that I make, and realizing that i have the ability to choose much more than i used to believe as I could not consciously see how other subconscious choices that I had made were limiting me. That those trappings are most often self-imposed by presuming that there is no other option, when in fact there is.
As a result, I see that i have opted to work in a field that compensates me with less money on an annual basis than if i worked in another industry where i might earn more money, but also have less freedom of my time.
Furthermore, serving as a board member required that I grapple with personnel matters, understand more about benefits packages and numerous other human resources (HR) matters. Boards require taking action, in a sector that has spent inordinate amounts of time dithering, processing, doubting, analyzing, talking about and navel gazing. If a board does not act and make decisions, then an organization will falter and cease to matter as a living organism. A living, thriving, healthy, changing, adapting organization requires that decisions be made.
One reason that I credit board service with being the best investment that I have made is that i may have left the sector otherwise. The triple headed hydra of inaction, inattention and fear that causes paralysis squashes life. I’ve encountered a lot of these three bickering heads over the last 13 years in the US.
In most organizational budgets, the travel, meals and other costs associated with holding board meetings, especially for national organizations composed of people who live in different states, would be listed under board, meetings or administration. It could not be listed under professional development — although that is what it has been for me.
I distill the significant attributes of being a nonprofit board member as:

  1. being visionary, then getting out of the way of staff and volunteers who need a board to hold the larger, the bigger, the abstract.
  2. fostering trust, as the highest functioning boards are those with deep levels of trust, mutuality and interdependence.
  3. grappling with the comings + goings of money, and being more responsible for the financing side, than the functioning side.
  4. brokering relationships with a wider cross-section of people.
  5. gaining a priceless return on investment, in a practice space where learning is far greater than compensation.
  6. being a generalist, by learning that it is not just $$ + access, not just organizing or programs.
  7. moving into positions of power, by setting policies, and practicing governance and democracy.

Here are more remarks on each of these seven attributes:

1: BEING VISIONARY, THEN GETTING OUT OF THE WAY
I was astonished when I realized that being a board member meant that I was supposed to think about the big picture and then leave it to others to implement and proceed. One of the joys of board service is meeting a few times — say two or three times — a year requires that there are 4 to 6 months between reconvening. As a result, others have to make things happen in that time.
At 25 years old, i realized how i was wanted for my cognitive abilities such as my ability to listen, ask questions and make decisions with the small group of people who i was on the board with. Over the last decade, I have learned that this dynamic works best when the board and staff act as teammates on the field, with distinct roles. By having a rare presence, boards have felt like special teams in football games — that can either win or lose games, and have a tremendous effect on position and strategy for all of the plays in between.

2: FOSTERING TRUST
A board is a different sort of entity. People serve voluntarily, there is a legal obligation as the entity responsible for oversight and legal responsibilities. Furthermore, there is a type of trust fostered when people choose to make time in their lives to attend meetings and participate in organization activities.
Board functionality requires that people cultivate individual relationships with one another. To not do so, is acting as if there is no shared interest or mutual benefit to relating to one another. As large and expansive people, we have many interests that go beyond the purview of the nonprofit. There is a chance to share passions, hobbies, learning topics or phases of life with the comrades and friends that we

3: GRAPPLING WITH THE COMINGS + GOINGS OF MONEY
I focused on systems issues in my first year as a board member. But, it was a luxury because there was a necessity to have the income exceed expenses each year. We live in capitalism, after all. Being a diligent board member means that there is a vision of how to raise (or earn) the money that will keep an organization running, people paid, and pay for the expenses and bills needed to operate.

4: RETURN IS PRICELESS
Great board experiences elicit emotions of pride and affirmation, for me. Similar to what i see parents exude with their children whether at a science fair, musical performance . It is also the tiny, private moments of tying a shoelace or pronouncing syllables and sounds as we learn how to read, and the experience of wonder and amazement in the presence of moonlight or the natural world.
These are sensations that have no money value. Feelings, rather than dollars. This is why the liberating, heart-opening instances as a board member can feel like.

5: BECOMING A GENERALIST
I have seen many people step into nonprofit board roles hoping to do more of the programs and activities for the community organizations that they love. Similarly, I have seen countless people have the notion that a board member has to be a lawyer, banker or someone else who has a rolodex or cell phone full of the rich. That is not the case for many organizations, particularly those with budgets under $1M. Nor is serving on a board as simple as becoming a hyper-volunteer.

