Nonprofit AF

More classic nonprofit jokes to tell at parties

Posted on April 7, 2014June 14, 2018 by Vu

Hi everyone. The last three posts have dealt with serious topics, so for a change of pace, here are more classic nonprofit jokes. We nonprofit staff are always asked to come to parties. Well, you can be the life of any party with these jokes. Write yours in the comment section.

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A Development Director walks into a bar, orders six shots of tequila, and quickly downs them. “Rough day?” asks the bartender. “Yeah,” the DD responded, “My car got stolen and I walked home to find my house on fire and my dog missing.” “I can see why you downed six shots,” said the bartender. “Oh, no,” said the Development Director, “I can handle those things. Those shots were for the annual gala tomorrow.”

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Why did the founding board member cross the road?

Don’t be ridiculous. A founding board member would never cross a road. Continue reading “More classic nonprofit jokes to tell at parties”

Shadows of the unicorn: How good leaders can negatively affect the world

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Vu

Hi everyone, I came back recharged after spending a week sequestered at the University of Washington for the Nonprofit Executive Leadership Institute (NELI). I learned many things about myself. For example, I tend to cuss way too much when giving toasts (“Hells yeah, this is the best @#$%& leadership program ever; let’s drink to that $#@%, mo-fos!”). This may explain why I don’t get invited to many weddings or kids’ birthday parties.

The five and a half days were intense, 10 to 12 hours each day learning about important concepts like “Are we spending enough time on the balcony, versus the dance floor?” “Are we using both formative as well as summative evaluations?” “Do we have enough jargon in the field, or should we create more?” And “Have we nonprofit leaders let ourselves go in the dress department?” The first three questions depend on your organization, but the answer to the last one is, “No; grey hooded sweaters and jeans are perfectly appropriate attires for nonprofit leaders, provided they have no more than one visible stain each.” I like to think of myself as a less economically comfortable but equally sexy nonprofit version of Mark Zuckerberg.

The week was a wonderful and much-needed time to connect with colleagues, and many of us seriously rethought our basic strategy for solving challenges. My new ED friend, Michelle, for example had the strategy called “Just Punch People in the Throat.”

Before, my default philosophy for handling everything was the “Gotham City Approach,” which was to destroy something so that a better version could form, for example, “What? Our database is down again? We must destroy it so that a new database could rise from the ashes!” or “The marketing committee is not meeting regularly? We must destroy it so that a new marketing team could rise from the ashes!” Or “What, he left his dishes in the sink again?! We must destroy him so that a new staff who could wash the dishes promptly could rise from the ashes!”

Now I’m thinking about Technical versus Adaptive challenges, Moving the Flywheel, the Fox vs. the Hedgehog, the 7-S’s, the 3 C’s, Flipping the Iceberg, Tickling the Badger, and Riding the T-Rex.

OK, I made up the last two.

What I’ve been thinking about most, though, is an essay from Parker Palmer’s book, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. He talks about how most leaders tend to be extroverts, because society thinks those qualities—being able to be sociable, to network, to give speeches—are what make good leaders, and leadership programs orient toward these skills of manipulating the external world. Focusing on shaping the environment around them, leaders rarely spend time looking inward. And why would they? Looking inward is at best not fun, and at worst messy or even painful.

But leaders, by definition, project light and shadows on the world around them, and if they don’t know themselves, they can project way more shadow than they do light. According to Palmer, we tend to project these shadows below. He talks about leaders in the general sense, so I’ll try to relate that to our nonprofit work:

