It’s not just the thought that counts

Gift Giving

Every year as December rolls around, a good chunk of my work pivots to that philanthropic panacea – Year-End Giving.  This year, however, nonprofits like the one I work for are struggling as individual donors curtail their charitable giving while demand for services rises.  In addition, private foundations that fund many vital organizations have taken major hits to their endowments, making grants fewer and far between.

This is all to say that while I spend not a few hours thinking about how to increase year-end giving at my job, I’m not very good at doling it out myself.  I get the direct mail, the emails and the youtube videos, evaluate them like a good communications professional and promptly ignore them, figuring that I do my part by working for a nonprofit organization myself.

This year, it’s not just the thought that counts.

So, here are the organizations I’m giving to this year.  Mind you, these are not large gifts -  but I’d encourage everyone to think about giving to these (and other) worthy organizations this year, even as it feels like you are stretching more and more.  Please feel free to add your own list in the comments.

Media:

Minnpost.com

Minnpost has become an invaluable resource for me — an island of good journalism in a sea of… well, you get the idea.  I particularly valued Eric Black’s pieces on what’s been going on in the Attorney General’s office, David Brauer’s Daily Glean, and general election and recount coverage.

The Uptake

Thanks to The Uptake, citizen journalism is showing that it can break big stories, and, perhaps more importantly, play a critical role in documenting and shedding the light of transparency on the fabric of civic life.  See:  RNC, Senate debate, and recount coverage.

Good Magazine

This is a twofer — Support a great publication that thinks outside the magazine box, telling stories about how to make our world a better place with data, visualization, video and more — but also 100% of your subscription goes to nonprofits.  In addition, you can choose how much you want to pay for your subscription.

Social Justice:

Admission Possible

Admission Possible is one of those nonprofit organizations, like the one I work for, that believes that tax status is no excuse for timidity, and that you have to be as aggressive and entrepreneurial as the for-profit world if you really want to make change on a large scale.  Founded in 2000, AP works in Twin Cities high schools to help low-income students gain admission to college.  Their success rate is incredible — 99% of students they work with get into college — and 80% of students admitted are still working towards their degree or have graduated.  In addition, they get all this done by supporting the spirit of service that President-elect Obama extolled in his election night speech — sending over 50 Americorps members as coaches into the schools.

Southern Poverty Law Center

After starting in 1971 as a small civil rights firm, SPLC now is on the forefront of tracking, documenting, and fighting white supremacists and other hate groups.  Through this work, they’ve taken an increasingly critical role as the immigration rights debate heated up in the last couple of years.  For me, I’m particularly fond of their Teaching Tolerance program, which provides resources to educators on anti-bias curricula.

Mikva Challenge

There are many “civic engagement” programs for young people, but I think Mikva Challenge gets it right.  They’ve worked with over 10,000 low-income Chicago youth since 2000 building skills and experiences in democracy focusing on all three key elements of change: youth policy making, electoral participation, and activism.  They consider themselves a leadership pipeline, inspiring young leaders into lives of public service and civic participation.  See them in action with this video from the 2008 New Hampshire primaries, where Mikva Challenge brought 60 students to be active on behalf of their candidate of choice.

Photo by the_moog

Embracing my Digital Youth

When I was a kid, someone told me that the best way to see if spaghetti was cooked was to throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.  I was reminded of this today while attending a media and technology conference .  So many middle-aged, middle-management nonprofit professionals throwing all kinds of “new media” tools at the wall to see what sticks and helps them raise money, gain exposure, save children in developing countries, etc.

  I participated in a panel on “digital youth and analogue adults”, and I learned that I truly am right on the cusp of a major generational shift.

I am in charge of website and communications at my work, I am on facebook at least 10 times a day, talk to my colleagues across the office on google talk, and, update my blog at least every six months (ha).  But still, I’m very different than people just a few years younger than me.  For instance, I have a land line.  I watch TV (though I DVR my favorites).  I read the actual newspaper (but only on Sundays or while I’m sitting alone at lunch).  I rely more on email than on txting, twitter, etc.   

Sitting with a bunch of nonprofitheads pondering the use of social media I couldn’t help thinking that for most, they’ll never be able to pull it off.  Part of marketing your organization is about disseminating a strategic message.  But participation in any online community requires being your genuine self – any hint of a pitch, whether you’re selling a product or a cause – can get sniffed out immediately.  How do you balance getting your message out and really being a member of a community?  Thoughts are welcome.

The Good

Some time ago my friend in the publishing biz referred me to the magazine Good.  I usually judge things like this from the quality of its free schwag, and I still have have two tokens from its premier issue hung up in my office- a 3 in x 3 in card that’s titled “personal manifesto” ( “_____________ like you give a damn”), and a small pin with an american flag in the shape of a heart. 

These things (and the magazine) captured my imagination by the cleanness of their design, the provocation of their message without being shrill or polemic, and the marriage of those two elements.

I recently picked up the newest issue of Good, and it had these great visual representations of statistics that subtly agitate you to ask questions of why things are the way they are.  And asking questions is the first step to change and shifts in power to make our world as good as it can be.  Check them out below.

