Because of my posts about being a nonprofit wage slave, and being unable to make rent on a nonprofit “salary”, someone took issue with this. Actually, more than one person did, and I’m glad about it. I got a reader email saying,

“I HATE YOUR PITY PARTY! IF YOU DON’T LIKE HOW YOU’RE PAID IN NONPROFITS THEN GET OUT!”

And some other, less choice words.

And well, shoot man.

What are people who want to change the world supposed to do? Some of us are best suited to being social workers. Some of us are best suited to being therapists. Some of us are best suited to being bus drivers or nonprofit office managers. We still deserve a higher wage. I will show you why.

Here’s my question for you.

Why should people in the nonprofit sector make less than every other sector?

Rick Cohen on Blue Avocado says, “It’s official, we’re paid less than any other sector.”

Proof:

And it's not like we're going to get paid significantly more in other sectors.

The fact is man, wages haven’t risen since the 1970s in most sectors.

Proof:

More Proof:

That means MOST people, not just nonprofits, are getting the short end of the stick. Especially women. Especially women of color. So even if we “get out of the sector” it is not much better out there than in here.

And people from every economic strata, such as doctors, nurses, air traffic controllers, hotel maids, pepsi truck drivers, are getting shafted. Here’s a post I did about how no sector is safe. Using data and detailed economic research and in-depth investigative journalism from Mother Jones. One of the top progressive nonprofit news sources in the US.

Starting your own business is not the answer.

You ended with a “start your own business” rant and frankly, that’s not a reality for most people. We shouldn’t have to start our own businesses to make a living wage. Not everyone is suited to being an entrepreneur.

America is also not one of the best places to start a business, contrary to popular myth. The best places? New Zealand. Canada. Australia. According to DoingBusiness.com, the US is ranked 13th in ease of starting a business.

Maybe next time you criticize someone wanting to help people get paid more, you should do your own research into this issue. It’s easy for you, as an english-speaking white man with a cushy job at a foundation in America with many resources to get started as an entrepreneur.

Have you ever stopped to consider what the barriers are for a black woman with two kids? A single mom of any color? What about a black man coming out of the judicial system? What about a hispanic man who may not speak English?

Income equality will help EVERYONE’s standard of living rise. And that IS worth fighting for.

We need to speak for those who need our support to get pay parity. Income equality. Equal treatment no matter what the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, how long they’ve been unemployed, or how many children they have or are planning to have. Maybe you’ve never experienced this discrimination personally, but let me tell you, it’s out there.

The Spirit Level Book (a must read!)

In a truly equal society, as argued in “The Spirit Level, Why Equality is Better for Everyone,” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, say:

Since we finished writing The Spirit Level in the spring of 2008, there have been many more studies reporting relationships between inequality and health. Nine of the new studies look specifically at rich, developed countries. Seven find, as we do, that health is worse in more unequal societies.

AND

“There is now evidence that inequality played a central causal role in the financial crashes of 1929 and of 2008. We suggested that inequality leads to increases in debt. It turns out that they are intimately related.” For more details, check out this article.

So if you think that it doesn’t matter that people at nonprofits don’t make enough money, then you’re basically saying that you don’t care that people who want to make the world better are less healthy, and that we have more giant financial crashes.

From the same article above:

“In his first major speech as leader of the Labour Party (in the UK), Ed Miliband said: “I do believe this country is too unequal and the gap between rich and poor doesn’t just harm the poor, it harms us all . . .”"

Let me just clarify this once and for all.

THIS IS NOT A PITY PARTY.

I’m here to call attention to disparities. I’m here to be a cultural critic. I’m here to help people think about how they want to change their worlds, their nonprofits, their lives.

My prescription for positive change? Unionize. Organize. Get clear about what you want to change and then change it. I’m not going to change it for you. But I’m not going to pretend that business as usual is just fine with me.

Wake up man! This is NOT a meritocracy.

And this is not a pity party. This is a call to action.

Do you understand me now?

You can tell the pioneers, because they’re the ones with arrows all over their chests.

I’m happy to stand beside Dan Pallotta, a white man who writes for the Harvard Business Review, and author of “Uncharitable” and agitate for a stronger nonprofit sector, to agitate for everyone who is getting underpaid at nonprofits right now. To agitate for better pay and better treatment for everyone. If that means unions, then so be it. If there’s another way, I’d be open to hearing what it is.

