• Home
  • About
  • BOOK!!
  • Contact/FAQ
  • Shop
  • Speaking
  • Support NAF!
  • Advertise
  • Report Crappy Funders

Nonprofit AF

Exploring the fun and frustrations of nonprofit work

NAF logo
NAF logo
  • Home
  • About
  • BOOK!!
  • Contact/FAQ
  • Shop
  • Speaking
  • Support NAF!
  • Advertise
  • Report Crappy Funders

Cultural Competency

Are you or your org guilty of Trickle-Down Community Engagement?

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Vu

plants-906447_640pdIn Seattle, if you’re a person of color and you walk down a dark alley late at night and you feel like you’re being followed, it’s probably someone trying to do some community engagement: “Psst…hey buddy—Go Hawks!—you want to attend a summit? It’s about economic inequity. We need your voice.” “Daddy, I’m scared!” “Stay calm, Timmy; don’t look him in the eye.” “Come on, help a guy out! Here, you each get some compostable sticky dots to vote on our top three priorities! You can vote on different priorities, or, if you like, you put more than one dot on—” “Run, Timmy!”

This is why you should never take your kid down a dark alley in Seattle.

A while ago I was talking to a friend (another Executive Director, since all my regular friends have abandoned me because I make jokes about compostable sticky dots), and he said, “Have you noticed that everyone is getting paid to engage us communities of color except us communities of color?”

Sigh. Yes, I have noticed. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and have come up with a term to describe it: Trickle-Down Community Engagement (TDCE). This is when we bypass the people who are most affected by issues, engage and fund larger organizations to tackle these issues, and hope that miraculously the people most affected will help out in the effort, usually for free.Continue reading →

Posted in Community Engagement, Cultural Competency, Funder Relations, nonprofit field 40 Comments

The Equity of Risk and Failure

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Vu

equityHi everyone. It’s Thanksgiving this week, and I usually spend a post listing things for which I am thankful—a meaningful job, awesome colleagues, loving family, The Walking Dead, etc.—but something has been weighing on my mind. Equity. It’s like coconut water; everyone’s drinking it lately (See “Is Equity the new coconut water?”). Diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency meanwhile are like hummus: you can’t attend a meeting without at least one clear plastic container of it.

The problem with Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Here’s the thing: The people of color that I’ve been talking to are getting kind of sick of these terms. We love them, but the dissonance between their usage and actual practice is like getting poked in the eye on a daily basis. Case in point, at panel I was on recently a colleague of color told me that someone contacted her, saying, “Can you help us spread the word about this new job position? We want to diversify our pool of candidates.”

My friend said, “I wanted to ask, Are you trying to just diversify your POOL of candidate, or ACTUAL hires?” We both sighed; thankfully, the wine was plentiful that evening.Continue reading →

Posted in Capacity Building, Community Engagement, Cultural Competency, Funder Relations, nonprofit field 22 Comments

Is equity the new coconut water?

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Vu

coconut-933310_960_720In the past couple of years we have seen the meteoric rise in the consumption of coconut water. Cold, refreshing coconut water. Drinking some is like being punched in the mouth by a tropical breeze. Coconut water is now everywhere. People drink it before and after working out. It’s added to everything, such as fancy smoothies made with flaxseed and goji berries. It’s flavored with mango and pineapple juice. Coconut water is delicious. And it’s excellent for hangovers. Not that I would know from experience or anything.

Recently we have also seen the rise in “equity.” I don’t know about you, but in Seattle, the term “equity” has become ubiquitous. You can’t walk down the street without hearing someone saying something like, “Equity. Equity, equity, equity. Blah blah community engagement Seahawks equity.” Funders are incorporating the terminology and concepts of equity more into their work. People are having summits on it. Strategic plans incorporate it. It’s included now in many organizations’ set of basic values. “Equity” will become one of the top baby girls’ names soon, believe you me (If I had three daughters, I would name them Equity, Charity, and General Operating Funds).Continue reading →

Posted in Community Engagement, Cultural Competency, nonprofit field 20 Comments

Icebreakers, do’s and don’ts, and some that don’t suck

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Vu

A while ago I wrote a post describing what bad-ass mythical creatures you are. Each creature has different qualities and preferences. Whether you like icebreakers may depend on what creature you are. Pegacorns, for example, love harmony and crap like that, so they tend to like them. Phoenixes are always distracted and have unlimited energy, so they like them too. Griffins love processes and don’t want to share much about themselves, so they’re leery of icebreakers. And dragons, who are action-oriented, would rather eat one of their arms than share their feelings in a wishy-washy icebreaker.

