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Since November I have been working on print layout for the Winter 2009/2010 edition of Survival News. “The voices of low-income women”, Survival News is half-yearly-ish compendium of news, personal stories, and advocacy information. Nearly half of this edition is devoted to Survival Tips, a collection of services and advice from legal aid to food programs in 3 languages (English, Spanish and Vietnamese).

At 40 tabloid-sized pages, this edition is 52 square feet of pictures and copy. Survival News has a circulation of 4,000, so altogether that’s enough newsprint to cover 1/3 of Boston’s tallest skyscraper, the John Hancock Building: papering it to the 20th floor. Not bad.

I don’t often find myself in InDesign, the layout program I used, but I still had fun with the project. Due to time and process constraints I couldn’t be as free with the design as I would have liked, but I am proud of the outcome. In keeping with the existing style and editorial demands, my goal was to normalize the ideas and voices within the text. I am sympathetic to criticism of this approach. From David Barringer in his essay “Left Wanting”, writing on the conservative design of liberal magazines:

Timid political art. Stale design. The money excuse. The market dynamic in which political speech is toned down for a presumably thin-skinned public. Artistic cowardice masquerading as commercial sensibility. These are the charges, but what is the role of design in political magazines? Is it to perpetuate a stylistic template? To signify stability?

…

“Design is order, economy, teaching people beauty, creating individuals,” says [Mirko] Ilic [designer for the Village Voice]. “Good design is subversive. And because it’s subversive, good design is left wing.”

If I do the next edition, I hope to be able to spend more time on good design.

An article that confirms my anecdotal experience: “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” from the Stanford Social Innovation review:

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.

That quote is from the brief, yet the last sentence is misleading. According to the article change starts at the board:

Nonprofits must then speak truth to power, sharing their real numbers with their boards and then engaging their boards’ support in communicating with funders. Case studies of organizations that have successfully invested in their own infrastructure have repeatedly noted the need for a shared agenda between the leadership team and the board.

And the article is chock full of fun, familiar anecdotes:

Not only do funders and donors have unrealistic expectations, but the nonprofit sector itself also promotes unhealthy overhead levels. “The 20 percent norm is perpetuated by funders, individuals, and nonprofits themselves,” says the CFO of one of the organizations we studied. “When we benchmarked our reported financials, we looked at others, [and] we realized that others misreport as well. One of our peer organizations allocates 70 percent of its finance director’s time to programs. That’s preposterous!”

From Mission Measurement by way of Entry Level Living’s Allison Jones. Illustration by David Plunkert (it’s included in the article).

My boss pointed me to the NY Times obituary of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (a featured radiobituary on Bubbles in the Think Tank):

In the late 1980s, Mrs. Prophet issued warnings of an impending nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 of her followers left their homes and gathered at the church’s compound near Corwin Springs, Mont., near the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.

Mounting tensions with local residents subsided when the predicted attack did not occur, and church members began returning home. At the same time, a looming face-off with the United States government was averted when church leaders agreed not to store weapons in return for a reinstatement of the church’s tax-exempt status, which had been revoked in 1987.

And yet the IRS claims that “charitable, educational, religious, scientific, literary, fostering national or international sports competi- tion, preventing cruelty to children or animals, and testing for public safety” are the only exempt purposes…

At work we’re pushing the idea of Honest Practices over Best Practices. Honest Practices are stories and analysis that include both successes and failures—the latter being something nonprofits often omit (or reframe). Our focus on developing Honest Practices stems from frustration with the meaninglessness of many “Best Practices” that are out there. From Wikipedia:

A Best practice is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive or reward that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc. The idea is that with proper processes, checks, and testing, a desired outcome can be delivered with fewer problems and unforeseen complications. Best practices can also be defined as the most efficient (least amount of effort) and effective (best results) way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people.

Despite the need to improve on processes as times change and things evolve, best-practice is considered by some as a business buzzword used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use for management, policy, and especially software systems.

As the term has become more popular, some organizations have begun using the term “best practices” to refer to what are in fact merely ‘rules’, causing a linguistic drift in which a new term such as “good ideas” is needed to refer to what would previously have been called “best practices.”