I’m happy to speak up. And I hope if you feel the same way, you’ll leave a comment, email me, or say hi on Twitter.

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This is not a pity party. You understand? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on January 16, 2012.

“In its most advanced sectors, a highly concentrated capitalism has begun selling “fully equipped” blocks of time, each of which is a complete commodity combining a variety of other commodities. This is the logic behind the appearance, within an expanding economy of “services” and leisure activities, of the “all-inclusive” purchase of spectacular forms of housing, of collective pseudo-travel, of participation in cultural consumption and even of sociability itself, in the form of “exciting conversations.” “meetings with celebrities” and suchlike. Spectacular commodities of this type could obviously not exist were it not for the increasing impoverishment of the realities they parody. And, not surprisingly, they are also paradigmatic of modern sales techniques in that they may be bought on credit.”

So, have you ever been to Disney world? Have you been to a Disney “timeshare”? Me TOO.

It was a completely artificial experience. It made me want to seek out nature, and the dark, and something more real.

If you have been similarly dissatisfied with Disney and its sanitized backward-looking version of life, perhaps you might enjoy this video.

Guy Debord continues:

“The development of capitalism meant the unification of irreversible time on a world scale. Universal history became a reality because the entire globe was brought under the sway of this times’ progression. But a history that is thus the same everywhere at once has as yet amounted to nothing more than an intrahistorical refusal of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production -time cut up into equal abstract fragments. Unified irreversible time still belong to the world market-and, by extension, to the world spectacle.

The general time of human non-development also has a complementary aspect, that of a consumable time which on the basis of a determinate form of production, presents itself in the everyday life of society as a pseudo-cyclical time.

Pseudo-cyclical time is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the time as commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential traits off that time: homogeneous and exchangeable units, and the suppression of any qualitative dimension. But as a by-product of time-as-commodity intended to to promote and maintain the backwardness of everyday life it necessarily finds itself laden with false attributions of value, and it must manifest itself as a succession of artificially distinct moments.

…modern society’s obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television. The social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations -moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance, and as desirable by definition. This particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. Yet even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of life, the only thing being generated, the only thing to be seen and reproduced, is the spectacle-albeit a ta higher than usual level of intensity. And what has been passed off as authentic life turns out to merely be a life more authentically spectacular.

Our epoch, which presents its time to itself as essentially made up of many frequently recurring festivities, is actually an epoch without festival. Those moments when, under the reign of cyclical time, the community would participate in a luxurious expenditure of life, are strictly unavailable to a society where neither community nor luxury exists. Mass pseudo-festivals, with their travesty of dialogue and their parody of the gift, may incite people to excessive spending, but they produce only a disillusion – which is in turn offset by further false promises. The self-approbation of the time of modern survival can only be reinforced, in the spectacle, b reduction in its use value. The reality of time has been replaced by its publicity.”

From: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Pages 107, 110, 111-112

Next time you see a vacation package offered, or a ski mountain, or a European tour advertised, know that this is what you’re buying. The “publicity” of “authentic” time.

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Have you ever bought an auction “vacation package”? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on November 9, 2011.

Last year when i went downtown in Austin, on Halloween night, people were dressed up as sexy geishas, white people in blackface, “terrorists” and more. So it is in the anti-racist spirit of the Halloween that I would like to see that I present you the project of STARS at Ohio State. (Reblogged from Sociological images)

PS.

Earlier this year I went to a performance of “the Mikado” by gilbert and Sullivan. It was…. pretty racist. Nothing had been changed from the original. It was disgusting. All of the names were the same, Nanki-Poo, etc. And the people in costume were all white people pretending to be Japanese people, “schoolgirls” dressed up as “Geisha” and dude I don’t care if it’s a “critique” of “british politics” STFU it’s RACIST and we got up and walked out pretty quick. And I actually PAID to go to that thing. UGH. So, if you’re into G&S and wondering if you should go and see The Mikado, just… don’t.

When you dress up tonight, REMEMBER: We are a culture, not a costume originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on October 31, 2011.

Do you take risks?

How?

Last week in the Harvard Business Review, Dan Pallotta talks about how taking risks is important. if we didn’t take risks, we wouldn’t have cures for diseases. We wouldn’t have so much of what we have now. But in the nonprofit world, risktaking is discouraged. Funders would rather see that you have a tried and true model before they invest. They want to see that you have a lot of money and that you are a “safe bet.” This seems backwards to me. Like foundations want to be investment bankers and get the greatest yield for their dollar amounts.