Our identity matters more than others’. In our need to be recognized, to be rewarded, to have a sense of self, we often deprive others. Good leaders understand that “Identity doesn’t depend on titles. It doesn’t depend on degrees. It doesn’t depend on functioning.” At annual dinners, for example, “important” people like politicians sit in the front, close to the stage. But why? Maybe we should save those seats for our students, community members, and key volunteers.
The universe is hostile, and everything is a battle. The work is stressful, and we tend to use metaphors like “continue fighting” and “do or die,” “pull out our big guns,” etc. But this sort of attitude of competition and war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I find that I tend to think that way, especially when there is so much crappiness and unfairness everywhere. But maybe no one is really out to get anyone. Our role as nonprofit professionals is not to fight some vast invisible army bent on evil and injustice, but to restore balance where there is imbalance.
Functional Atheism. This is Palmer’s term for our unconscious belief that if anything good will happen, we ourselves have to be agent. Basically, things will continue to suck unless I am personally going to do something about it. This may explain why we nonprofit types burn out so quickly. We each genuinely believe that we and we alone can save the world, and Smokey the Bear does not help at all with his message that “Only YOU can prevent forest fire!” You know what, there are many people in the world, and Palmer says “we do not have to carry the whole load, that we can be empowered by sharing the load with others, and that sometimes we are even free to lay our part of the load down.” Dude. That’s such a relief. If we can all believe that, maybe we won’t all burn out as fast.
Fear of chaos. Many of us are chaos-tamers. We like this role, bringing order where there is none. We freak out when systems are not in place or they’re not working perfectly. But all sorts of great stuff comes from chaos. It is necessary for creation. And when leaders fear it and not treat it as something necessary and natural to the existence of order, others fear it too and then everyone freaks out about everything.
Denial of death. We think of death as a bad thing, and we try to hold on to life. This may be why we cling on to programs and projects that should have ended or changed a while ago, or why so many of us have issues with founding board members, who refuse to accept that the death of their involvement and influence may be necessary for new life and ideas to form.

All right, that’s a lot to think about. I haven’t thought this much in a long while since the first episode of Sherlock Holmes (the one with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman). I needed to write these lessons down for my own inner processes. Palmer’s point that we all, especially those of us called “leaders,” can vastly influence the world around us for good or for not-so-good is an important one to mull over. We must take time to know ourselves. We in nonprofit are all unicorns, as I wrote in this post for Valentine’s Day, “Nonprofit Professionals, You are Each a Unicorn.” But even as unicorns, as we do our work, we should take time to think about whether we are casting more shadow than light on the world and people around us.

And if we are, we should destroy ourselves, so that better unicorns could rise from the ashes…

The 7-S’s of effective organizations, plus cherry blossoms and existential crises

Posted on March 24, 2014March 24, 2014 by Vu

The dinner went remarkably well, and for the past three days I’ve been feeling a sense of after-event euphoria. That, combined with the contact high from legalized pot in Seattle, has led to one of the best weekends I’ve had in a while. Now I am at a hotel near the University of Washington, sequestered here this entire week for the Nonprofit Executives Leadership Institute (NELI), a time for us nonprofit leaders to take a break from daily work and reflect on things like adaptive leadership, board engagement, strategic thinking, and how ancient and decrepit we are in comparison to the fresh-faced college students here, who are walking around while texting, oblivious to the world around them.

The course is pretty intense, but I might try to use this blog for some reflections on the key concepts that strike me. Apologies in advance if the posts come too often and clog up your inbox.

Today, among several concepts, we learned of the 7-S Model created by McKinsey consultants ad Harvard Business School and Stanford Business school professors. The S’s are:

Strategy (what actions the organization uses to be more awesome than its competitors),

Structure (who reports to whom, how authority is distributed, is it hierarchical, how departments/divisions interact, etc.),

Systems (processes and procedures like a database, budgeting, planning, monitoring, and rules around washing dishes because it’s disgusting when staff leave them in the sink for days!),

Staffing (recruitment, retention, professional development, do we have the right people, and why is Steve still around when doesn’t do any work and never washes his dishes?),

Skills (the organization’s distinct competencies, developed over years, such as “We are the best in the business at teaching youth to make balloon animals”),

Style (the organizational culture, often led by the people at the top. For instance, does the ED have an open-cubicle policy, or does she prefer to close the door in order to weep quietly by herself?).

Shared Values (written and unwritten values to guide the organization, for instance, “focus on quality” or “customer service above all” or “Let’s just try not to screw up.”)