Instead, it is a combination of program and activities, noting the short-term while being mindful of the mid-range and long-term, it is an exercise in systems thinking as well as being able to hold complexity. And find a way to not be stuck, but be able to move, adapt, and be fluid.

Again, I get to feed my inner economist by nerding out over human resources, employment policies such as sabbatical policies and cash-out limits for departing employees that have not immersed my paid work. It has been through board roles that i have seen, learned and practiced the variety of ways to present cash flow, financial statements and budgets that have greatly improved how i work in my day job.

6: BROKERING RELATIONSHIPS WITH A WIDER CROSS-SECTION OF PEOPLE
In high school biology, I learned that evolution has happened as generations of plants and animals change by introducing new chromosones and traits rather than keeping a pure. I believe that boards full of miscegenating ideas, miscegenating people and miscegenating practices are more likely to evolve in order to live.
Boards that relied overwhelmingly on a single type are exposed to environmental threats that can cause the entire organism to perish. That can be the case if a board of directors consists entirely of organizers or social workers, overwhelmingly men, or if the board members depend on a single source to bring most of the information about the health and vitality of an organization. The prevalence of some characteristics bodes poorly for experimentation in the short term, as well as vitality in the long-term.

On three boards, I have met and collaborated with parents, financial advisors, designers, lawyers, anthropologists, doulas, entrepreneurs, artists, journalists, and researchers. Having such a broad array of peers has provided me with instruction, insight and connection to a much larger range of professions and areas of knowledge than i have had elsewhere.

7: RISING TO NEW LEVELS OF POWER
Characteristics of power can include responsibility, privilege, force, strength, texture. By the end of my first board meeting, my notions of what it meant to be a nonprofit staff member were radically altered. In the first two-day weekend meeting, I witnessed a board member reflexively oppose the request from a long-serving, long-standing and respected staff person just because it was a new way of operating. Furthermore, he was in a outdated mindset resisting the reality that the workplace was increasingly virtual and distributed. He wanted to resist a staff request for her work to align with changes in her work life. I appreciated the opportunity to see how important investing in people is, so that I did not defer to an elder but spoke clearly to support such a request. It was the first in hundreds of moments where behaviors and attitudes can be either life-giving or -depleting.

In a different year, I have been on boards when we established policies limiting how much vacation could be carried over from one year to the next after seeing the severe impacts that employee choices have made on an organization’s finances, as well as when designing sabbatical policies for workers who pass a five-year mark. Establishing policies have been instrumental about setting some buliding blocks in place for hte future. Choices that alleviate future generations of board members from being blindsided by entities with outdated ideas around comp time that adversely affect the organization in the long run, while exacerbating the behaviors of workaholics.

Establishing policies is vital to build a stronger foundation and establish core systems that support the vitality and expansion of a living, breathing being. For me, considering what the lingering impacts of today’s decisions has been a stepping stone to wielding power and carrying the responsibilities of governance. Such practice and learning are a training ground for people in civil society who will rise into roles of governance within our lifetimes.

poetry in a mission statement?

a friend is launching a new nonprofit. some guidance that i gleaned online:

1. it can’t be said much more simply than this:

A Mission Statement should be a one-sentence, clear, concise statement that says who the agency is (the name, that it is a nonprofit, and what type of agency it is), what it does, for whom and where. Period.

2. to distinguish between a Mission Statement and a Vision Statement:

Vision
What are the values or beliefs that inform your work?
What would you ultimately hope to accomplish as a result of your efforts?

Mission
How do you plan to work toward this broad vision? For whose specific benefit does the organization exist?

    3. then to think of a mission statement as poetry:

    On a concrete level, how can we apply the craftsmanship of poetry to mission statements? Think carefully about each word of your mission statement, about the range of denotations and connotations it carries, and about the effect it will have on readers. As you write or revise, consider your mission statement a poem, that is, a carefully-worded piece in which every syllable holds meaning. Interpreting an existing mission statement as a poem can provide meaningful insight into your organization’s purpose and approach.

    On a “positioning statement” that is speaks to the value of your nonprofit:

    a one to three (only if they’re short) sentence statement that conveys what your org does for whom to uniquely solve an urgent need—the  value that your org delivers. Here’s a list of key components your positioning statement should  convey:

    • Who you are
    • What business you’re in
    • For whom (what people do you serve)
    • What’s needed by the market you serve
    • What’s different about how you do your work
    • What unique benefit is derived from your programs, services and/or products?