Nonprofit AF

Amidst cruelty and chaos, a world that’s on her way

Posted on January 28, 2025January 28, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: Fingers holding a copper ring shaped like an ouroboros, a snake devouring its own tail. Image by Coppertist Wu on Unsplash]

Happy New Year, everyone. This week, starting January 29^th, marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year. This is the year of the Wood Snake. Here’s a great visual guide on what that means and what your fortune for 2025 will be, according to your own zodiac sign.

Since it is the Year of the Wood Snake, I think about the significance of this animal. The snake is often associated with evil, cunning trickery, and ruthlessness: hypnotizing people, envenomating them, persuading the naive into…eating fruit, and so on.

But in some cultures, they can be symbols of good fortune, fertility, transformation, and renewal. The Egyptian icon the ouroboros, for example, depicts a snake eating its own tail, symbolizing the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth. Snakes often shed their skin, leaving them behind.

I’m thinking about all this because like most of you, I’ve aged an entire year since last week, thanks to the breathtaking onslaught of racism, transphobia, ignorance, and general cruelty coming from those who are now in charge, led by an adjudicated rapist and conman, flanked by Nazis.

“Raise the chainsaw” and other tips to inject more masculine energy into nonprofit and philanthropy!

Posted on January 20, 2025January 21, 2025 by Vu

[Profile of a rooster with bright red comb and wattle (the fleshy part that dangles under its beak is called a wattle. Don’t say you never learn anything useful from this site!), his beak open. A majestic, masculine bird. Image by Leuchtpunkt on pixabay]

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that “feminine energy” has been “neutering” companies, and what they need is more masculine energy! He is on to something; society’s focus on woke/feminine values like “equity” and “respect” and “personal hygiene” have turned us all soft and ineffective. Luckily, there has been a recent general resurgence of manliness, seen for example in alpha bros cutting short their long eyelashes because manly men do not have heart-stoppingly dreamy come-hither looks.

With all that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of things we can implement to make our sector more masculine:

Nonprofit and philanthropy and our white moderate tendency to obey tyranny in advance

Posted on January 14, 2025January 14, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: A statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where he appears emerging out of a block of marble or concrete, his arms folded, one hand holding a rolled up stack of paper. Image by Laura Nyhuis on Pixabay]

Next week, because the universe has a perverse sense of humor, we have MLK Jr. Day on the same day as the Inauguration. One of the brightest lights for equity and justice sharing the same day with one of the most effective catalysts for hate, racism, misogyny, and injustice that Humanity has ever produced. It feels sickly appropriate, as these opposing forces have been fighting one another for decades, with the stakes now higher than ever.

The side of equity and justice, though, has taken a huge hit recently. Meta (which runs Facebook), for example, has capitulated, now relaxing their rules against hateful content. So now it’s a free-for-all for people to harass transgender people, women, immigrants, and other vulnerable people. Zuckerberg has also said companies need more “masculine energy,” which I think means having employees of all genders wear fake mustaches and interrupt one another more often to talk about stuff they only have a little knowledge about but a lot of confidence in.

Meanwhile, I hear about the rise of MEI, which stands for Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. It is a counterresponse to DEI. Instead of focusing on “woke garbage” like equity and inclusion, with MEI we just focus on whoever does the best job, never mind stuff like systemic racism and bias, those things “don’t exist.” Be on the lookout for more MEI language from right-wing pundits, politicians, and CEOs. Thankfully, we have some companies, notably Costco, whose board refused to cave in to pressure from the right to dismantle their DEI program.

Script for The Matrix, if it were set in nonprofit and philanthropy

Posted on January 6, 2025January 8, 2025 by Vu

[Image description: A hand, pointing straight at the camera, while concentric circles of ones and zeroes in green text, as well as a curtain of green codes, appear in the foreground and background. Image by geralt on Pixabay]

Welcome back to work, everyone. I hope your holiday break was restful. I was able to hang out with my kids, and when they were asleep, binge-watched all the episodes of Shogun; it was glorious! But now we’re back to the grind, and it is cold and miserable. Sometimes, I think the people who believe we exist in a computer simulation may be on to something, and I find myself looking around, trying to break the fourth wall, hoping whoever is running this simulation would just give us all a reprieve from all this. Maybe they could simulate a world where the forces of good win for once.

Anyway, I’m reminded of the movie The Matrix, where the main character, played by Keanu Reeves, realizes he’s been living in a simulation, trapped along with other humans by sentient machines that are using humans as batteries while creating a fake reality to subdue them and keep them from rebelling. Of course, that makes me think about our sector, and what it would be like if The Matrix were set in nonprofit and philanthropy:

“What the skibbidi Ohio sigma rizz?!” Gen Alpha slang explained for nonprofit professionals

Posted on December 17, 2024December 17, 2024 by Vu

[Image description: A cute brown baby goat, staring directly at the camera. This goat is the GOAT, no cap. Image by NoName_13 on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, this will be the last blog post before the holiday break. I’ll be back on January 7^th. I hope you’re taking some time to rest and recharge and make happy memories with friends and family.

Having two kids who are Gen Alpha (those born 2010 and on) means I have to deal with their sassy remarks all the time. Like when I told the 11-year-old about my prized Casio calculator watch—the height of watch technology back in those days, hundreds of moons ago—and he said “I’m surprised you didn’t just wrap a leaf around your wrist and glue on an acorn!”

Over the past year, their sassiness started including wacky slang I had never heard before. “Skibbidi Ohio rizz” one would shout, and the other would reply with “gyat,” laughing. When I asked the 11-year-old to explain all this stuff to me, the 8-year-old interrupted with, “Don’t tell Daddy! He’s cringe! If he uses our language, it will plunge us all into chaos!”

Ha! These little dudes don’t know their father is a master of something called “googling.”