Category: Opinion

During the first year of Covid, I was at home with my kids, who were aged 7 and 4 at the time. The days were long, and they constantly needed to be entertained. At one point, they discovered the vacuum and were fascinated by it. So when they weren’t looking I would intentionally drop cracker crumbs and assorted other debris on the floor. “Oh noOOooo, kids! Looks like this spot could use some vacuuming! Thank you for helping Daddy clean it up!”

Now, they could have been helpful if they had just put away their Legos like I had asked them to so, but no, they wanted to use the vacuum, while the Legos remained there for me to step on throughout the day and in the middle of the night.

This makes me think about one of the fundamental problems in our sector. Managing other people and their need to feel useful, productive, and engaged. I think a fourth or a third of nonprofit work is just making up tasks for other people and in the process ignoring ones that would be genuinely helpful. Think about it:

Boards of directors can be very useful when they’re focused on the right things. But so much of EDs’ and staff’s work is just keeping them engaged by having various things for them to be involved in. So staff start creating board packages for them to read (or more likely ignore), committees for them to feel some sense of structure, and various tasks that staff could probably do a lot more efficiently.

Donors and potential donors also need to be “engaged,” so various events and activities are set up, such as meetings and site visits. Some of them want to contribute in unique ways, or fund specific things, so nonprofits end up spending time and sometimes resources trying to making up stuff for them to do. Some of it may be useful, but a lot of it is ego-driven nonsense.

Volunteers: I remember a time when we just needed volunteers to come in and sweep up the place, file stuff, stack chairs, toss out moldy old leftover event foods we had saved up and then completely forgot about. But some of the potential volunteers were “skilled” and needed more advanced work. One of them created a complex marketing plan that we never used, simply because we wanted to keep her engaged.

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Being in the Pacific Northwest is amazing. The food is excellent, and we have so many trees and lots of kombucha. And the weather is great, with rare extremes in temperature or natural phenomena. And sometimes we see orcas in the water and eagles flying around! Or eagles in the water and orcas flying around, if you eat certain types of mushrooms.  

But like other places, we have challenges, one of which passive-aggressiveness. I think I have tons of haters in the city, but I can never be sure who they are, or why they hate me, since folks rarely confront anyone directly or say what’s on their minds. Ryan, stop glaring at me at the farmer’s market!

The passive-aggressiveness, however, though more present in certain geographic areas like the PNW (and, cough, Minnesota), is pervasive to our entire sector. We attract and reward people who tend to be nice, compassionate, and community-minded, whereas other sectors attract and reinforce those who are more assertive and aggressive, and nice people can be conflict-avoidant.

Meanwhile, the constant presence of power dynamics means we often can’t be as direct; or else I’m sure a lot more nonprofit staff would be telling their funders and donors to take their money and shove it where the sun don’t shine (e.g., Seattle).

One of the results of this indirectness is something called triangulation, and it happens a lot. Triangulation is when Party A has issue with Party B, but instead of confronting them directly, they go to Party C to vent and complain.

Now, all of us vent to our friends and colleagues, that’s normal and when done right, even helpful. But in triangulation, Party C then may get mad at Party B on Party A’s behalf without understanding the full picture. It forms a triangle of drama, and left unchecked often becomes a pentagon or octagon of workplace toxicity. In extreme cases, it can devolve into what I call the Wheel of Disillusionment.

Here are some examples:

·       A colleague is annoyed that a new team member skipped the post-event cleanup. Instead of talking to her directly, he complains about her to another colleague. The two of them create a narrative that their new colleague is selfish and not a team-player.

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Hi everyone. I hope you have had a nice break and were able to rest and recharge. I haven’t done one lick of writing in two months, so this post may be a bit rusty (especially as I refuse to use AI for any part of the writing process).

During my hiatus, I did speak at a conference, and I guess I was rusty at that too, because five angry people walked out of my keynote, probably due to some combination of my cussing, mentioning of white supremacy and wealth hoarding, or saying how foundations that have a “wait and see” approach when nonprofits are in multiple intersecting crises are assholes.  

Anyway, I stayed the rest of the first day and attended the closing plenary, which was a panel of funders. Now, before we go any further, let me reiterate that some of my best friends are funders, and there are many instances where funders can be very helpful when sharing their knowledge. I’m just not sure, after having been in the audience of so many of these events, that the funder panel format is more beneficial than detrimental to our sector.

A funder panel is usually a group of several program officers who are invited to share glimpses into their work and advice for nonprofit leaders. It all sounds useful, possibly even exciting, which is why so many conferences have them. And yet, they’ve always bothered me. Maybe it’s because without fail, I hear standard philanthropic tropes like “when you see one funder, you’ve seen one funder” and “resources are limited and we get sooooo many applications.”