In successful organizations, these 7 S’s are aligned with one another. When there is a disconnect, it could spell trouble for the agency. For instance, if a Shared Value is Innovation, but the organization fails to take risks and never tries anything new, or if the Value is Quality, but the morons who don’t focus on it keep getting promoted, then it may be a serious problem.

It was good fodder for thought. But the thing that really made me think today was something not in class at all. It was the cherry blossoms. UW has a dozen ancient cherry blossom trees in its Quad. Today, the trees are in full bloom, looking breathtakingly magnificent and smelling like Spring, like happiness, like childhood, like general operating funds. Hundreds of people were in the Quad, including a wedding party that used the snowy backdrops for pictures.

Three other EDs and I walked to the Quad and were amazed by the beauty of the cherry blossoms. “The cherry blossoms are a great symbol of nonprofit funding,” I said. Another ED piped in, “Yeah! We wait for them all year. We cultivate them. Then the arrive and they’re gone in days!” Ahahaheheheh, we all laughed. That’s how we EDs laugh. Then we sighed and scoped around for a bar.

The cherry blossoms, of course, are symbolic of both how beautiful life can be and yet how ephemeral it is. I imagine that many of us choose the stressful nonprofit field because unconsciously we know that life is short, and to get a grip on our impending mortality, we strive to do something meaningful with our time. I don’t think this is a bad thing. There are far worse ways to deal with the existential despair we all feel from time to time.

For instance, grabbing some pimply college kid by their hoodie, slapping them around a bit, and screaming, “Stop texting and look at the cherry blossoms! You don’t know how good you have it! Enjoy your youth, you exquisite fool, for soon it will be gone, and you too shall look like I do. Look at me! THIS IS YOUR FUTURE!”

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Discussion questions:

Which S does your organization excel at, and which ones does it suck at?

How much do existential factors influence your work?

How much trouble will I get into if I slap some random college student who is walking and texting?

Help, I suck at time management!

Posted on February 18, 2014February 18, 2014 by Vu

Hi everyone. This is not going to be a high-quality post, because I spent many, many hours this weekend watching House of Cards on Netflix. Darn you, Frank Underwood, you creepy, effective bastard and your ruthlessly efficient wife! Now it is 12:30am and I am only beginning to work on this post, which is really more like a cry for help. I was going to skip writing this week, but I want to set a good example for my son, who is now 10-months-old. “Son,” I told him today while he was snuggled up on my lap, “always be consistent, sometimes even at the cost of quali—what…what is that in your mouth?! Is that a paperclip?! Ack! Where did you get this paperclip?! Spit that out! Spit it out right now! Stop squirming! Open your mouth! No! You can’t eat this paperclip! Stop biting Daddy! OW!”

So let’s talk about time management. We are all incredibly busy people. Helping make the world better takes a lot of time. I am always amazed at the people who can manage their time well. They tend to be morning people, and they wake up at 5am to do some yoga and drink a green smoothie made from wheatgrass and hemp oil or something before heading to the office by 7am and they’re all like “I feel so good because I exercised this morning, and wheatgrass is soooo good for you.” If you are one of these people, I admire and hate you in equal measures.

I am not one of these people. Before the baby came along, I woke up at 9:30am and got to the office at 10am. Then I’d work until whenever, coming home anywhere from 6pm to 10pm. That seems like a solid 8 to 12 hours per day, except those hours are not efficient. Maybe 5 hours was spent doing actual work. The rest would be filled with reading the news, arguing with various people about the Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, and looking at pictures of cute baby animals. Then, at home, feeling awful that I didn’t get much accomplished, I would put in several hours at night—unless TBS has a marathon of The Golden Girls, because, come on, those girls, Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia are hilarious!

Now that the baby is here, time is even scarcer. My emails are going crazy, I have way too many meetings, and I haven’t been sleeping enough. I must get a handle on things. A while ago I wrote about the four different work styles. Some of us are Dragons, some are Unicorns, others are Phoenix, and others are Lion-Turtles. Reading that post again, I realized that they each handle time management differently:

Dragons are probably the best time managers, since they are action-oriented and are hard set on deadlines. They don’t like excuses. If you say you’re going to do something, you better do it, or a Dragon will set your hair on fire. Quality may sometimes be debatable, but stuff will get done.