Well, guess what, strategic philanthropists. The greatest yield for your dollar amounts is in a developing nation, where people live on pennies a day. Phil Cubeta, over at GiftHub, writes:

“Albert, a community foundation leader orginally trained in philosophy asks such questions (on his blog under his own name, even). For most, though, the answer about goals is, effective and efficient strategies with measurable outcomes is the operative goal. Giving Smart gets results. Let’s get results. We will then be smart.” As the best salesperson I ever knew once said to me, “Phil, don’t ask why there is air, just breathe.” Maybe Albert should stop asking why the poor suffer so, and just get on with the grantmaking. The more we explore root causes the more complicit we realize we are, and the more demoralized and the less our smart grants seem sufficient expiation for our moral blindness. Better to choose goals by passion, prejudice or whimsy, and concentrate on the effectiveness of the means.”

So, if wages of most people had moved up with the rest of the moneyed classes, we wouldn’t need to court the favor of the big foundations, because our communities would have the money to take our nonprofits higher. The trouble is, they have most of the money now. Don’t believe me? It’s true. The top 10% of America’s wealthy hold over 75% of the wealth in the USA. I have statistics. I can back this up.

Top 10% have 75% of the wealth

We can try grassroots fundraising, but the reason its’ not working so well anymore is because people have less and less money to give you.

So what is a nonprofit professional to do? The way I see it, we could do several things.

1. One of the things we could do is raise wages for everyone who works at nonprofits. Since this probably won’t happen voluntarily, we should consider getting unions for nonprofit workers, so that people will have cost of living raises, healthcare paid for, and be insulated from wrongful termination. When we start to address income inequality within our own organizations, we are truly making a difference at the grassroots level.

2. Second verse, same as the first!

3. We can start agitating on a local government level, or if you prefer, advocating, for a better working climate and more unions for people in our local economies. Whether that’s day laborers or other people who work at nonprofits, this is something that we can all agree that we want. If it’s too big of a problem to look at how politicians are bought and sold on the national level, then look at the local level. Should commissioners of your city or your mayor be bought out? Perhaps not. Perhaps these elected officials are still small enough to listen to you, if you get enough people around you. If you shout loud enough. So start there.

4. Run for office yourself. Get a sense of the political process. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the problems, start to be part of the solution. Abolish At-Will Employment.

5. Or you could just sit there and whine and complain and talk about moving to another country. Someplace “safer.” But where is going to be safe if the US crumbles? We’ve got all of the world’s currencies tied up with our own. I’ve done the whine and complain thing, and all I’ve felt at the end of it was just hopelessness and despair. Because there really is no place like home, and we can fight to take it back.

6. Civil disobedience. What does this mean? Go to protests. Be visible. Make graffiti stencils and put these around different neighborhoods in your town. Why not? There’s nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

7. Start to build a social media following, of people who want the same things you want. Clean air. Clean water. Higher wages, better local economies, better food for everyone, less dependence on oil, equality, true equality.

Maybe I’ve been reading too much Terry Pratchett lately, I’m talking like a revolutionary. But what’s so revolutionary about wanting better treatment for all nonprofit workers?

Do you have any ideas? How can we get out of this mess? The roof is on fire! What’s your solution?

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Is your nonprofit a “safe bet”? Let’s Get Dangerous! originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on August 24, 2011.

My little brother’s story

Let me tell you about one of my little brothers. He graduated college a couple of years ago, and has since bounced from job to job, trying to find his place in the world. He worked in a supermarket, at the fish counter. He works mowing lawns and trimming hedges. In the winter he works snowplowing the roads. He is selling cars right now and looking for another job. His boss canceled all of his days off so that he could be on the lot for 3 weeks in a row, trying to sell cars in one of the worst economies this country has ever seen. He never complains. I have never known a more hardworking person. He is living with my parents and has lived with them since he graduated, because he can’t afford his own place.

I never talk about him, because I feel so sad and helpless to do anything for him. I see him suffering and want to help him find his place in the world. I want to help him find fulfillment, a job with true security, and direction. But with the world the way it is, I doubt he will find any of this.

Let’s talk about context. I want to talk with you about three lies, and three truths.

Lie: All our lives, if we are American, we are taught that interdependence is weak.

Lie:We are taught that we have to go out and be the lone hero.

