Nonprofit AF

Exploring the fun and frustrations of nonprofit work

NAF logo
NAF logo

Personal

It’s OK to feel like crap right now

Posted on by

[Image description: A person, wearing a face mask, sitting on a bench, next to a large window. It looks like they may be on a train.The window overlooks some buildings and mountains in the distance. Image by wphoto on Pixabay.com]

Hi everyone, before I get into this week’s topic, thank you to the 2,700+ colleagues who attended last week’s Community-Centric Fundraising launch event, “Let’s Make Fundraising Less Racist!” The excitement was so much that we crashed several websites. If you missed it, here’s the recording. And check out the CCF website, communitycentricfundraising.org. Meanwhile, this week on 7/24 at 12:30pm Pacific Time we have another free event, Data Says: What BIPOC Fundraisers Have Known for Years, where evaluator and CCF leadership team member Anna Rebecca Lopez will present the results of the Fundraising Perception Survey, which over 2,000 people took. See you there.

***

I was looking at my list of topics to write about, and honestly, this week I’m just really tired. I know many of you are too. It has been a horrible year. And now Congressman John Lewis just died, another light gone when the night seems interminable and our democracy so tenuous. I don’t know how much more we can all handle. At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote “Things are not normal. It’s OK to not be OK.” I did not anticipate, though, how much worse it would get for the world, for our sector, for all of us.

Continue reading →

Things are not normal. It’s OK to not be OK.

Posted on by

[Image description: A cute light-brown bulldog, lying on the ground, facing the camera, looking sad. This bulldog is all of us right now. Pixabay.com]

Hi everyone. It has been a long couple of weeks. I don’t think many of us have experienced anything like this before. We’ve weathered awful things as a society, but this is something else, a threat not just to our physical health, but our livelihoods, our way of being, our groundedness, and our optimism for the future. It even threatens the one thing we could always count on during these challenging times: Our proximity to one another and our sense of community.

I have been trying to breathe and remain calm, not add to the chaos, and be helpful where I can. But it’s been tricky. Schools here in Seattle have been out. The days blend into one another as my partner and I try to figure out how to homeschool our six-and-four-year-olds. Or at least keep them occupied enough that they don’t burn the house down. They seem to be fine at this moment, but I know that as this progresses, it will hit them that things are not normal, that everything is out of balance.

Continue reading →

Thankful for nonprofits—as vital, invisible, and underappreciated as air

Posted on by

[Image description: Golden sunlight streaming through a forest of pine trees. Pixabay.com. By the way, someone told me they didn’t understand why I write these image descriptions. It is not just for fun. Image descriptions help people who have vision impairment. Read more here.]

Hi everyone. This week is Thanksgiving in the US, a holiday revolving around food and spending time with the people closest to us, the people we love despite their continuing to have no understanding of what we do. It’s capacity building, Dad, holistic organizational capacity building combined with equitable leadership development, I’ve told you a hundred times, gaw!

Thanksgiving forces us to reflect on what we are grateful for, the people and things we often take for granted, and this should include the fact that we are on, and benefit from, stolen Native land. Take a moment to read this article, “This Thanksgiving, Educate Your Family About Native History and Culture.”

Continue reading →

10 lessons for nonprofits I learned from getting a vasectomy

Posted on by

[Image description: A golden pair of scissors, lying on the ground, holding a beige twine of some sort. Wow, this image is actually relevant to the topic at hand, while being both suggestive and yet not graphic. But I am sure I will stay up wondering if I should have used a picture of a baby animal. Pixabay.com]

Hi everyone. Last week, I got a vasectomy. Normally I would not talk about highly personal stuff like this, but there are lots of guys who are still squeamish about this simple and relatively painless procedure, so I am trying to help normalize it by being public about it. We dudes should do our part in family planning, and getting a vasectomy is a great option, as it is extremely effective while less intrusive and with fewer complications than what women have to go through. As this is a nonprofit blog, however, I am going to extrapolate my experience into lessons for all of us in the sector. So here are the lessons:

Continue reading →

Why art and music matter in the fight for social justice

Posted on by

[Image description: A beautiful spiral made up of stained-glass windows, depicting various scenes, likely from the Bible, since this looks like a dome of a chapel of some sort. Pixabay.com didn’t identify it. Update: It’s the Chapel of Thanksgiving in Dallas, TX. Thanks Marijana Ababovic for identifying it]

Hi everyone, before we dive into today’s subject, my organization is growing and hiring three new positions. I’m highlighting here our Capacity Building Lead position. If you are a capacity building geek who also loves using an equity lens to support organizations led by and serving communities of color, this may be your dream job. Check it out. Must be able to tolerate rain, transformative work, and the Oxford Comma.

Last week, I gave a keynote at the conference held by the Association of California Symphony Orchestras (ACSO), whose staff and board are some of the nicest people ever. And extremely talented, with everyone seeming to play one or more instruments. There was beautiful, moving music everywhere. At one point, I stood in the corner, sipping on a margarita and listening to a duo of mandolin and fiddle players whose virtuoso performances for a few minutes lifted me away from thoughts of the gradual apocalypse our country is going through.

Continue reading →