Whether we like them or not, icebreaking activities can play important roles, such as lightening the mood, building energy, improving team dynamics, and distracting people from the fact that the snacks are skimpy and probably left over from another meeting (why is the hummus so crusty?). Yet so many suck, or are deployed wrong and end up wasting people’s time or embarrassing them. Find-Someone-Who, for example. Participants are given a sheet of paper and are asked to go around the room finding people who speak four languages, has a pet chihuahua, is gluten-free, makes soap from bacon grease, or whatever. Problem is, by the end of the activity, no one remembers a single fact about anyone, and obsessive people feel resentful that they didn’t get enough time to complete their checklist. Meanwhile, “Two Truths and a Lie” should be renamed “Two Hours and a Half” because that’s how long it usually takes to get through everyone’s truths and lies.Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Competency, nonprofit field, Unicorns 23 Comments

Nonprofit with Balls’s 100th post! Let’s celebrate by going home early.

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Vu

unicorn sunsetHi everyone. This is Nonprofit With Ball’s historic 100th post. It is a momentous occasion. When I was a little boy growing up in a small village up in the mountains of Vietnam, my father said to me, “Son, we may be poor, but that does not mean we can’t accomplish great things. You are the smartest, most-talented, and, in certain very dim lighting, best-looking kid in our family. Bring honor to our name.” Well, look dad, I wrote 100 blog posts about nonprofits, many mentioning unicorns! I think our ancestors would be proud. They’re probably tweeting about it right now.

For this 100th post, I’m going to provide excerpts of some of my favorite early posts, the ones that you probably haven’t read because they’re so old. If this sounds very lazy, like those TV shows that do montages as a special episode (“Instead of writing a real episode, let’s spend 10 minutes looking at all the times that Joey said ‘How you doin’?’ and all the times that Ross acts like a completely unlikeable character”) you are right. But hey, this only happens every 100th blog posts; we’ll be back next week with new content. Here, read these posts below if you haven’t. And I think it’s only appropriate that we all go home early today in celebration.Continue reading →

Posted in Capacity Building, Community Engagement, Cultural Competency, Donor Relations, ED Life, Funder Relations, Fundraising, Grantwriting, leadership, nonprofit field, Random stuff, Zombies 2 Comments

  • Previous
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Page 6
  • Page 7
  • Page 8
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 10
  • Next

Primary Sidebar

Grant Station Ad

Support NAF
FOLLOW NAF BY EMAIL. MAKE TUESDAYS SUCK LESS!
Enter your email address below and get notice of hilarious new posts each Tuesday morning. Unsubscribe at any time.

Random Posts

  • Why communities of color are getting frustrated with Collective Impact
  • Hey progressives, can we stop using the tools of social justice to tear one another down?
  • “I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas” and other nonprofit holiday songs
  • Hyper-independence as a trauma response, and how it manifests in nonprofit leaders
  • Nonprofit and philanthropy and our white moderate tendency to obey tyranny in advance

Share NAF

FOLLOW NAF BY EMAIL. MAKE TUESDAYS SUCK LESS!

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 51.5K other subscribers

Recent Posts

  • Funders, please stop trying to be unique snowflakes
  • How to stay motivated when everything is on fire and you look and feel like crap
  • Instructions on not giving up: Let’s conserve our energy for the battles ahead
  • Brutally honest answers to 15 pointless questions our sector keeps asking itself
  • The Tide is Surging: The No King Protests and the Beginning of the End of Fascism in the US

Categories

  • AI (1)
  • Board Relations (32)
  • Capacity Building (31)
  • Community Engagement (79)
  • Community organizing (10)
  • Cultural Competency (46)
  • Data (7)
  • Donor Relations (48)
  • ED Life (86)
  • Finance (34)
  • Funder Relations (179)
  • funding (17)
  • Fundraising (212)
  • Grantwriting (119)
  • Hiring (6)
  • Humor (59)
  • leadership (86)
  • Marketing (6)
  • nonprofit (9)
  • nonprofit field (311)
  • Office Culture (82)
  • Personal (36)
  • philanthropy (35)
  • Policy and Advocacy (21)
  • Race, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (119)
  • Random stuff (89)
  • self-care (26)
  • Special Events (25)
  • Staff Dynamics (30)
  • Uncategorized (40)
  • Unicorns (62)
  • US Culture (17)
  • volunteers (4)
  • Work-Life Balance (31)
  • Writing (1)
  • Zombies (14)

Archives

Tags

board board of directors capacity building collective impact communities of color community-centric fundraising community engagement cultural competency diversity donors equity feedback foundations funders funding funding dynamics fundraising game of thrones grantmaking grants grantwriting hiring hummus humor inclusion leadership nonprofit nonprofit funding nonprofit humor overhead oxford comma philanthropy power dynamics race restricted funding salary Seahawks self-care social justice special events sustainability taxes Thanksgiving unicorn unicorns

© Vu Le NWB Consulting
Design: SN