 

The Accidental Pun

Yesterday, I was in a meeting for work.  We were debriefing recent trainings that we’ve done, and my coworker (who was calling in via phone) started telling us about his training with the National Association of Letter Carriers, you know, the people who deliver your mail.

So my coworker said, “blah blah blah so yeah it was really great, we did some new things and really pushed the envelope.”(!!!)

So of course I start laughing uncontrollably, which the person calling in via phone couldn’t understand at all. 

I love puns, probably an abnormal about.  So I got to thinking about puns and the people who love them, and how they are considered a cheesy, even base form of humor.  I would agree with all that – with the notable exception of the accidental pun. 

Part of the reason why puns are so groan-inducing is the sense of desperation clinging to them.  It’s like, implicit (or explicit) in every pun is a guy with big eyebrows going “eh?  eh?” and jabbing you with his elbow.  But if they come about by coincidence or happenstance, then that air of desperation is washed away and you’re left with pure, unadulterated funny.

The Harvest

Well, it’s sukkot, as well as fall generally here in the midwestern lands, and i’ve had a lot of reason lately to think about local foods. The change of seasons always makes me inexplicably nostalgic – the smells of fall give me all these sense memories of childhood. As usual most of my memories revolve around eating, like crisp apples in my mom’s kitchen, or pumpkin bread/pie and sweet potato cheesecake.

In honor of sukkot and sense memories, here are my favorite food-related sites: a harvest of the internet’s offerings.

Organic Valley
You’ve probably seen this brand of dairy in whole foods, but you probably didn’t know that OV is the biggest Co-op in the country and if you buy their milk in Chicago it comes from local organic farmers in IL, MI, and IN. They also have great materials on their farmers as well as recipes on their site (featuring OV products, obvi)

Local Food Routes
Well, you all know how I feel about mapping. This site provides a good background on the benefits of local food, as well as a map (linked above) where you can enter in your zipcode and it shows you food producers in your area!

Crop Art at MN State Fair
The above link takes you to a flickr stream of photos of the crop art offerings at the 2007 MN State Fair. Crop Art is an art form where the medium consists entirely of seeds, grasses, dried beans, etc. It lives in the agriculture building with the 2 ton pumpkins.

Smitten Kitchen
Sort of cloying but interesting food blog that just so happens to highlight bagels in its most recent post.

Rootabaga Stories
While not exclusively about food, Carl Sandburg’s series of children’s stories that are at once completely fantastical and relatable are part of the inspiration behind the name of this blog. The link above goes to a harvest-appropriate story called “How to Tell Corn Fairies if you See ‘Em”

The World as You Can Make It

I am obsessed with mapping.  Mostly this is a work-related obsession, because as I work to keep track of our impact on the world and the “ripple effect” of the work that we do, I have visions of visual representations of progressives and their good deeds spread out across the country like so many amber waves of grain. 

Google lets you do custom maps now, but there other applications have features like a bulk upload of multiple data points and open source editing.  I’m working on a map over at platial.com that features all the candidates we’ve trained that have been elected to public office.  It’s still a work in progress but check it out by clicking here.

I know this isn’t revolutionary or MAJOR BREAKING NEWS or anything like that, but I find it interesting for reasons beyond the standard “I can make a map of all my favorite places and show it to my friends!”  I think in terms of progressive momentum building, the more we can actually see a critical mass of people, campaigns, or organizations, the more likely we are to get involved in those things.  Also, if you collect data and map it, you can see where the holes are – where is there excess progressive capacity and where do we need to build more. 

 Sorry if this is totally dorky in several ways, but that’s me! 

The Tax Dollar at Work

I’m nothing if not a sucker for politically manipulative online tools.  This one came across my inbox this morning, from the National Priorities Project.

Their cost of war counter doesn’t just showcase the arbitrary, difficult-to-contextualize total number of tax dollars being spent in the war in Iraq, in real time.  It also allows you to see specifically how much your community is paying, based on some formula that is beyond me to describe.  Once you select your city/town, you can also click on links like “public housing” and see how many units of public housing could have been built with the same amount of money, or “pre-schools” and see how many youngsters we could have sent to Head Start.

They have an embed feature but it doesn’t seem to be working, so visit the Cost of War Counter by clicking here.

The Awkward Turtle

To start this off I can think of nothing better than to share with you the latest craze in hand signals going around our office. Like many phenomena it’s not clear how it started or where it came from, but a google search tells me that it’s been making the rounds with the socially-deficient campus set. However, the Awkward Turtle (AT) has become essential to inter-office communication in my workplace as well.

Simply described, the AT is a means of diffusing awkward situations/interactions by pointing out the obvious with a simple gesture recalling the funny/sad condition of a turtle on its back. Take the following (hypothetical) situation:

Officemates A & B are involved in animated conversation about a past event.

Officemate C tries to insert him/herself in conversation repeatedly, while slowly realizing that s/he wasn’t actually there and s/he was thinking A & B were talking about some OTHER event.

Officemate C tries to cover.

Officemate A realizes Officemate C is covering; laughs and says “awkward turtle!” while performing the following gestures:

both hands, palms up, are placed on top of each other, slightly angled inward.

thumbs then rotate randomly, like the flailing legs of a turtle upside-down.

Please pass this on as necessary.