10 reasons nonprofit work is totally awesome

hummus-1058000_960_720Hi everyone, I got feedback from my ED friend, Director Lee, that I spend too much time pointing out the challenges of the field and not enough time on the good stuff that happens. “Vu,” she wrote, “I am enjoying your posts. But you gotta talk about the good stuff too. We aren’t all scraping by and exhausted all the time. Sometimes it’s fun too!” All right all right, I’ll try to be more positive, starting with today’s post. Here are the top 10 reasons why our work is so totally awesome, like the best work ever on earth. They are in no particular order. Add your reasons for why you love nonprofit work in the comment section. Continue reading “10 reasons nonprofit work is totally awesome”

Capacity building for communities of color: The paradigm must shift (and why I’m leaving my job)

chessWhen I first got out of grad school with my Master in Social Work, I was a bright-eyed kid full of hopes and dreams of doing my part to make the world better. Completely broke and desperate to find work before the student loans people released their hounds, I applied to countless jobs and found that no one would hire me because I had no experience, a vicious “Experience Paradox” that many young grads go through each year. Frustrated and dejected, I secluded myself in my room (in my parents’ house), sending out my resume all day, coming out at night to raise my clenched fist to the dark skies and screaming “I may be inexperienced, but I am still a human being! A human being!!!” Then I would eat some ramen and watch Spanish soap operas on Univision. Continue reading “Capacity building for communities of color: The paradigm must shift (and why I’m leaving my job)”

10 Game of Thrones quotes you can use at work

Hi everyone, I was going to write “10 Lessons for Nonprofits from Game of Thrones,” but that requires way too much analysis and I just ate an entire bag of bittersweet chocolate chips and can’t concentrate. Here, however, are 10 Game of Thrones quotes that you can use in everyday nonprofit work. Don’t worry if you are not up-to-date with the show. There are no major spoilers here. Also, even if you don’t intend to watch the show ever, you might as well learn some of these lines so you can fit in at the water cooler…if your nonprofit can afford a water cooler, of course. (We just put a bucket on a chair and fill it with Capri Suns). I like to run into a meeting, scream “I will take what is mine with fire and blood!!!” then quickly grab some baby carrots and hummus and run out.


1. “You know all that from staring at marks on paper? You’re like a wizard”—Gilly, encountering written words for the first time.

Perfect for: Board meetings, when the Treasurer presents the financial statements. Or when consultants present their final report and recommendations.

2. “If we die, we die, but first we’ll live.”—Ygritte to Jon Snow.

Perfect for: A pep talk before an annual fundraising event.

3. “Has anyone ever told you you’re as boring as you are ugly?”—Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth.

Perfect for: Staff performance reviews.

4. “Let me give you some advice, bastard. Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.”—Tyrion to Jon Snow.

Perfect for: Coaching and mentoring up-and-coming young professionals.

5. “I will hurt you for this. A day will come when you think you are safe and happy, and your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth. And you will know the debt is paid.”—Tyrion to his sister Cersei.

Perfect for: A coworker who ate your food from the office fridge without asking you.

6. “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”—Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish.

Perfect for: Motivating youth in a leadership or employment program

7. “Paint stripes on a toad, he does not become a tiger.”—Sandor Clegane.

Perfect for: Sniping at rival organizations that seem to have an unlimited marketing budget.

8. “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”—Ramsay Snow.

Perfect for: End of the fiscal year, when a new budget is being created. Or when coworkers leave their dirty dishes in the sink for days.

9. “Winter is coming”—the motto of the Stark and Winterfell.

Perfect for: Explaining to staff why their program budgets have been reduced.

10. “I will take what’s mine with fire and blood!”—Daenerys Targaryen

Perfect for: Motivating a team after losing a major grant or contract to another organization. Or when there’s leftover snacks after a meeting.

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SU/FU: The secret to branding success

brandingThis weekend we had a party for my son, who turned one. This kid was not going to remember anything, so it was really a party for us. Still, it is customary in Vietnamese culture (and I hear Korean culture) that when a child turns one, an assortment of objects are placed in front of him. Each object represents a profession, and the first thing he picks up is indicative of what he’ll be. Parents usually lay out things like a stethoscope, a gavel, a caliper, a syringe, and some money. The really ambitious parents will lay out a stethogavel. Or a wedding ring glued to a lottery ticket.

On a silver tray we placed all the items and set the baby down on the ground. He looked at the 60 or so people gathered around him, then slowly reached toward his destiny. I was hoping he would choose the unicorn card I placed on the tray, the unicorn of course representing all of us in nonprofit. His hand hovered over the objects, and he picked up the maraca.

And that brings me to today’s topic: Marketing and branding. I’ve been hearing a lot about these concepts lately, since everyone is talking about them. “Develop your personal brand,” I hear, or “improve your elevator pitch” or “engage your donors through social media” or “Vu, could you please wear a shirt with buttons and comb your hair for the site visit?” etc. Continue reading “SU/FU: The secret to branding success”

Shadows of the unicorn: How good leaders can negatively affect the world

unicorn shadowHi everyone, I came back recharged after spending a week sequestered at the University of Washington for the Nonprofit Executive Leadership Institute (NELI). I learned many things about myself. For example, I tend to cuss way too much when giving toasts (“Hells yeah, this is the best @#$%& leadership program ever; let’s drink to that $#@%, mo-fos!”). This may explain why I don’t get invited to many weddings or kids’ birthday parties.