I really want to toss {{Citation Needed}} after the suggestion that “good ideas” is a suitable replacement for what was formerly known as Best Practices. But that would be too Honest.

Two articles came across my desk today that I think are strongly connected. The first is from Danah Boyd on Teaching, nursing and second-wave feminism:

Since the 1970s, the number of brilliant, motivated individuals working as teachers and nurses in particular declined rapidly. Many women left these professions because they had many more opportunities and many men refused to do “women’s work.” Don’t get me wrong – there are some amazing teachers and nurses out there, but sexist constraint meant that the most brilliant, most passionate women inevitably went to these professions while that is no longer the case.

The problem is what has happened since then. I certainly don’t want to go back to the dark ages where women had no choice. But while we’ve opened up doors for women, we haven’t addressed how sexism framed nursing and teaching in ways that are causing us tremendous headaches in society today. Teachers are underpaid and undervalued because we took women’s work for granted. When teaching stopped being women’s work, we didn’t rework our thinking about teaching. As a society, we still have little respect for teachers and nurses and we pay them abysmally. This is deeply rooted in the sexism of the past but the ripple effects today are costly.

The second is from Dan Pallota over at Harvard Business Blogs (more on that in a moment) titled The “Psychic Benefits” of Nonprofit Work Are Overrated Star Trek: Insurrection the movie :

People often tell me that those who work for nonprofits should work for less because of the psychic benefits of being able to make a difference, work with the poor, and so on…

Don’t fall for this Puritan self-sacrificial psychobabble. It’s not the poor who are asking you to work for less. It’s the donating public, including many a wealthy donor. They’re asking you to end poverty and every other great social problem and to do it for them at a discount. And they’re exploiting the images of the poor to get you to agree. The fact that someone makes a one-time sacrificial gift doesn’t mean you’re obligated to make a lifetime sacrificial career choice. If you do the math and the psychic benefit comes up lacking for you, then ask the people who want you to make the world a better place for another kind of benefit that begins with a “p.” Pay.

I definitely feel the first quote flows into the second, and hence the inflammatory title to this post. I think Pallota’s explanation is wrong (Puritanical self-sacrifice) and Boyd’s is correct (we undervalue the work of women).

I find it very telling that social work is reframed as Social Entreprenuership (thank you Harvard Business School), a rhetorical device that allows men to participate. Giving things away is women’s work; getting people to pay for it, now that’s a job for a man.

I was recently invited to participate in a blogging alliance of millennial nonprofity folks. Which is pretty fitting considering I am of the appropriate age range, employment and that “nonprofit” is the largest tag in the tag cloud in the sidebar of this blog.

I can’t speak to any teleological path leading me to where I am today. I can though give the short and contextualized version:

In 2001, as I was preparing to graduate from high school I really wanted to do AmeriCorps (or the military, but my parents were strongly against that). I also hedged my bets and applied to some state colleges—being in California I had some decent options. Unfortunately my AmeriCorps dreams were cut short when my entire application packet (motivational essays, letters of reference, etc.) was lost by the USPS… or so I assumed since no one from AmeriCorps was ever able to consistently return my phone calls. So I went to college.

Three years later, as I was preparing to graduate from college I was looking for things to do. My parents were strongly against me enlisting the previous year (when I really wanted to go) and my friends now in the officer’s program weren’t singing many praises either. I was accepted into Teach for America; but after taking their welcome packet’s advice and calling some alumni, I was told that the benefits I really wanted—structured personal and professional development—weren’t there. The post-graduation internship I really wanted at a local defense contractor didn’t come through either. So I (re)applied to AmeriCorps. To my glee, the new application packet now came with a FedEx envelope. So I moved to Boston to serve in AmeriCorps.

Five years later, I haven’t moved far from that. Working within and with nonprofit organizations has afforded me a lot of flexibility in the work I do and the people I do it with. I find myself driven more by excellence than by mission. Mostly I enjoy the direct problem solving and latitude I have: I haven’t worked myself out of a job yet, so there is obviously room for innovation.

If that’s not a millenial memoir, I don’t know what is.