Phoenixes will commit to just about anything because they get bored easily and need to work on a billion things all at once. But then they get distracted by shiny new projects and drop balls left and right. They are poor time managers but because they’re usually charismatic, the rest of us tend to let it slide.

Lion-Turtles take forever to think about things because they need everything to be absolutely perfect. They are systematic and organized with their time. They, like the Dragons, are deadline-driven and high-quality, but they need plenty of lead time in order to analyze and think about everything.

Unicorns are considerate and want to be helpful, so they’ll often spend time on other people’s projects even at the cost of doing their own work. They put people before time, and they overcommit. So if a coworker is feeling down, they’ll drop their own work to cheer that person up. In other words, they also suck at time management.

Crap, I think I am a Phoenix-Unicorn hybrid, the two worst time-managers among the four styles. Dragons are awesome this area, followed by Lion-Turtles (I think Frank and Claire in House of Cards are these two styles respectively). I had planned to write a post called “10 Time Management Tips for Busy Nonprofit Peeps,” but I don’t think I am qualified to dish advice on something I pretty much suck at.

So, I need your help. What strategies do you use to manage your time? There are tons of time-management tips out there. They all make sense. “Tip 1: Make a To-Do list. Tip 2: Prioritize your list. Tip 3: Do the stuff on your list.” But it’s not that simple! To-do lists work for some people. Plus, we nonprofits are all understaffed, so we default to the Competency Paradox, which states that the more competent you are, the more work you get. Things are getting out of control! It’s 1:45am and the baby wakes up in 5 hours!

Let me know what works for you, and what style you are. You can type it in the comment section. Or if you’re free this week, I’d be glad to get coffee or a drink to talk about it for several hours.

8 Recipes from the Nonprofit Cookbook

Posted on February 10, 2014February 10, 2014 by Vu

Every once a while I get a chance to infiltrate the campus of a major corporation like Microsoft. Usually it’s to beg someone to join our board or to be a sponsor of our annual event (ideally, both). These places are very different from nonprofits, but luckily, I’ve learned to blend in by using the lingo. Walking up to the reception desk, for example, I’ll pretend to say something on the phone like, “Yes, I know you’re cranking against deliverables–we all are–but the adminisphere needs the CRM to be in beta drop and repro by next week or we are all SOL, so tell your PM to get the chips and salsa buttoned down!” Except for my aura of stress and exhaustion, no one suspects that I am from the nonprofit world.

Until I enter the cafeteria. Did you know many big companies have cafeterias? Last month, I visited he one at Microsoft, and it is amazing! They have these cool stations, with different types of hot food. They even have vegetarian/vegan food. All for very reasonable prices. I get so excited seeing all this convenient and affordable food, freshly prepared every day, and it shows. I ran around, expressing delight at everything, embarrassing the host. “Dude, calm down,” he whispered, “It’s like you’ve never seen food before.” The forks and spoons are all compostable, made from potatoes. “This is totally awesome,” I said, chewing on a piece of Panko-crusted tofu, “This tofu tastes like childhood. And this fork is delicious!” Ah, to have hot food prepared for you every day, to eat with edible utensils!

“So,” I said, calming down, “would you consider joining our board?”

It’s disappointing to come back down to earth, where we have no company-sponsored cafeteria, where last week one of the staff interrupted me to ask whether there was any food left over from the meeting the previous night. Let’s face it, we nonprofit folks have different eating habits than the corporate types. First, because we don’t have the same financial resources. Second, we usually also don’t have a lot of time, since we’re always helping people and stuff.

However, that shouldn’t mean that we can’t eat delicious, nutritious, and affordable meals. Also, we don’t like to waste food, and there is always a ton of food left over from various meetings. That’s why, prompted by Director Jen of Virginia, I’ve been thinking of writing a cookbook for nonprofit professionals. I’m working on it between episodes of the Walking Dead, but I wanted to give you a sample of what will be in the book. Here are a few recipes. I also asked friends of NWB’s Facebook page for suggestions.