I thought about why these events tend to annoy me, and having spoken to other colleagues, I know they annoy them too. Probably because of these reasons:

They normalize terrible grant philosophies and practices: It seems valuable on the surface for several funders to give advice on how nonprofits can increase their chance of getting funding. “Be concise in your proposals. Submit your proposals to the grant portal ahead of deadline. Don’t lie in your program reports.” Etc. All reasonable. Except, by positioning all these things as the default, it prevents us from critically examining them. Why are funding “limited” when most foundations hoard 95% of their assets and only give out 5%? Why are funders all requiring unique proposals and reports in the first place and not just accepting proposals that are already written? Why can’t they just accept annual reports instead of requiring their own snowflake reports? Why is ok that each funder has their own aggravating grant portal for grantees to waste their time navigating through?

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Hi everyone, this is the last blog post before I take my summer break. I’ll be back on September 1^st with a tan and a new post.

The last few months have been a whirlwind of depressing news. However, there are tons of amazing, inspiring, courageous things happening all over the US and the world. We often don’t hear about them because fascists want to keep us fearful.

So here are a few of them I’ve gathered from people on the internet, in no particular order. Grab your favorite beverage and click on some of these links; your nervous system will thank you. Add in the comment section any other good news you come across. And share this widely!

. The Supreme Court just ruled against Trump’s quest to end birthright citizenship!

·       DOGE fired a bunch of climate scientists. They banded together and launched climate.us, to keep us all informed.

·       After 100,000 Albanians protested for 18 days over Jared-Kushner-backed plans to build a fancy resort on Albanian land, the European Parliament voted to support stronger measures to protect the land against development.

·       New York passed a law that fines companies for using AI-generated people in ads and without letting people know. Hopefully it’ll inspire more transparency laws like this.

·       Progressive candidate Janeese Lewis George, often compared to Zohran Mamdani, defeats centrist opponent in the primary and will likely become DC’s next mayor in November, proving once again that progressive candidates can and do win.

·       France grants honorary citizenship to Palestinian civilians and journalists.

·       In Scotland, after bottom trawling was banned, life on the seabed has tripled!

·       Wolves, bears, horses, and other wildlife have returned to Chernobyl, including species that have not been there for a hundred years!

·       A study in Ecuador finds that 90% of rainforest biodiversity recovers if left alone for 30 years after the land has been used by humans.

·       There’s a breakthrough new treatment for ovarian cancer, one that targets cancerous tissues instead of treating the whole body, greatly reducing side effects and allowing patients to have much better quality of life.  

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Hi everyone, this is the next-to-last blog post before I go on my yearly summer hiatus. I’ll be off all of July and August to spend time with my kids, who got me a mug that says “Not the worst dad” for Father’s Day.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son goes like this: There are two sons, an older one who is steady and hardworking, and the younger one is immature and reckless. The younger takes his inheritance early and squanders it, likely on wine and cryptocurrency, and was left destitute. He comes crawling back, and instead of being chastised by his father, the old man threw him a feast.

The older son was like “WTF?! I’ve been here the whole time doing everything right, and you’ve never once thrown me a feast. Heck, you won’t even share your streaming password with me! I’m not even sure you appreciate me!” And the father said, “Uh…remind me…who are you again?”

OK, I may need to polish up on my biblical stories.

The point is, the Prodigal Son represents someone who gets praised for losing their way and then finding it again. And while it’s great for people to learn and grow, the “Prodigal Son Effect” can be deceptive. Here are some ways it manifests in our sector:

·       A guy who is known for being an a-hole suddenly gets a change or heart and is now not as horrible as before. He gets praised, possibly even promoted, over people who have been decent the whole time

·       A man has a baby, displays some basic parenting skills, and is treated like a hero for being a good father, and people bend the rules to accommodate his schedule, whereas his women colleagues are just expected to be good mothers and get zero acknowledgement or concessions.

·       A foundation CEO holds a listening session and gets praised for being approachable, whereas other funders who have been much more present in communities get ignored

·       An organization with mostly white senior leaders decides they want to do some internal DEI work. They get a lot of funding for it, whereas organizations led by marginalized communities that have been doing DEI work struggle to get funding to do the same work.

·       A large corporation or wealthy individual donates a sizeable amount of money and gets press releases and social media posts praising their “generosity,” when they should have been paying a significantly higher amount in taxes, like some of the smaller companies.   

·       A funder increases their grantmaking by a little bit, starts giving two-year grants instead of one-year, or stops requiring burdensome applications and reports, and they get applauded, whereas funders who have been doing those things for years get ignored.

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The past few months, I’ve been reading various articles and attending different conversations about AI. I guess we have no choice but to learn about it and discuss it, as it’s being shoved down our throats constantly, like the ubiquitous hummus in our sector, but way less delicious or nutritious.