While cleaning up some files, I came across this awesome scenario I wrote for our AmeriCorps*VISTA orientation last summer. I wrote it to give our new service members an idea of what it’s like to enter a small community nonprofit organization in contemporary times: under-staffed, under-resourced, broadly missioned, lacking in a comprehensive strategic plan. Most importantly, the nonprofit in this scenario lacks a well-prepared board… which is the role you play in this scenario.

I pasted the text of the  scenario below, though you can download the whole thing along with the budget worksheet in a word document(.doc).

Nonprofit Board of Directors Roleplay:

Rural Food Services

эротическая обувь

Mission: “SERVING the needs of Spring County” малолетних порно видео

• эротика 2

Summary:

You and your table make up the Board of Directors of a small nonprofit organization: a rural food-bank that also houses a community radio station. As the Board of Directors, you are responsible for setting overall strategy: balancing the health of the organization with the needs of the community. Every year you create an Annual Budget that provides the Executive Director with the expected income and expenses she is to manage. Unfortunately, you were just informed by your primary funder, a Private Foundation, that due to the current economic climate, all funding will be cut by 50%.

Using the following information about the organization and the community—and your own experiences and imagination—together design an Annual Budget that balances expenses with the newly reduced income. There is no “right” answer.

You have been provided with a Budget Worksheet to help you understand the current expenses and plan your cuts. Do not sweat the math so much as what your overall cost-cutting strategy is.

Be creative, but remember that this is a very common scenario that nonprofit organizations find themselves in.

At the end of this activity, your group will be asked to briefly share your budget with the room. While you do not need to go line by line, you should summarize your overall strategy for the budget, where you had to make major cuts, and the impact you expect those cuts to have upon the organization, its services and the community. интим объявления ростов

Background:

Your organization, Rural Food Services is the only Food Bank in rural Spring County. Covering 1,200 square-miles, Spring County has a population of 40,000 , an average age of 42, and a median income of $22,500. Light commercial (call centers) and light manufacturing (automotive and industrial parts) are the primary employers. And a WalMart Supercenter.

Rural Food Services was founded in the early 1980s to provide free and reduced-cost food and staples to rural Spring County. It is the only Food Bank in Spring County.  20% of residents (8,000 people) in the county receive aid from the Food Bank each year.  The food itself is donated from distributors and the government, but Rural Food Services must pickup and store the food, dispose of rotten or expired food, and comply with licensing and inspection requirements.

In the year 2000, the organization applied for and received a low-power, non-commercial radio license. Since then, KSRV has been broadcasting local news, disaster alerts and community-produced stories from a small studio in a former storage room.  KSRV is the only non-commercial radio station serving Spring County, and the only radio station that consistently covers local issues. All programming is created locally by volunteers, but Rural Food Services must pay for music licensing, antenna-tower rental and equipment maintenance.

Rural Food Services depends upon volunteers for nearly all of its operations. In addition to the Executive Director, the staff only includes a Finance/Operations Manager, a Grants/Fundraising Manager, and a Volunteer Manager.

Current Circumstances: голова болит секс

You have just been informed that your primary funder, the Pierpont Memorial Trust, has decided to reduce all grants by 50% because of the current economic climate. Though your organization receives a mixture of private and government grants, individual donations and earned income, this news will severely impact your organization in the coming year. Tough decisions have to be made about how to cut costs with the knowledge that the need for your organization’s services has not lessened (they have most likely grown). The questions you must tackle include:

• What do you

  think the organization’s priorities are? Immediate and long-term

• What values do you

  think the organization should protect? Internally and externally.

• What sacrifices are you willing to make to get the organization through the year?

In addition to cutting expenses, Rural Food Services has two “Earned Income” strategies for creating income based on their services, though each has its own drawbacks and implications.

1. Sliding Scale Fee charged to individuals using the Food Bank depending on their ability to pay. Increasing this income increases the amount charged to Rural Food Services’s clients.
2. Underwriting (advertising) for the Radio Station from local and national businesses. Increasing this income will reduce the local/independent focus of the station’s community-led programming.

Lastly, income from Individual Donations (“Individual Giving”) has been left open. While the current economic climate forecasts a decrease in individual giving, you could recommend the implementation of aggressive individual fundraising (especially from “Major Donors”); though such a strategy would require significant inputs of staff time and resources.