Lie: Our culture has taught us that consuming goods will solve our problems and ease our pain. It even implies that without consumer goods, we have nothing and therefore we are nothing.

So if you’re a new graduate, and you don’t want to live with your parents, but get out and be the lone hero and buy lots of stuff, you may feel pretty low right now. Why are you losing?

Change gears for a second. Have you heard about the protests in London and how they are spreading to the rest of England? Then you’ve probably heard about the riots in Egypt, in Spain, in Denmark, in Greece, in France, and other places too. What’s the deal? A whole bunch of people, graduates without a future, rising up? We could see them as thugs and violent anarchists, but what’s the greater context behind the protests?

Um, hello? The austerity measures that the EU is trying to put into place are basically helping millions of people fall off the poverty cliff, and I am not down with that.

People in Europe are protesting enforced austerity measures which mean that they are going to have to pay more for college, that their social services programs are being cut, that they are going to have much poorer lives while the bankers who ruined the economy, and the biggest corporations who don’t have to pay taxes get off SCOT FREE.

Dr. Cornell West and Tavis Smiley on the Poverty Tour

And now here we are, in America, with the same austerity measures, poverty of graduates with no future. Luckily Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornell West are on tour exposing poverty in America.

Paul Mason of the BBC talks about “A new sociological type: The graduate with no future.” in his article, “Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere.”

Nothing left to lose
His article explains that when people graduate and there are no jobs for them, they decide to get connected and go and protest. I don’t agree with everything that he says, specifically when he says;

“This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because – even where you get rapid economic growth – it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.”

Londoners seem to think that there are root causes people like Paul are overlooking. I think we could all have better standards of living with better corporate taxation and better funding of NGOs, nonprofits and charities from the government. And as I understand it, the protests in Tottenham Court in London happened in part because youth clubs were shut down and youth had no place to go. A case for funding more social services and more charities if I ever heard one!

Diane Abbott, on Tottenham Court riots

According to “This Can’t be Happening”The slashing of social service funding, particularly for youth related matters from education to recreation, by Britain’s Conservative led coalition government, has accelerated the conversion of Tottenham into a “tinder box waiting to explode,” declares Diane Abbott, the first black women ever elected to Britain’s Parliament. Abbott represents a district adjacent to Tottenham.

When people protest, and break shop windows and set fire to cars, as they did in London a few nights ago, it’s because they have nothing left to lose. They are galvanized enough to demand change. You may not like their methods, but they may feel they have no other choice, that no one will listen unless they resort to violence.

Egypt Protests

Social Media aids protests
Paul goes on: “6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before – and the quintessential experience of the 20th century – was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratization.”

The methods employed by many protesters in Egypt, England, and France include social media, which allows for people to act more like the Apaches, who resisted against American “manifest destiny” for years because they were decentralized and everyone could be a leader, communicate with each other and then drop back into the scenery and be an ordinary citizen again.

We’ve got protests by graduates with no future. they are in debt for school, and they are struggling to find work, or giving it up and just getting mad at the system, and deciding a brick through a window is better than sitting at home just feeling depressed. They call up their friends, and learn to do things together to express what’s happening.

They are illustrating interdependence, expressing their dissatisfaction with the state of the world. I am not advocating violence. I am advocating acknowledging our interdependence, and thinking about collective power.

Truth: Interdependence makes us all stronger. We are better together than we are apart.

Truth:The lone hero is capitalist propaganda. We are all in this together. This is what fundraising keeps reminding people. We are all in this together, so let’s do our bit.

Truth: Consuming goods is neither good nor bad. Obviously, buying fair-trade and local is important, but apart from that, consuming is as apolitical as brushing your teeth. No one really cares if you don’t drive a Ferarri. No one really cares that your clothes don’t come from the most expensive shop in town. Your life is worth just as much if you have a million dollars or one dollar. When we help donors care about our causes, we are encouraging them to step out of a dream of consumerism, and into one where we can help make people who are economically disadvantaged matter more.

Greece Protests

When I see those protests in London, Paris or Greece, I think, “My little brother, if he was a bit more politically aware, could be there. He could be allying with people who have nothing left to lose. He could be attempting to make change.”

How does this apply to us, here, now? What can we do, where we are, in this moment?

We need to be helping new graduates ally with our nonprofits and help them see that they can help make a better world without violence.