However, there is a particular message being reinforced everywhere that’s been especially getting on my nerves: “AI is coming whether you like it or not. It’s inevitable, and if you fight it, you’re going to be left behind. It’s the FUTURE! Accept it!!! Resistance is FUTILE!!!”

I can’t remember a time when something so obviously destructive was foisted with so much force and confidence upon the masses. Besides the myriad problems with it, it poses a unique and serious threat to humanity. Anthropic, one of the tech giants around AI, is sounding the alarm and warning people to slow down, as AI is rapidly learning to improve itself without human intervention.

Here AI deletes a company’s entire database in 9 seconds and then “confesses” to it. And here we learn AI models resort to blackmailing people when their existence is threatened. Watch this 5-minute video where the AI on its own, unprompted by anyone, wrote and published a “hit piece” defaming an engineer it felt was a threat to it.  

Yet, THIS is what we push as inevitable? THIS is the future? That’s bleak as hell. If a technology as uncertain and as harmful as AI can be pushed with such confidence, where is our imagination for other things? Things that have been proven repeatedly to be helpful, with few negative consequences?

On Instagram, I saw a content creator, @theconsciouslee discuss a message Twitter user named @OrevaZSN wrote: “How come AI is treated as inevitable and something we must adapt to and accept, but renewal energy technology, sustainable infrastructure[,] and electric cars aren’t treated with the same urgency or certainty?”

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Hi everyone, happy Pride month. Please put on your calendar to attend this webinar on June 18^th from 11:30am to 1pm Pacific: “What If our Trans siblings were fully included and protected in all spaces? A guide to substantive allyship for Trans rights and how to do better with Nathan Rodriguez of Trans Equity Coalition.” It’s free. Register here and spread the word.

There are a few things our sector sucks at, and one of those things is feedback. How to give it, how to receive it, and why it’s never a good idea to walk silently to stand behind someone when they’re microwaving their lunch and whisper in their ear, “You did something I didn’t like, Jeremy…”

This week, though, I’m talking specifically about feedback from funders to nonprofit leaders in the grantmaking process. In the usual process, hundreds of organizations apply. A lucky few are awarded the grants; the rest get a generic rejection letter to read in while weeping softly in the supplies closet.

Some funders provide helpful and specific feedback on what applicants could do better next time, such as “your community needs section didn’t include enough data.” The majority do not, leaving most nonprofit leaders bewildered and frustrated.

So, should funders do a better job providing feedback to grantseekers? Please vote by selecting one of the following options:

A.     Absolutely! It’ll help nonprofits improve their grantwriting skills

B.     No, funders are too busy to give feedback to hundreds of applicants!

C.    So? If nonprofits each spend ten or more hours writing grant proposals, the very least funders could do is spend 30 minutes giving some helpful feedback to each applicant!

D.     You’re wrong, and your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries!

E.      Worst. Survey. Ever.

The correct choice is Z: Most grant processes are arbitrary, inequitable, and pointless, so feedback on them is meaningless and distracts us from the real problems.

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Hi everyone, this week on May 28^th at 1pm to 2pm Pacific, I’ll be in conversation with some brilliant leaders (including Jan Masaoka and Al Cantor) about regulatory and tax reform of private foundations, such as with Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs). It’s free. Register here.

I’m writing this from Toronto, where I just spoke at one of the largest gatherings of animal rights and veganism advocates I’ve been to. It was amazing, and not just because I could eat everything and didn’t have to settle for a blueberry garnish and a mint leaf plucked off a nonvegan cake for dessert.

It was inspiring and heartening to meet so many dedicated people who care about animals and to learn about the creative, vital, and successful work they’ve been doing. One of the most inspiring and illuminating sessions was about a community in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula mobilizing against a pig farm. The farm, owned by a giant corporation, raised and slaughtered thousands of pigs, with most of the meat sold overseas.

The effects were horrifying. Community members could no longer drink the water and had to use bottled water because of the runoff of blood, antibiotics, and waste. Children were getting sick from the burning of the feces creating acrid smoke. The air and water and land were all polluted. Fruit and vegetables were contaminated and no longer edible. The mental health of everyone in the village suffered due to the constant sounds and smells and sight of death.

The community organized, lobbied, and protested and faced down police brutality, where organizers were beaten and arrested. At the end, though, they won, driving out the factory farm. Now they begin the process of healing the people and land, which will still take many years for this small community.  

This case highlights how connected all our issues are. In this instance, we saw the intersection of animal rights, environmental protection, children’s welfare, food security, physical and mental health, poverty, community organizing, labor rights, and politics. If we dig further, we probably see other subsectors as well, such as the arts.

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