The five and a half days were intense, 10 to 12 hours each day learning about important concepts like “Are we spending enough time on the balcony, versus the dance floor?” “Are we using both formative as well as summative evaluations?” “Do we have enough jargon in the field, or should we create more?” And “Have we nonprofit leaders let ourselves go in the dress department?” The first three questions depend on your organization, but the answer to the last one is, “No; grey hooded sweaters and jeans are perfectly appropriate attires for nonprofit leaders, provided they have no more than one visible stain each.” I like to think of myself as a less economically comfortable but equally sexy nonprofit version of Mark Zuckerberg.

The week was a wonderful and much-needed time to connect with colleagues, and many of us seriously rethought our basic strategy for solving challenges. My new ED friend, Michelle, for example had the strategy called “Just Punch People in the Throat.”

Before, my default philosophy for handling everything was the “Gotham City Approach,” which was to destroy something so that a better version could form, for example, “What? Our database is down again? We must destroy it so that a new database could rise from the ashes!” or “The marketing committee is not meeting regularly? We must destroy it so that a new marketing team could rise from the ashes!” Or “What, he left his dishes in the sink again?! We must destroy him so that a new staff who could wash the dishes promptly could rise from the ashes!”

Now I’m thinking about Technical versus Adaptive challenges, Moving the Flywheel, the Fox vs. the Hedgehog, the 7-S’s, the 3 C’s, Flipping the Iceberg, Tickling the Badger, and Riding the T-Rex.

OK, I made up the last two.

What I’ve been thinking about most, though, is an essay from Parker Palmer’s book, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. He talks about how most leaders tend to be extroverts, because society thinks those qualities—being able to be sociable, to network, to give speeches—are what make good leaders, and leadership programs orient toward these skills of manipulating the external world. Focusing on shaping the environment around them, leaders rarely spend time looking inward. And why would they? Looking inward is at best not fun, and at worst messy or even painful.

But leaders, by definition, project light and shadows on the world around them, and if they don’t know themselves, they can project way more shadow than they do light. According to Palmer, we tend to project these shadows below. He talks about leaders in the general sense, so I’ll try to relate that to our nonprofit work:

  • Our identity matters more than others’. In our need to be recognized, to be rewarded, to have a sense of self, we often deprive others. Good leaders understand that “Identity doesn’t depend on titles. It doesn’t depend on degrees. It doesn’t depend on functioning.” At annual dinners, for example, “important” people like politicians sit in the front, close to the stage. But why? Maybe we should save those seats for our students, community members, and key volunteers.
  •  The universe is hostile, and everything is a battle. The work is stressful, and we tend to use metaphors like “continue fighting” and “do or die,” “pull out our big guns,” etc. But this sort of attitude of competition and war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I find that I tend to think that way, especially when there is so much crappiness and unfairness everywhere. But maybe no one is really out to get anyone. Our role as nonprofit professionals is not to fight some vast invisible army bent on evil and injustice, but to restore balance where there is imbalance.
  • Functional Atheism. This is Palmer’s term for our unconscious belief that if anything good will happen, we ourselves have to be agent. Basically, things will continue to suck unless I am personally going to do something about it. This may explain why we nonprofit types burn out so quickly. We each genuinely believe that we and we alone can save the world, and Smokey the Bear does not help at all with his message that “Only YOU can prevent forest fire!” You know what, there are many people in the world, and Palmer says “we do not have to carry the whole load, that we can be empowered by sharing the load with others, and that sometimes we are even free to lay our part of the load down.” Dude. That’s such a relief. If we can all believe that, maybe we won’t all burn out as fast.
  • Fear of chaos. Many of us are chaos-tamers. We like this role, bringing order where there is none. We freak out when systems are not in place or they’re not working perfectly. But all sorts of great stuff comes from chaos. It is necessary for creation.  And when leaders fear it and not treat it as something necessary and natural to the existence of order, others fear it too and then everyone freaks out about everything.
  • Denial of death. We think of death as a bad thing, and we try to hold on to life. This may be why we cling on to programs and projects that should have ended or changed a while ago, or why so many of us have issues with founding board members, who refuse to accept that the death of their involvement and influence may be necessary for new life and ideas to form.

All right, that’s a lot to think about. I haven’t thought this much in a long while since the first episode of Sherlock Holmes (the one with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman). I needed to write these lessons down for my own inner processes. Palmer’s point that we all, especially those of us called “leaders,” can vastly influence the world around us for good or for not-so-good is an important one to mull over. We must take time to know ourselves. We in nonprofit are all unicorns, as I wrote in this post for Valentine’s Day, “Nonprofit Professionals, You are Each a Unicorn.” But even as unicorns, as we do our work, we should take time to think about whether we are casting more shadow than light on the world and people around us.

And if we are, we should destroy ourselves, so that better unicorns could rise from the ashes…