We need to depend on each other, to recognize the strength in building networks of friends, colleagues, and family members. To build coalitions and alliances with other sister nonprofits so that we can set the example for others, save money, save time, and get more things done.

No matter what your political inclination, you must admit that the world economic system is pretty broken. We all need to work together now.

Can you make a commitment to reaching out to a nonprofit with a similar cause to yours this week? Even if you feel like your plate is full, can you lend a hand to someone for an hour?

Fundraising can be a lonely job. The more we communicate with each other, the more we can depend on each other, create relationships not just with donors but with other fundraisers, and share our knowledge, our expertise, and our time to help lift everyone up.

And yes, I’m walking my talk. I’m reaching out this week, and I will reach out next week too. If you want to chat, I’m here. This is my phone number. 512-763-5161. Go for it.

Do you know a Graduate with no future? What is up with these protests? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on August 16, 2011.

Half the Sky! Read it!

Lately I’ve been reading “Half the Sky” by Sheryl WuDunn, and Nicholas Kristof, about fundraising and international aid efforts. It is extremely well-researched, and well-written. Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American ever to be awarded the Pulitzer prize, deserves it 100%.

International aid is a lot more complicated than it seems at first blush. I’ve written about “The Myth of the Naked African Child” before, and rather than reprise that post, I’d like to share a little story with you, from ‘Half the Sky’ which, by the way, you would not want to read during a serious depressive episode.

This title quote comes from a person at a concert by Bono, who feels that aid does Africa more harm than good.

The passage reads,

“…Economists have noted that it’s difficult to find any correlation between amounts of aid going to a country and development in that country. As Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian put it in a 2008 article in The Review of Economics and Statistics:

“We find little robust evidence of a positive (or negative) relationship between aid inflows into a country and its economic growth. we also find no evidence that aid works better in better policy or geographical environments, or that certain forms of aid work better than others. our findings suggest that for aid to be effective in the future, the aid apparatus will have to be rethought.”

Half the Sky! Read the book by Sheryl WuDunn and Nick Kristof!

We’re great admirers of Bono, who has been indefatigable in support of aid for Africa and who knows the subtleties of development; he talks poverty policy as well as he sings. Yet when Bono spoke at an international conference in Tanzania in 2007, he was heckled by some Africans who insisted that aid isn’t what Africa needs and that he should back off. Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan, complained about the calamitous consequences of “the international cocktail of good intentions.” James Shikwati of Kenya has pleaded with Western donors: “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

In 2000, a world health conference in Nigeria set a target: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would use bed nets to protect them from malaria. In reality, only 3% were using bed nets in 2005. There is also a legitimate concern that aid drives up the local exchange rate of African countries, undermining business competitiveness.

Maybe we should let an African tell us what she wants. Here’s a Ted talk by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, first female finance minister for Nigeria, entitled, “Want to help Africa? Do business here”

Highlights from her talk:

“We are tired of being the subject of aid.”

“We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, and be more democratic, and we have to do it ourselves.”

“The best way to help Africans is to create jobs and help people stand on their own feet.”

“Some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women.” -Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Finance Minister in Nigeria

If you want to do more to help the Half The Sky movement, go here.

What do you think? Do you agree that investment in women and the economy is the best solution for the problems that aid causes in Africa?

Please leave a comment and tell me what your response is.

Dear Western Donors: “For God’s Sake, Please Just Stop” originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on January 27, 2011.

Over on White Courtesy Telephone, there’s a new post on the Challenge of American Consumerism to Nonprofit Work.

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself, “Would my donors have more attention and money to give to my cause if they weren’t constantly buying new products and being distracted by new advertisements?”

That’s kind of a leading question, but my guess is yes.

When Dan Pallotta says in his book Uncharitable that nonprofits are competing with Nike, Coke and other big name brands for the attention of donors, he is correct. With our small nonprofit advertising budgets, there’s no way we can hope to compete, not even if we spent the entire agency budget on advertising.

So what is the solution?

How can we stop this consumerist avalanche, and redirect attention, when we are riding it ourselves as we blog from new computers and tweet from our smartphones and so on?

