Category: Uncategorized

Hi everyone, if you’re free this week on September 26th at 4:30pm Pacific Time, please join White House Includes Nonprofits (WHIN)’s virtual gathering to rally the sector to support Harris/Walz and to push for nonprofits to have a seat at the table in the upcoming administration. See the details and register here. Another session is scheduled for October 24th at 4:30pm Pacific Time; join one or ideally both!

I spent a lot of this weekend working on the book, while simultaneously resisting the urge to throw my laptop off a cliff and run away to live a simple life in a small fishing village in another country. Which apparently is a very common temptation for people who attempt to write books!

So, here’s a little video instead. Thanks to colleague Farrah Parkes for the idea. A lot of funders can be more demure and mindful. See you next week!

Hi everyone, over the past two months, my blog traffic plummeted. Though I was still writing each week, no one was reading, even when they included the usual picture of cute baby animals. Feeling betrayed, I started plotting a sector-wide scheme of revenge.

But it turns out that none of my email subscribers had been getting any email notices when new posts were published. Thanks to the tech experts I’ve contracted with (shout out to Jordan!), we got to the bottom of it, and everything is better now. So no revenge. Sorry that the first thing I thought of was revenge; I will now return the 20,000 praying mantises I ordered online.

Anyway, because notices hadn’t been sent since January 22^nd, you probably missed these the last eight blog posts or so. Here they are below, so you have a chance to catch up.

Hi everyone, I’ve been having issues with the email notification system, which is why email subscribers hadn’t been getting notices for the past two months!

I’m working to resolve it, and I think it’s been fixed now, thanks to the tech experts. Please, a few of you who are subscribed by email, let me know in the comment section that you received an email notice that this blog post was published!

(It’s been a surreal few months. I was wondering why my traffic plummeted and just thought people hated me or have started disliking pictures of baby animals! I mean, I wrote an amazing article on codpieces, and only about 8 people read it!)

Hi everyone, this post will be more personal and serious than usual. Content warning: I will be talking about suicide, trauma, and grief. Please take care of yourself, and skip this post if you need to.

Over the past two months I have been struggling with the suicide death of a friend. She was a nonprofit professional and social justice activist. She was 30 and had been battling depression and anxiety and suicidal ideation for most of her life. A traumatic childhood led her to cutting ties with her family at a young age and being homeless for several years. Despite various challenges, she got a master’s degree, became an educator, and dedicated years of her life to advancing social justice through her nonprofit and community work, affecting the lives of many people, especially the numerous kids she taught and mentored.

Grief does a number on you, and grief when someone dies of suicide brings different feelings of guilt and regret. I run through various scenarios of what I could have said and done. Maybe if I hadn’t stayed up so late the previous night, I wouldn’t have slept through the last time she tried to call me. Maybe if I had invited her over for Christmas, she wouldn’t have spent it alone, and things might have been different. Until recently, I sometimes woke up, and unable to sleep, scanned through our text threads. Some of the messages were happy: trading vegan recipes, discussing TV shows. Others involved us arguing over various things. The later ones were of me begging her to get professional help. She had bought a gun, and I and her other friends couldn’t convince her to get rid of it. The last text she sent me was “I’m sorry. Goodbye.”