The Budget Making Process:

As the Board of Directors, you have control over how much money is allocated for specific expenses (“line items”) in the budget. For example, “staffing” or “rent”. You must take into account the impact of that reduction upon the activities that money is used for—though ultimately it is the role of the Executive Director (not yours) to cut costs within a particular line item. For example, you can decide to cut staffing costs by $20,000, but it is the Executive Director’s role to decide whether that becomes an across the board pay-cut or the elimination of a position. You still must take into account the impact such a cut will have though and make a recommendation for what that cut will look like.

Examples:

Reduce Staffing by $20,000 – The Volunteer Manager position could be reduced to half-time. Volunteers themselves could take over some responsibilities.

Reduce Equipment Maintenance budget by $5,000 – Try to stretch things out. Seek equipment donations if necessary.

Stop providing Health Insurance – Staff can apply for individual coverage (a de facto pay-cut)

Budget Worksheet: this can be downloaded in the attached Word Document.

Douglas Rushkoff wraps up Life, Inc. with the clearest conception of “act local, think global” I’ve read (and usually seems to be misinterpreted).

Instead of fighting corporations with corporations of our own [like nonprofits--Ben], or working through corporations to reduce their negative impact on society, we’re better off reinventing ourselves as humans. We live on a terrain and in a dimension they can pollute but to which they will never belong. By working on this human-scaled landscape instead, we can create changes in our own lives and communities that stand a chance, in aggregate, of trickling up and changing how the big world operates as well.

We can’t look for those kinds of changes overnight. The grand expectations we have for ourselves and our achievements are really just the false promises of consumerism, brand culture and the politics of revolutionary change. This is the ideological heritage of the Renaissance, and what brought us into the cycle of utopian hopes and alienated cynicism we’re churning through today.

We’d each like to launch a national movement, create the website that teaches the world how to build community from the bottom up, develop the curriculum that saves public schools, or devise the clever anti-marketing media campaign that breaks the spell of advertising once and for all. But these ego trips are the artifacts of the strident individualism we were taught to embrace. The temptation to save the whole world—and get the credit—comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place. A successful movement depends on getting attention from media and institutions that are dead set against recognizing our ability to create value ourselves, and for its own sake. The minute they find out what we’re up to, it’s their job to dash our hopes and return our attention to the false idols they’re selling us.

I found the following on the photocopier (after a few days, I assume its orphaned). Sourced from a SurveyMonkey print-out, it’s part of a “BYU Chair Study” which through context I assume is polling what training resources the owner of this printout requires.

These are attributes of Respected Chairs. The context is a faculty member within an academic institution, but it’s pretty easy to convert to other contexts. As always, the gems beneath the headings (for example, anything that recognizes the time and place for procrastination has my vote).

Be healthy and well-balanced (take care of yourself and your other life): Family, friends, community, religion, teaching & research, health and emotional needs

Be competent: Key leadership skills, preparation, participation, people, issues, professional & national trends

Be collegial: Balanec of sociable and formal, work and personal, internal and external to department

Be effective at managing time: balance important vs. urgent; delegate, optimize secretary/staff/comittees, prioritize

Be proactive: Identify and implement personal program/goals, be responsible, change self – not others

Be aware of the power of your position and use it effectively: Understand sources, extent, and limitations of chair power/influence; exercise skillfully

The Ambushers

Be effective in making decisions: Emergencies, mistakes, red flags, stakeholders, when to procrastinate; maximize or satisfy

Be credible: Authentic, believable, inspiring, reliable, sensible, appropriately transparent

Be humble: influence & success through humility, level 5 leadership, egonomics, servant chair

Be skillful in communication: Timely and appropriate information; letters, memos, personal statements/notes (in & out of department)

Be in harmony with your institution: Customs, directives, guiding principles, history, mission, official documents, tenets

Be trustworthy: Build trust in self/others, tap efficiency of trust; recognize/manage enemies of trust

Be politically adept: Allies, connections, favors, gate keepers, information, opponents, social relations

Be accepting of your role as chair; embrace and make the most of it: Less autonomy, changed relationships, careful speech, realigned perspectives, empowerment