Nonprofit AF

Exploring the fun and frustrations of nonprofit work

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We need more shows about nonprofit work

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Like most executive directors, I come home exhausted from hours of telling staff what to do and taking credit for their work. To de-stress, I’ve started watching ridiculous amounts of television. And I started noticing something. There are plenty of shows about lawyers, doctors, detectives, cooks, servants, zombies, etc., most of them featuring attractive actors who spend endless episodes in frivolous romantic triangles with one another (except the zombies).

Unfortunately, not one of these shows is about nonprofit directors. What kind of example does that set for our kids? Do show producers think we are boring? Do they not realize how incredibly exciting our work is? In either case, I am going to write to David E. Kelley with an idea for a show, called “ED,” featuring a group of Executive Directors of several nonprofits. The show will explore their struggles helping to improve the world while balancing family and other obligations. It will chronicle the hard choices they have to make; the triumphs and challenges; and the friendships they develop, usually through happy hours. There are tons of exciting stuff to mine from the nonprofit world.

Pilot episode: A meeting room at the Coalition for Excellence (CFE). Tension so thick you could carve a statue out of it. Maria, the ED, prepares to present a cashflow report. Things do not look good, and she knows it. Meanwhile, at another nonprofit, Think of the Children (TOTC), Troy is furiously typing. He cries out in pain, cursing his email-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. But this grant is due tomorrow, and it’s a general operating grant! At another nonprofit, Unicycles for Guns (UFG), Vinh, a particularly dashing Asian ED, has a flashback. He is sitting in front of his parents at dinner. He tells them he is pursuing a Master’s in Social Work. They are silent, the sound of their chopsticks clinking on porcelain bowls mournful and ominous. He snaps back to the meeting he’s having with his Development/Human-Resources/Finance-Director/Janitor, Loan. She is tired of having multiple responsibilities and wants to a clearer work plan.

Episode 2: Maria’s board has voted to apply for a line of credit. This is a small victory, short-term. They did not seem to understand that fundraising efforts will need to increase. Staff morale, meanwhile, is down. She calls her Program Director, Arlene, into her office to plan a teambuilding retreat with no funding. At UFG, Vinh’s back hurts from endless hours of meetings. He holds in his hand a grant letter. He is afraid to open it; it could be a rejection. He decides to get it over with, when his phone rings. It’s Troy from TOTC; he got the grant he wrote and is calling, ecstatic, to invite Vinh to happy hour. Vinh looks at the letter in his own hand. “While we had many qualified applicants…” He retraces steps in his mind. Did he talk too much during the site visit? He felt like a failure, imagining all the kids now who couldn’t trade their guns for unicycles.

Episode 3: The Coalition for Excellence wildly succeeds at its annual dinner, and Maria has a good night’s sleep for the first time without Ambien. At TOTC, Troy welcomes an influential board member that he had been pursuing for months, Louis, whom he does not know had a relationship with Maria. He also does not know that Louis has loyalties to Think of the Children’s competitor, Care for the Children (CFTC)! The smart and inexplicably sexy Vinh, meanwhile, finds a coupon for 20% off reams of copy paper. He rushes to Office Depot. Little does he know that at that moment Loan is plotting with the board Treasurer to get Vinh fired.

In the season finale, viewers are left with cliff-hangers: Will Maria get together with Louis? Will Louis destroy Troy’s organization?! Can Arlene find a pro-bono facilitator for the team-building retreat??! Will Vinh be able to carry a ten-ream box of copy paper with his bad back and carpal tunnel???!

If that’s not compelling television, I don’t know what is. I’m going to develop a more detailed script for the pilot episode. Maybe I should add a zombie or two. If they don’t like “ED,” I also thought of another show, one from the perspectives of spouses of Executive Directors and what they go through. It’ll be called “Living with ED.”

Site visits: uncomfortable, yet terrifying

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officeThis week, VFA had a site visit. Whenever we apply for a grant, the second-best outcome is a site visit (the best outcome would be a funder saying, “We’re funding you, and in fact, doubling your request and sending the kids in your after-school program a laptop and a bunny each!”)

I always get excited about site visits. We write these grants telling people about how cool our programs are, but to have funders actually come down and visit is affirming. And terrifying. It’s a weird contradiction, like it’s your birthday—yay!—but you’re also getting a colonoscopy.