The ED Ramen Bowl: Prepare one package of ramen. Add some frozen vegetables. Microwave for 5 minutes. Eat while reading financial statements or having a meeting with a staff. One hour later, eat a Cliff Bar while running to a meeting. Serves 1.

Fundraiser Wine Sangria: After every annual event, you will inevitably be left with several bottles of wine that have been partially finished. Don’t dump those down the drain! Combine and pour about 2 bottles’ worth into a punch bowl, add 2 sliced lemons, 2 sliced oranges, 2 shots of brandy or vodka, and 4 cups of leftover club soda or ginger ale or whatever, stir, and chill for a refreshing drink at the debriefing session. Serves 8, or serves 4 twice.

I-Forgot-My-Lunch Pasta: Having dried pasta and jarred spaghetti sauce in the office is a major time and money saver. For a quick meal, add dry pasta to a large microwave-safe glass bowl. Add water to one or two inches above pasta. Microwave for 15 minutes. Go answer some emails. Check for doneness and microwave 3 more minutes as necessary. Carefully drain pasta and return to bowl. Add pasta sauce to your liking, and stir. The hot bowl will heat up the pasta sauce. Serves 1 to 5. If you want more nutrition, add frozen or fresh vegetables and microwave an additional 3 minutes.

Hummus Platter Pizza: Hummus has gotten very popular, and that’s why 95% of nonprofit group meetings will feature this item, along with baby carrots, sugar snap peas, broccoli florets, and pita wedges. You will always have more hummus than people will eat, so why not make a delicious “pizza” after the meeting? Take leftover pita wedges, spread hummus on top, slice and add leftover baby carrots, snap peas, and broccoli, cover with shredded cheese cubes leftover from another meeting, and bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Serves 1 to 5.

Morning-After Breakfast Melt (Contributed by J Eric Smith): “Put the leftovers from last night’s meeting/event snack platters in a bowl. Pretty consistently, the things that no one ever eats off the platter are the pepper jack cheese, the weird salami looking stuff with more white fat than red meat in it, the cauliflower florets, and those strange, flat, brown things in the snack mix that taste like Worcestershire sauce. Heat in microwave until the cheese melts. Eat at desk, with aspirin garnish.” Serves 1 to 8.

The Team-Building Stone Soup: Food being left in the fridge for too long can cause consternation among staff. So every month, make a delicious “minestrone” soup. Add one carton of vegetable stock and one jar of tomato-based pasta sauce to a large pot. Season with salt, pepper, and a tablespoon or dried Italian seasoning (rub between your fingertips as you add for extra flavor). Add a splash of red wine left over from an event and half a cup of small dried pasta. Then have each staff look through the fridge and see what they can contribute to the soup: cheese, tuna salads, that weird kombucha tea with its “mother” floating inside, other soups. Simmer till the pasta is cooked. Not only is this a great way to clean out the fridge, it’s also a wonderful team-building activity. Serves the entire team.

Pastry bread pudding: Breakfast pastries are like government grants. At first they seem like a good idea, but you quickly get sick from how heavy they are. And yet, which nonprofit has not had a box of assorted pastries left over after an early-morning meeting? Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut 8 pastries into small pieces, shove into a baking pan, and drizzle 3 tablespoons melted butter over pieces. In a mixing bowl, whisk 4 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, ½ cup sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Pour over pastries and make sure everything is covered in liquid. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes. Serves 3 to 8.

The Development Director Omelette (Contributed by Rachel Schachter): “Take a dozen eggs out of the fridge. Give your ED a list of donors to call. Wait one week. Throw one egg at him for every donor not called. Go to store. Buy more eggs, repeat as necessary.” (Note from NWB: This is actually not a recipe and is very wasteful of eggs, which should be saved for the real recipes, like the bread pudding above).

I’ll be developing more recipes for the cookbook. Please send in your nonprofit recipes and any suggestions you may have. Remember: Just because we’re in nonprofit, and cranking against deliverables, doesn’t mean we can’t eat well.

Ooh, my ramen is ready!