Nonprofit AF

Funders, this is the rainy day you have been saving up for

Posted on March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A cat, grey and orange with a patch of white on their chest, sitting staring wide-eyed out the window, which is covered with lots of water droplets, indicating rain. Pixabay.com]

Hi everyone. I hope you are doing OK amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s scary. Take care of yourself while socially distancing. Most of us have never faced anything like this before, and we cannot take any chances. Cancel everything and stay home. I am in Seattle. My kids’ schools are closed for the next six weeks, possibly longer. It is going to be rough, but we are far luckier than most, as my partner and I both have flexible schedules.

A lot of folks are hurting right now. Small business owners, people without sick leave, gig workers, folks without childcare, those who have no emergency savings, incarcerated people, people experiencing homelessness, disabled folks, kids who rely on school for food, those who are undocumented—all face daunting challenges with no foreseeable end date. Meanwhile, nonprofits face drastic reductions in revenues because of canceled events and other factors, which means we are less able to help during a time when we are most needed.

Amidst all this, I got a message from a colleague saying that a foundation just informed its grantees that due to its corpus being affected by the stock market, in part because of the Coronavirus, it may cut down on funding, possibly not even be able to disburse committed funds.

Funders, fund sabbaticals. Nonprofits, have a sabbatical policy.

Posted on March 2, 2020March 2, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: Three adorable puppies, asleep with their heads resting on the edge of what looks like a rope basket. Awwwwww. Pixabay.com]

It’s been over two months now since I stepped down as an executive director. I wish I could say that, unchained from the shackles of leadership, I would be able to relax and recharge like I had planned. I haven’t been able to yet. I have to unlearn so many strategies that I adopted to be an effective ED: Constant vigilance, emotion suppression, functioning on reduced sleep, abandonment of personal hygiene, etc.

And then there’s the guilt. I feel like I have abandoned my friends in the trenches. This guilt manifests in my trying to buy colleagues lunches and coffees, leading to conversations like this:

Me: Let me buy you lunch.

Colleague: That’s sweet, but you don’t need to do that.

Me: No, I insist! It’s the least I can do! You are facing so much! Let me pay!

Colleague: You are unemployed…

Me: Oh. You’re right. Can…can you buy me lunch…?

10 ways you or your organization may be an askhole

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: Three yellow ducklings, two facing the camera, one with a slightly quizzical look, like “Did you just ask me to come up with an entire grant proposal for your organization as part of this job application?” Pixabay.com]

A while back, I wrote a post called “Are you or your nonprofit or foundation being an askhole?” An askhole, according to Urban Dictionary, is someone who asks for advice, but then completely ignores it or does the opposite, or someone who asks a lot of inane questions. However, I would say there are other ways to be askholes. Namely, asking people to do stuff for free or making unreasonable requests. Here are some ways you or your organization may be an askhole:

Trust-Based Philanthropy: Imagining better, more effective partnerships between funders and nonprofits

Posted on January 27, 2020January 27, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A black dog and an orange striped cat nuzzling one another. Or the cat just slammed into the dog, I’m not really sure. Let’s assume they’re friends, because that would make this image a lot more relevant for this post, because if dogs and cats can be friends, then maybe funders and nonprofits can be more effective partners. Pixabay.com]

Hi everyone. Happy Lunar New Year. If 2020 has sucked for you so far, you have a fresh new start. May the Year of the Rat bring you joy, love, good health, multi-year general operating funds, and Oxford Commas.

Last week, I wrote “It’s 2020. Be bold or get the hell out of the way.” Our sector’s addiction to intellectualizing, equivocating, risk-avoiding, and time-wasting is lethal, and there are few places where this is more present than within philanthropy. Because of power dynamics, these philosophies and practices get passed down to nonprofits, rendering us all less effective, leading to the continuation of injustice. We need philanthropy to be bold.

Which is why I am so grateful that the Headwaters Foundation, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and The Whitman Institute just launched the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, “a five-year, peer-to-peer funder initiative with the goal of bringing greater vulnerability, transparency, and humility to philanthropy.”

Time for our sector to draw a new fish!

Posted on January 12, 2020January 15, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: Profile of a longhorn cowfish underwater. They are yellow with grey blotches and light turquoise blue dots. They have a big blue eye set beneath two little “horns.” They have a pouty light-colored mouth with a grey ring around it. One small diaphanous blue fin rises out of their lower back like a magnificent tramp stamp. Wow, this is the hardest image to describe ever. This is not an attractive fish. I hope they have a good personality…Pixabay.com]

A while ago, I read about an experiment where kids were asked to draw a fish. One group was just told to draw a fish; the other group were told the same thing, but they were also given an example of a fish drawing someone else had drawn. The kids in the first group creatively drew all types of fish. The kids who were given the example, with few exceptions, drew fish that were very similar to the example. (I can’t seem to find this study or article again; if you know it, please put the link in the comment section).

I bring this up because it is yields a good lesson for all of us. And that lesson is: Flossing in an important part of good dental hygiene. OK, that’s not the lesson, but that’s still an important reminder. The lesson is that all of us in this sector have been given so many fish drawing examples—fundraising fish, capacity building fish, leadership fish, board governance fish, hiring fish, etc.—and they constantly and unconsciously affect how we think about and do everything.

If you think about it, so many of the things that we do are done a certain way because that’s just how someone else told us things should be done. There are few legal requirements. Which means most systems and practices are traditions that we pass down, and after a while, we just accept that that’s how we do them, the way the kids who were given a fish drawing example instantly assume that that’s the way a fish should be drawn.