Before the visit, we try to prep as much as we can. Making a good impression is important. This includes tidying up the place and putting away our fold-out cot, which staff use for naps during particularly long days, or just weekdays. I also gather up all the papers on my desk and shove them into the overhead bin.

The staff’s personal appearance is also taken into consideration. “What kind of site visit is this?” one of them asked, “how should we dress?” The more funding is at stake, the better we dress. Less than $10,000, we dress a little better than normal, but are still generally shabby. At $10,000 to $19,000, we wear button-down shirts and tuck them into our jeans. $20,000 to $49,000, we wear slacks and a nice shirt, maybe a tie. $50,000 or over, I might require some of the staff to get Botox.

“$80,000,” I responded. “Ooh,” they said, “you better get a haircut.” A year ago, an hour from a visit with a major foundation, I checked myself in the mirror. Normally I look like a movie star, an Asian Steve Buscemi if you will, but this time I had a greenish complexion overshadowed by cowlicks so unruly, they were really goatlicks. Quickly I ran downstairs to a barber shop and got a trim. I made it to our program on time but was horrified to see that my face, neck, and shoulders were covered with bits of hair. “Quick, grab some tape,” I said, and for the next ten minutes, two staff used masking tape to remove offending pieces of hair. We got that grant, but the staff have never let me live that down.

On the day of this recent site visit, I was at a Leadership Tomorrow training. “Tidy up office, prepare slideshow,” I texted James, our Director of Youth and Community Engagement, who would be managing the project if we received this grant. This was only an office visit, not a program visit. Program visits have special challenges. We want our funders to see our programs in their natural state, so we don’t prep our students too much, except to tell them that a few people might be visiting and that if they don’t behave, Justin Bieber will stop singing forever.

When these visits go well, everyone leaves with a good feeling. The staff feel affirmed; the funders feel warm and fuzzy. Once in a while, though, they coincide with a crappy day, when kids have low energy, or some staff are absent, or the ED is hungover. Funders are usually pretty understanding and sympathetic when that happens, but I haven’t yet seen a bad site visit that has resulted in a grant or even a second-chance visit. It’s a horrible feeling watching a group of funders leave after an uninspiring tour. It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re practicing for hours at a yo-yo trick and it’s awesome and you’re excited to show your older brother, but then the trick doesn’t go right, and he tousles your hair and says “That was a nice try, Vu, I’m sure you’ll get it eventually,” and you’re mad at yourself because you already got it, dozens of time, so then you hide his car keys under the couch cushions.

Office visits are challenging in that funders don’t have the visceral experience of our programs, a chance to meet our kids and stare into their big, liquid eyes brimming with hope and potential. So we create a slideshow to give them an impression. Two hours before the site visit, I texted James to “make sure only cute kids w big eyes are in slideshow.”

On my way back, I got a text from James. “They are here thirty mins early! They in conf room relaxing!” Crap, I thought, I don’t have time to clean up my desk! The previous evening, I had eaten some Morningstar vegan barbecue ribs and left the plate out on the desk. The office had been cleaned, so my cubicle would be the only messy area. They’re going to think I’m disorganized and sloppy! How could they invest in an organization when the ED can’t even clean up his mess after eating vegan BBQ ribs?!

I arrived at the office with twenty minutes to spare, but somehow felt late and anxious. I ran up the stairs and burst into the conference room to greet the four visitors. This was $80,000 on the line and I was blinded by their radiance. Program officers are on average 27% more attractive than civilians, and like Galadriel the Elven Queen from Lord of the Rings when she nearly held the One Ring of Power, they can be both beautiful and terrible to behold.

“I’m so sorry for being…early,” I said, breathless. They cracked up. Maybe they’re just humans, too, after all.

Reflections for Thanksgiving

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thanksgivingLast week I received a severe drubbing from a program officer for unintentionally breaching protocols with her foundation while seeking funding for the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC), which I chair. I’ll explain the whole thing later in my book “Unicorns, Equity, and General Operating Funds: Quest of the Nonprofit Warriors.” (It’s a working title). Suffice to say, I apologized profusely and left the lunch meeting feeling very much like crap.