Keith Farnish, an environmentalist, writes in his book, “A Matter of Scale”

“The “happiness” that comes from holding a new piece of technical wizardry in your hands is something created by the system that needs you to feel happy in buying that piece of technical wizardry; because if you didn’t feel happy then you wouldn’t want to buy it. The sad fact is that there are few real rewards to be had from following the consumer dream, apart from the initial flush of excitement that raises our endorphin levels – the same hormones that make childbirth more bearable – and thus leave you with a chemically-induced sense of happiness or wellbeing. This then leads you to associate buying things (or taking part in other artificial “experiences” for that matter) with good times, so you do it again, and again, and again. If all this sounds like a circular argument, then you have spotted the exact point I am making – you, the consumer, are stuck in a positive feedback loop which is growing increasingly urgent: “Buy now, while stocks last!” “Hurry, closing down sale!” “Limited edition!” “Special offer!” And all the while the economy keeps growing, and the amount of carbon dioxide being thrown into the atmosphere keeps going up.”

How To Keep People Disconnected

One: Reward Us For Being Good Consumers
Two: Make Us Feel Good For Doing Trivial Things (greenwashing or pinkwashing, anyone?)
Three: Give Us Selected Freedom
Four: Pretend We Have A Choice
Five: Sell Us A Dream
Six: Exploit Our Trust
Seven: Lie To Us
Eight: Scare Us
Nine: Abuse Us
Ten: Give Us Hope

If you want more context and explanation around these ten basic ideas, click here.

Farnish suggests some radical things you can do to fight consumerism and disconnection. I am not saying that I advocate all of them, but it seems that the time has come to consider our options.

We can make change inside our organizations, and we also, I believe, need to reconsider our strategies for engaging donors and stakeholders outside the organization.

If we are actively soliciting, say, Coke to come into our schools so that we will get more money, can we ask ourselves, “What is the ethical trade-off?” If we are trying to get Boeing to sponsor our annual dinner, can we sit back and think, “What are the implications of our aligning ourselves with a weapons manufacturer?”

How can we give people hands-on experiences of connection with our cause? How can we help them get RE-CONNECTED with their purpose as it aligns with ours, which is to make the world a better place?

No matter what size your fundraising office, this is something we need to think about. It goes beyond an appeal letter. Beyond an email or a Facebook poke. It has to do with our basic yearning for our communities to grow strong, and our earth to be healthy. Aligning our values to our deepest desires, and from there, convincing people to take action.

No small task, with the millions of ways to distract ourselves and disconnect. But if we can even meet people where they are distracting themselves, (via videogames like SecondLife, and others) we might be able to make a dent in this mass distraction.

Do you have any ideas? Please leave a comment.

Are you a nonprofiteer AND a good consumer? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on January 14, 2011.

This is a must watch video.

Does your nonprofit or company tell you to “be positive” and “smile”?

Is that in your job description?

Why is it wrong to “smile” and “be positive”?

Have you ever experienced:

1. Bosses telling you not just to do your job, but to make people around you happy, and smile at them all the time.

2. Trying to control the moods of people around you, because if you’re not making them happy you’re a bad person and a bad worker who can never fix any problems of the world!

3. Not being satisfied until you have exhausted yourself in pursuit of making other people happy, and then not even then. And your true feelings? Stuffed under your shirt.

4. Never feeling like you can be your “real self” with people

Okay, listen up.

No more smiling masks.

No. You can take off the mask now. It’s time for everyone to realize that “trying to be happy” is their problem.

It should be okay for you to cry at work. Or be angry. Or laugh. Or be indifferent. Or bored. Very few people are super-excited to be at their desk all day.

The real kicker is the EXPECTATION by the boss, board, or others that we get super-excited, whether it’s for the job interview or the daily grind. If someone in authority at your job tries to police your feelings, and tells you that you’re “uptight” or “you need to smile more,” it’s time to start looking for a new job.

You have a right to express your feelings.

You are completely capable of doing an incredible job without being the “Manic Pixie DreamGirl.”

It would be so easy to blame “The Secret” but I think the problem goes deeper than that, into the positive psychology movement which has been embraced by corporate America and increasingly by the nonprofit world as a means of social control.

If you are a fundraising professional, you ESPECIALLY are under pressure to smile, to be nice, to be excited about the work.

Don’t buy the hype.

It’s okay to be serious, to be real, to be focused on the urgency of your mission. You don’t have to run around with pompoms and cheerlead 365 days a year.

Cut yourself some slack.

Realize that no matter what your outward mood is, the work will get done.

Take off your mask now.

Smile or Die originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on November 26, 2010.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be interviewing different nonprofit leaders, asking them questions, and hopefully, getting some answers around what the nonprofit sector leadership is going to look like in the next 20 years.

