Nonprofit with Balls’s 100th post! Let’s celebrate by going home early.

Posted on by Vu

unicorn sunsetHi everyone. This is Nonprofit With Ball’s historic 100th post. It is a momentous occasion. When I was a little boy growing up in a small village up in the mountains of Vietnam, my father said to me, “Son, we may be poor, but that does not mean we can’t accomplish great things. You are the smartest, most-talented, and, in certain very dim lighting, best-looking kid in our family. Bring honor to our name.” Well, look dad, I wrote 100 blog posts about nonprofits, many mentioning unicorns! I think our ancestors would be proud. They’re probably tweeting about it right now.

For this 100th post, I’m going to provide excerpts of some of my favorite early posts, the ones that you probably haven’t read because they’re so old. If this sounds very lazy, like those TV shows that do montages as a special episode (“Instead of writing a real episode, let’s spend 10 minutes looking at all the times that Joey said ‘How you doin’?’ and all the times that Ross acts like a completely unlikeable character”) you are right. But hey, this only happens every 100th blog posts; we’ll be back next week with new content. Here, read these posts below if you haven’t. And I think it’s only appropriate that we all go home early today in celebration. Continue reading “Nonprofit with Balls’s 100th post! Let’s celebrate by going home early.”

Really-high ropes courses and other uses of legal marijuana in the nonprofit sector

Posted on by Vu

Cookies shaped like marijuana leafs are pictured at the Cannabis Carnivalus 4/20 event in SeattleHi everyone. Before we launch into today’s topic, I want to invite you to Rainier Valley Corps’s open house this Wednesday evening, July 9th from 6pm to 8pm. If you’re in Seattle, come on by and learn about the project. And I’d love to meet you. Details at rainiervalleycorps.org

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Every week, when I publish a new post, inevitably two to five readers will unsubscribe their email from this blog, probably in protest against something I said (“How DARE you disparage hipsters blah blah you’re just jealous because your fat vegan legs don’t look good in skinny jeans blah blah scientific studies show that wearing skinny jeans for just two hours a day can vastly improve fertility rates blah blah you and your blog suck, etc.”) It’s OK, because new readers subscribe, so there is usually a net gain.

As a warning, this week’s topic may be sensitive to some readers, because, dude, recreational marijuana will be available for sale in Washington State this Tuesday! For some, it is the end of the world. But for others, it’ll be like Black Friday, where you wake up extra early, grab an empty Snapple bottle, wait in line for hours, and then shove aside the weak and elderly to get your hands on that sweet, sweet 32GB flash drive for $5.99. Except replace “32GB flash drive” with “legal weed” and “$5.99” with “about $400 per ounce.”

Now, whether you support or oppose legalizing pot, the fact is that the tides are turning, and pot use will grow and affect the way we do our work in the nonprofit sector. Continue reading “Really-high ropes courses and other uses of legal marijuana in the nonprofit sector”

7 annoying things nonprofits do and say that get on funders’ nerves

Posted on by Vu

irritatedHappy Monday, everyone. Last week, I wrote about annoying things that funders say to us nonprofits. Now, I want to stress again that funders and fundees are in symbiotic relationship. Like those ants that live on that one tree. Or those billions of probiotic bacteria that thrive in a healthy stomach. Nonprofits cannot do our work without funding, and funders can’t do their work without nonprofits. And no one can do their work without a healthy stomach, which is why all of us—funders and NPOs—should eat more yogurt and kimchi.

Anyway, after last week’s post, I got emails from a few funders who wanted to point out that nonprofits say and do annoying things also. At this point, you may have spewed coffee at your computer screen in shock and indignation. We nonprofits are unicorns! We never do anything annoying! Well, here are some things I was asked to mention. Let’s hear our funding friends out. And let’s keep in mind that I am only the messenger here. Like Shakira in those Activia probiotic yogurt commercials, but maybe slightly less attractive. Continue reading “7 annoying things nonprofits do and say that get on funders’ nerves”

7 Annoying things funders say, and what we wish they (you) would say instead

Posted on by Vu

Kaziranga National Park reopens for visitorsHappy summer, everyone. A colleague wrote me recently, saying “I just received an email from a well-known foundation (that supports us) mentioning that they ‘are all out of town all of this week for a conference in Hawaii.’ I just spent 2 months working my a** off on our annual event raising just $35,000…” She asked me to write about things that funders should never mention to folks working in the nonprofit world

Now, funders are awesome and play a very important and symbiotic role in the nonprofit ecosystem. It would be hard for us nonprofit egrets to do our work if the…uh…rain doesn’t fall and the…um….savannah grass is not green enough to feed the rhinoceroses who…uh…do whatever it is that rhinoceroses do in this metaphor, which made a lot more sense yesterday after I had several beers. But once in a while, likely inadvertently, funders say things that get on our nerves. I asked Nonprofit With Balls readers as well as all my ED friends to tell me what they wished funders would stop saying. Here are the top ones: Continue reading “7 Annoying things funders say, and what we wish they (you) would say instead”

The game of nonprofit, and how it leaves some communities behind

Posted on by Vu

Game-of-Thrones-S3E7-02-e1368427519542A while ago I attended a meeting coordinated by a major local funder. The topic was “Lessons from Game of Thrones we can apply to nonprofit work.” All right, that wasn’t the topic, although that would have made for a much livelier discussion and will be a blog post here soon enough. No, we were talking about Community Engagement. Once again we were talking about community engagement, because it is becoming more and more apparent that voices of communities of color are missing from almost every table on every issue—the environment; education; housing; transportation; food equity; employment; scrimshaw, the ancient art of carving on whale bones, etc.—and everyone is banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Continue reading “The game of nonprofit, and how it leaves some communities behind”