On the way back to the office, I walked by Panha, an elderly Cambodian woman who sells fish and vegetables on the sidewalk. Seven days a week she is out under a makeshift tarp awning, sitting on a short stool, her eyes framed by crows’ feet and greying hair. “Yellow mushrooms yet?” I asked. She shook her head. “Not yet!” For the past several weeks I have been waiting for the chanterelle mushrooms that Panha’s friend harvests for her to sell. Despite the heavy rain, still no signs of them. “You buy leaf?” she asked. Panha speaks broken English and does not know the vocabulary for many of the vegetables laid out in front of her. All the greens—kale, collards, bok choy—are “leaf” to her. She pointed at some greens that I did not recognize. “What can I do with them?” I asked, knowing what the answer will be, since she does not have vocabulary like sautee, braise, steam, etc.

“Make soup!” she said, and we both cracked up. It has become an inside joke between us.

In my cubicle, I composed a short email reiterating my apologies to the program officer, then started working on some grants that were due, thinking of how nice it would be to have four solid days off for Thanksgiving. I was still feeling pretty crappy.

Then I thought about Panha sitting out there in the rain and cold, like my mother may have once sat long ago, selling her wares at the market, which we transported for miles on her bicycle. It made me realize what an ingrate I was being. I started thinking about the things for which I am thankful. They range from small things (wine, The Walking Dead), to big things, like friends and family and good health and shelter. I am thankful for all these blessings.

But I am also very thankful for my work. In all the daily craziness, I forget sometimes how lucky I am to be able to wake up each day and be engaged in meaningful work. Three decades ago I was a kid growing up in a small mountain village in Vietnam. The War had recently ended and my parents would struggle to feed us. In my fractured memories of that time are images of our wood-burning stove, the dirt floor, the smell of pine and red earth, and the monsoon rain that battered our rusty, leaking tin roof.

It was luck, or Fate, or maybe Karma, that brought us to the US. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if we had not made it here. I was a frail and timid little kid. I did not know anything of the War or what it did to our family. Now I realize that my father’s role as a soldier on the losing side of this War would ensure that none of us kids would be able to make it into college. We would end up repairing bicycles or farming a tiny plot of land or, if we were lucky and clever enough to navigate the network of corrupt officials, maybe opening a small business. All noble occupations, and we might have even been happy.

But I like the work that I am doing now. I don’t think many people in the world get to do what they find fulfilling. This work, strengthening a nonprofit, advancing a community, is challenging and often crazy driving. We face obstacles constantly. There are days when I get bad news from a funder, or an elder lectures me for an hour on what I did wrong, or our cashflow is awful because a reimbursement-based grant payment is delayed and we might not be able to make payroll.

But there are also days like this Saturday, when I dropped by our SES program to find 80 kids experiencing Thanksgiving for the first time in their life. It was also moving to see two VFA board members there, serving these kids their inaugural portion of turkey. Later in the same day, at a different location, our Youth Jobs Initiative program brought in guest speakers with different occupations to inspire a different set of our bright kids who face so many barriers.

The work is constantly challenging, oftentimes aggravating, and infinitely rewarding. I get to meet and collaborate with awesome, dedicated people all the time. I have the best and most amazing team in the world. And my actions, perhaps in just a small way, may be helping to make a difference in the world, to make it better. For the chance to do that, I am very thankful.

I took a break from grantwriting and ran downstairs to get Panha some Vietnamese coffee. She loves Vietnamese coffee, steaming hot, with condensed milk. The rain still fell, and she was huddled under her blue tarp awning when I approached her. “Oh, thank you, honey,” she said, her eyes lighting up when I handed her the coffee. I asked her how business was going. “Not good,” she said, “raining, raining too much. Nobody buy.” The winter would be worse for Panha. But she is always in good spirit. “You buy pumpkin?” she said, gesturing at some green squash. What can I do with it, I asked.

“Make soup!” she said, and we laughed, and I went back to my office.

The case for nonprofit partying

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WDPIn a month, we’ll be having World Dance Party, a giant multicultural dance party and potluck. It’s free and usually draws over 200 people of all ages and backgrounds. Of all the projects VFA takes on, this one is unique. There is no fundraising, no programming. No one will present on cultural competency. There will be no surveys or focus groups. No one will be asked to put dots on a flip chart. People will eat and dance. That’s it.

So what the heck is the point? Fun. The point is fun. We as a society are stressed as all-get-out, and those of us in nonprofits are probably even worse for wear. The pay could be higher, the workload lower. We spend all our times calculating, with every meeting, every event needing to have some sort of agenda. No wonder we are burning out, with some of us considering running off to raise llamas in the Andes.