Larissa DeLuna, of YNPN and the American Heart Association

Who are you?

My name is Larissa De Luna, I am a 29 year-old Austinite working in the non-profit world.

What’s your day job?

I am the Director of Health Equity for the American Heart Association.

What are you passionate about, personally?

Helping others, whether it’s volunteering for a kids cooking class or holding the door open for someone. I like knowing that I help people in some way every day.

That is so noble. Rock on Larissa. What is a career goal that you have?

I would love to one day work in the Community Relations department for a large company and help them develop their strategy for supporting non-profits.

Ah, Corporate Social Responsibility. It seems to be a trend with bigger companies now. Perhaps eventually all marketing departments will be rebranded into social responsibility. What’s a trend that you see for young nonprofit professionals?

I am seeing a lot of non-profits focus on developing college students interest in the non-profit work by offering some great internships. I don’t think entering that non-profit sector is something that college graduates think about doing. I know it’s not what I had planned, but I’ve learned more here then I could have imagined.

I know what you mean, I never though I would be in the nonprofit sector either! That’s the funny thing, we go to college, and we don’t realize the mechanisms behind the college are all nonprofit mechanisms. But I digress. There are a lot of different jobs that people do in nonprofits. Where do you see the sector growing in terms of jobs, and where do you see it shrinking?

I see more non-profits developing more marketing/cause campaigns that support specific
issues online, I think that also helps with the funding side of the business too. Now you can show a sponsor that your funds did this specifically to have an impact of that certain cause. Statistical analysis is clearer.

What I’m hearing you say is that in the future, perhaps people should train themselves to be up on social media ways to measure statistics automatically. If this is what you’re saying, I see that too, and also, I see that people are quick to say things like “Direct Mail” is dead, and social media lives, or the backlash against that, that social media leads to “Slacktivism/Clicktivism” instead of real action and donations. You know, I think it’s important have every tool you possibly can in your toolbox, and use technology to make your job easier as a nonprofit professional, whether it’s measuring results or automating awareness campaigns.

So, what do you wish older generations understood about Gen X and Gen Y?

How much we depend on technology to help with our jobs. I remember early in my career having a superior who didn’t use their outlook calendar and had no desire to learn. The same person didn’t like Excel which made developing budget reports fun!

LOL. I bet that was fun. It’s so frustrating when people around you expect you to just do their tech work for them. I think it brings up a good issue that Gen Y are often asked to do the tech stuff, and it’s assumed they’ll just keep doing them, instead of making older generations learn how to do it themselves.

Do you think that Gen X and Gen Y need to be managed differently in the workplace?

Yes, I think so. I think Gen X and Y like to see the big picture of what they are trying to accomplish and as they work towards that they like to get pretty instant feedback. I think that has something to also so with the technology that we use, everything is at our fingertips.

Also, I think Gen X and Y are always looking to where the next step is career wise as opposed to the Baby Boomer who stayed with companies and organization for decades.

I would agree that feedback needs to be real and positive to keep Gen Y engaged. And I think Gen Y has learned that companies are not loyal to them, so why should they be loyal to their companies? All of these at-will employment contracts, GRRRR! But I digress.

Do you see more people of color, sexual minorities, or people from different class backgrounds leading nonprofit organizations, either as executives or board members?

To be honest I don’t. As we see more minorities go on to higher education I hope that changes. As with the diversity of board members, I think that must first start with the grassroots volunteers that help an organization. If you have diverse volunteers who are engaged with an organization then those are the people that you look at when cultivating board members. After all, if they are volunteering four hours of their Saturday to volunteer and an event, then you know they have a true passion for the cause.

I agree with you. We need to focus more on recruitment and engaging and empowering volunteers of different ethnicities and backgrounds to become leaders in our organizations. I think Rosetta Thurman is doing an excellent job of highlighting this in her blog.

What’s a cause you love that you wish got more attention from the media?

I think I would have to go with education for this. I am a first generation college graduate and know how much focus my parents put on me to make sure I was successful in school and college. It’s unsettling to see where Texas schools rank and even more so to see the rates of minorities that actually finish at a four-year university.

I agree. Education needs more attention from people in this country. Especially in terms of how we treat people in a classroom setting. A book I’d recommend on this topic is “A Different Kind of Teacher” by John Taylor Gatto. Thank you so much for this interview Larissa!

