Nonprofit AF

Exploring the fun and frustrations of nonprofit work

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Courage, joy, and equity: My wishes for our sector for 2024

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[Image description: A hand holding three lit sparklers. The sparklers are shooting off sparkles in the dark. Image by StockSnap on Pixabay]

Hi everyone. I hope you’ve been able to have somewhat of a break over the past few days. I know many people are returning to work this week, and it is always difficult, so every year for the first blog post of the year, I try to start with something upbeat and humorous. But everything reminds me of the horrors happening around the world. The beautiful fireworks on New Year’s Eve were a reminder of bombs Israel is still dropping on civilians in Palestine, funded by the US with our tax dollars. Even as we celebrate a new year with the renewal it brings, millions around the world are starving, freezing, and dying. So many of them are children.

It would feel disingenuous for me to go about as if the arbitrary transition of one calendar year to another somehow magically ended multiple ongoing genocides in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Tigray, and other places in the world. Instead, I have hopes and wishes for all of us and our sector this year. In spite of everything, or more likely because of everything, I am still optimistic of the role we play in creating a just and equitable world. For 2024, in no particular order:

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Hope and trust, and gratitude for our sector

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[Image description: Silhouette of a kid flying a colorful plane-shaped kite at the beach. In the background, near the water, are the silhouettes of several other people. Image by pikabum on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, this is the last post of 2023. I’ll be back on January 2nd. Normally, I end the year with a lighter article, maybe something humorous. But humor has been hard to come by with everything taking place all around us. The genocide of Palestinians. The US’s veto of a ceasefire. The horrors happening to civilians in Sudan, Congo, Tigray, and other parts of the world. The attacks on reproductive rights. The rise in violence against trans people. The continuation of mass shootings. The surge in fascism across the globe. We’ve had a horrible year after a series of horrible years, and 2024, with the election in the US, doesn’t look like it will bring much relief.

To be honest, I am very tired and on edge. I’m drained, feeling a combination of helplessness at being unable to do much to stop the injustice and suffering I see everywhere, and the frustration of having to battle strangers, colleagues, and even friends and family who seem completely unaware of the nightmares taking place, or worse, justify them.

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We as a sector must speak up for Palestine

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[Image Description: A protestor at a protest holding up a sign that says “Not war, it’s colonialism. Not eviction, it’s ethnic cleansing. Not conflict, it’s occupation. Not complicated, it’s genocide.” Image by Nikolas Gannon on Unsplash]

Hi everyone. This is my fourth blog post on the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. Before I go further, yes I condemn Hamas’s atrocities committed on October 7th against Israeli civilians. And I also condemn antisemitism, a serious issue that has been on the rise all over the world.

And I condemn the war crimes and terrorism against Palestinian civilians that Israel has been committing since then, and for the past 75 years. As you read this, the number of Palestinian civilians that the Israeli government has massacred approaches 16,000 since October, including nearly 8,000 children. The death toll of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians this year has surpassed the Nakba of 1948. It will get worse, as Israel ramps up its aggression against southern Gaza, where it had previously told civilians to evacuate to. There is no place for Palestinian civilians to go to be safe. And as winter approaches, there will be more famine and starvation. The death toll will rise even higher.

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Intermediary organizations are vital and funders need to increase funding going to them

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[Image description: Beautiful bluish/purple mushrooms growing out of the ground, shiny and almost translucent, like jellyfish. They have gills, a ring halfway up a slender stem. In the background is taller white mushroom, blurred. Image by adege on Pixabay]

A while ago, I wrote about how intermediary organizations are like mycelium, which is the rootlike structure of mushrooms. Like mycelium, these orgs are vital to the nonprofit field, as they provide several critical functions, including bringing funding to other nonprofits, connecting orgs to one another, disseminating vital information, fostering communication, and mobilizing orgs for advocacy. And they even help organizations at the end of their lives to exit gracefully, the way mushrooms help break down decaying matters and return them to the earth to feed and generate new life.

Yes, that was a very nerdy post, even nerdier than my piece that employs Star Trek analogies to talk about the future of the nonprofit sector. (Nerd alert: one of the newer Star Trek shows, Discovery, has a technology that uses a vast invisible mycelium-in-space network to warp its eponymous spaceship instantaneously anywhere in the universe, and one of its main characters is named Paul Stamets, after the legendary mushroom expert).

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Asymmetric Expectation of Gratitude: What it is, and why it’s harmful to our work

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[Image description: A heart-shaped green leaf standing upright out of a knot made of rope. Image by Kranich17 on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, before we get started, a few cool things to check out: First, my friend the amazing Kishshana Palmer, has a virtual workshop series geared towards nonprofit leaders. It starts next week. Check it out.

Second, the Institute for Policy Studies released a new report on the shenanigans of billionaires. Please read it, get angry, flip over the nearest table, and then contact Congress to demand they do something about it.  

Finally, past and present funding professionals, please fill out the First Draft Funders Survey with your opinions on philanthropy and how it can improve.

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As Thanksgiving is this week, I start to think about our society’s and our sector’s weird dynamics around gratitude. We’ve been trained to be thankful, to have an “attitude of gratitude,” to keep a gratitude journal, etc. This is mostly great. When everything feels overwhelming and out of control, gratitude can often be extremely grounding.

However, we don’t talk enough about the negative sides of gratitude. Specifically, there are ingrained notions of who is expected to be grateful to whom, and it is grossly lopsided, and we’ve been conditioned to just accept it. I’m going to call it the Asymmetric Requirement of Gratitude (ARG! I mentioned it briefly earlier here). Here are a few ways that it manifests:

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