World Dance Party started two years ago, when I was invited to an Aging Your Way event held by Senior Services. I had no idea why I was invited; despite my rapidly greying hair, I’m actually not a senior. But it was a good way to avoid work and get free food, so I sat in a room with 50 other people as we envisioned a community in which we would like to grow old. Most of us do not think about our own aging, preferring to be in denial about the cadence of time and the looming approach of the Inevitable. But during those four hours, we confronted the existential and realized there can be joy and hope in growing older, no matter what our popular culture leads us to believe.

“We should have a time bank where we could help each other out using our talents,” said one voice. “We should have more handicap-accessible spaces,” said another. One by one, people stood up to shout their ideas. More gardens. More bike lanes. A multicultural heritage festival. Then, a man rose to his feet, an Asian man, his shabby clothing and unkempt hair indicating that he worked for a small nonprofit. “We should have a giant multicultural dance party, where elders and kids and people of varying backgrounds can get together and teach each other different dances. Seniors can teach youth Disco. Kids can teach seniors to Pop-and-Lock. Salsa! Merengue! Bollywood! Everyone brings a dish to share. Booze. There will also be booze for those of age!”

“Well, those ideas are just brilliant,” said the facilitator, “Now, we’re going to break into groups to actually work on implementing them.” If that man who suggested the multicultural dance party knew he would have to do actual work and organize it, he probably would have remained silent, munching on his pita and hummus.

We have put on seven World Dance Parties now, several organizations working together to coordinate each one. Each event has drawn 150 to 250 people of all ages and ethnicities. We have had dances from multiple countries, from the Horah to Bhangra to Eastcoast Swing to Tinikling. At each World Dance Party, I get a vision of what our society should be like: diverse, everyone interacts with everyone, joy radiating from every face, a giant plastic bucket of cheese puffs on the potluck table. At one point, I stood back to observe the crowd, sipping on a beer. 150 people were holding hands, engaged in an Israeli dance, while others in the room were talking and laughing. Kids were dancing with older adults. Asians were learning West African dances. It was moving. That’s the kind of community I would like to grow old in.

I wasn’t the only one who was awed by the magic in the room. A lady who was also standing back to take in the scene came up to me. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked, gazing at the crowd, who had now moved into a line dance called the Wobble, “we should send this out to the universe, this energy, this pure happiness. If you and I were rich, if we each owned a yacht, could we be any happier than we are tonight?”

I thought about it for a second. Then I turned to her, slightly misty-eyed, and said, “How the heck would I know?!” I work for a nonprofit, I said. How would I ever know what it’s like to own a yacht? I mean, how much do those things cost anyway? $5,000? $10,000? I’ll never have that much money! Oh, God, I’m going to die without having paid off my student loans!

OK, maybe I had one too many beers. My new friend’s point was well-taken. Seldom do we see such joy. Our organizations work to fill critical needs; rarely does a nonprofit mission statement include the words “to increase happiness.” We do not prioritize it. Oftentimes we feel guilty, as if providing happiness is less important than basic needs. A party is frivolous, we think. But isn’t happiness ultimately what our work is about? I would say that bringing people a sense of community, of joy, of humor, of connection to their neighbors, is just as important. That is why VFA will always help organize events like WDP.

***

A few months ago, we posted an announcement on our website, selling off the naming rights to our cubicles:

Let’s face it, life is short, and all of us are on a quest for immortality. People with the means can have their names on buildings and stadiums: Carnegie Hall, the Trump Tower, the Monsanto Lab for Frankensteined Produce, etc. Naming buildings costs millions, which none of us have. However, with only $1,000, you can have your name on Executive Director Vu Le’s cubicle forever. That’s sixteen square feet of immortality, and every time someone passes by, they’ll be reminded of your greatness.

Well, I’m happy to announce that we have sold off our first cubicle, thanks to the generous donations of two amazing SVP partners. The ribbon cutting for the “Emily Anthony and Julie Edsforth Cubicle for Youth and Community Engagement” will happen at VFA’s first annual Halloween party on October 30th at 6pm at the VFA office, and all friends of Emily and Julie are welcome to come and witness this historic event. If you are interested in immortalizing yourself or a loved one by having your name emblazoned on a cubicle, please let me know. Hurry! These cubicles are selling like hotcakes! (If hotcakes sell at approximate one cake every three months.)