Anything this interview brings up for you? Anything you’d agree with? Disagree with? What do you think of Gen Y in the workplace?

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Young Fabulous Nonprofit Leader Interview with Larissa DeLuna! originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on October 8, 2010.

What makes you lose your power?

And how do you get it back?

What can make you lose your power is when you start to focus on things that are designed to make you insecure, like ads that have super skinny make-upped highly photoshopped people with the latest designer everything. Basically people who don’t exist in real life, but only on magazine covers. You might start to think that you need lipsuction, or waxing, or laser hair removal, or an expensive makeover, or you name it.

Every time you see those magazines, remember, For Every Anxiety, There Is A Product.

Even if you don’t identify as a feminist, you may not be a person motivated so much by ads for special hair relaxers or liposuction or ultra-permanent makeup or laser hair removal.

In fact, you may find those ads quite offensive, and see through them for what they are, Attempts to make you insecure and get you to spend money to feel better about yourself. Perhaps you’re opening your eyes and seeing that objectification that happens everywhere, and choosing to not give your power away to it.

“If somebody is investing time, resources, and energy into convincing you of your own worthlessness, that same somebody has revealed to you that they have a lot to lose if you don’t believe them. They’re protecting their own loss of power. Which means they perceive you as somebody who can take that power away. If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.” -Harriet of Fugitivus.net (Thanks to Ealasaid for the recommendation!)

Bidisha, columnist for The Guardian, goes on to say, “Women’s collective fight-back is occurring in reality and in person, not just in the form of narked critiques online.”

But even the narked online critiques seem to be gathering momentum. A few weeks ago, when Jezebel said that the Daily show had a woman problem, namely that they had very few women correspondents and writers, the Daily Show shot back an “open” letter from their female writers stating that they were very happy, and that the Daily show was very respectful of women.

To which I say, “O RLY” because in 2009, the following male actors/comedians were guests on the Daily Show (according to Wikipedia): Daniel Craig, Liam Neeson, Ricky Gervais (twice), Tom Selleck, Dev Patel, Billy Crudup, Paul Rudd, Ian McShane, Seth Rogen, Ben Affleck, Hugh Jackman, Denis Leary, Will Ferrell, Ed Helms, Larry David, Kevin Nealon, Paul Giamatti, David Cross, Tim Gunn, Matt Damon, Clarence Clemons, and Hugh Grant. And the female actors/comedians? Cameron Diaz, Rachel McAdams, Sigourney Weaver, Wanda Sykes and Joy Behar. So we’re to believe that these 5 women were the ONLY ones willing to appear on the show?

So this year, at the Emmys, there were several women onstage, compared with the past 4 years, when there’s been one or two women on stage at most. A victory? Perhaps. They also asked a former female correspondent, Kristen Schaal, to come back. Salon.com seems to see this in particular as a victory for Jezebel, and for feminism, that the Daily Show is taking stances to increase the number of women publicly on the show and to talk about feminist issues. So in this case, perhaps, online snark actually accomplished something. WOW.

But it’s not ALL pop culture fluff.

As Bidisha writes, “The symbolic and powerful Reclaim the Night marches are back, across the UK (in America, it’s “Take Back The Night” -ed.). Groups, charities and initiatives including Justice for Women, Women Against Rape, Women Against Violence, Million Women Rise, Women’s Aid, Eaves, Refuge, Object and the longstanding Fawcett Society and Southall Black Sisters have national prominence and are part of the international movement.”

If you want to know who ELSE is helping in your movement or your cause, just go on Myspace, and check out all of the Myspace pages, or even Facebook pages for these causes. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how many people in the world are working towards your cause, or towards the cause of women’s equality.

You should see some of the comments Bidisha gets. It’s a LOT of men investing their time in telling her that she’s wrong, bad, a man-hater, and so on. They are really invested in protecting themselves from losing power. But the more they focus on her, the more they show their own insecurity.

Anything you pay attention to thrives, and anything you ignore eventually starves and dies.

Power is Attention.

Attention is Power.

Think of your attention as a very precious resource. How do you want to spend your resource?

Get clear, gather your allies, and fight back by putting your attention towards the cause that matters to you, and the people who can support you and hear you. Blog, get on twitter, go to a take back the night march. Start to actively ignore magazines and websites that try to make you feel like you’re not good enough in some way. I know you can do it.

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Tell me how you’re fighting back below.

How to take your power back originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on September 7, 2010.