#If you want to talk about funding the classroom and nonprofit work I’m much more knowledgeable

[just-rogi]

Are you Marxist?

Right now I’m a teacher- and I know that isn’t the answer that you wanted but listen-

Ideologically I don’t care what we call it, I will support my kids getting food every day and my classroom being funded so the kids can have the materials they need.

I will support any programs that complete fund public transportation, and which will actually put roofs over the heads of the people I pass on the street every day. I support the radical dismantling of government programs like the military and the police and the redistribution of those funds. I support the private dismantling of monopolies and large corporations hoarding wealth and food and homes.

I support not having to work myself to the bone every single week- coming home so dead tired that I fall asleep in my work clothes at 7:30 because I feel my body breaking from the five day/ eight hour work week. I support the death of the landlord class and the model, by which, a public City of Boston employee who works 40 hours a week for the city can’t afford to actually LIVE in the city on my salary (I have four roomates)

I support the complete reconstruction of the Forster care system, which in many cases takes children from loving parents for lack of funding, rather than just giving the parents access to food and clothes and a home to call their own and raise their children in. As wealth isn’t an indicator of morality and responsibility, and certainly not a reason to separate children from families who love them.

I support free and accessible educational for the brilliant black and brown children I see every day who have been barred from higher education due to the costs of privatized education- I support the fully funded public schools, community centers, libraries, and museums as safe spaces for all people of all ages to go, as knowledge should never be only accessible to a certain class.

I support gutting the private medical and pharmaceutical industry and instead building up public healthcare in which people will have access to medication which they desperately need without having to pay thousands of dollars. Where people can access mental health care, elder care and senior homes drug and alcohol abuse care (and yes that includes safe sites to dispose of sharps, and inject drugs without fear of dirty needles and ODing I know for whatever reason people can’t stomach that one) , rehabilitation for addiction, mental illness, and eating disorder without being in crippling debt for life. As a kid I had to ration my inhaler as they were close to $100 USD each. As an adult I want to make sure that no child - or person in general- has to do that with something that they NEED.

Everyone deserves to live in comfort and dignity, and no one man or company should have the power to sway politics or hoard property, food, or medication while the people are in need of care.

I have read a little bit about communist theory, and know all The Hits (hello communist manifesto), and yeah ideologically I suppose I agree with a lot of it on the surface level, but frankly I’ve read a LOT more about Socio Emotional Leaning, and teaching phonetics to ELL students, and textbooks on Ancient Civ as that is how I spend my whole day.

It would be arrogant and ignorant to call myself a Marxist, as I am know knowledgeable enough about the difference between Marxism, or Marxist Leninism, or Maoism, or all the nuances between the different communist and socialist political and ideological movements. And frankly, at this point in my life I don’t care about the label that you use- I care that food gets on my kids lunch trays and that they all have a warm bed to go home to and a place to learn and all their health needs met. Weather that is achieved by voting or by revolution, I don’t care. Weather it’s the marxists that get it done or the Maoist’s, I don’t care. Fuck if the Democrats were advocating for all that I’d be first in line to the polls (though even now please still vote, both in national and local elections- not voting is used to silence you and is a tool of the oppressor).

I really honestly don’t know shit about anything, and it would be sooooo much easier to give you a sound bite and respond “FUCK YEAH MARXISM BASED!!!!” With gif of a hammer and sickle flag…. But that feels reductive and unrepresentative as I honestly and truly am not intelligent enough about the subject to talk about it at length. What I am knowledgeable enough about is working full time in public education in a low income school. And working for a non profit organization in rural communities. And volunteering to get my boots dirty doing non profit work during what little free time I have. I know a lot about the world that I WANT to make better and if Marxism can get it’s shit together all the better- but a revolution WONT just be peacefully standing around discussing ideology. It starts in your classrooms and food banks and your streets. So I suggest that any real Marxist get themselves a pair of practical shoes.

[morningfears]

black coffee [prologue]

Rating: PG-13

Summary: neither calum nor isabelle wanted to be a teacher's assistant. more work, less pay, and no power; not the grad school experience either were hoping to have. but they're roped into teaching intro to public speaking and are handed all the responsibilities that go along with it. students, grades, classes, faculty meetings; but at least they have each other, right?

Word Count: 2.2k

“No.”

Dr. Bennett blinks, momentarily surprised by Isabelle’s blunt refusal, before he tries to hide his smile as he leans back in his chair and places his full attention on the girl in front of him. He raises an eyebrow at her, amused by the seeming lack of grace in her answer, and waits as she shakes her head. He watches her fidget with her pen, watches her take a deep breath and attempt to gather her thoughts, before she lifts her head and meets his gaze.

“Sorry,” Isabelle adds, cheeks tinted pink with embarrassment at her outburst. “I just, I thought I made it clear when I came in that I didn’t want to teach,” she explains as she glances down at the bright green notebook on her lap. She stares at the cover, still unopened, before she lifts her head once more. “I haven’t fully decided if I want to get my Ph.D. and while I appreciate the offer, I like my current assistantship. I really enjoy planning and coordinating events, that’s more in line with what I want to do after graduation. I mean, I’m seriously considering going into nonprofit work instead of sticking with academia. It just seems like I’d be taking on a lot for something I’m not really sure of and I’m just wondering what I get out of teaching, you know?”

Dr. Bennett did know this, the entire department knows of their most recent cohort’s lack of a desire to teach, but they’d all been hoping that the first year in the program would change their minds. However, judging by the look of despair on Isabelle’s face and the panic in her words, that hadn’t been the case at all. She seems even more sure of her unwillingness to teach now than she had been at orientation in August but he’d drawn the short straw and had been tasked with getting her agreement so he sighs and leans forward to rest his elbows on his desk.

“There’s a lot that you can do with teaching experience,” Dr. Bennett informs her with a slight shrug. “You’re wanting to do nonprofit work, right?” When Isabelle nods, he copies the action and continues, “Having that experience can help you program educational experiences. It can help you create curriculum for whatever field you go into to help educate the people you serve. Even if academia isn’t where you see yourself remaining, the experience can be useful in your future and it looks good on a resume. Having someone with your previous internships, your current assistantship, and then a year of teaching experience would be a dream. You’d be overqualified for pretty much any position you wanted.”

“Plus, if you teach and you like it, you don’t have to stay in higher ed. You can teach high school with a masters degree,” Abbey, Dr. Bennett’s advisee and Isabelle’s best friend in her cohort, tosses out. “You get a teaching certificate and you can teach speech or debate, maybe even rhetoric if the school is nice enough to have a rhetoric course. That’s what I’m thinking about doing.”

Isabelle bites her lip to keep from rolling her eyes at Abbey’s suggestion. She loves Abbey, she really does, but their situations are vastly different. Abbey had come in funded through the department and hadn’t had much of a choice in whether or not she would be teaching. For her, it was either accept the teaching position or pay for her second year out of pocket. Isabelle, however, has options. 

The department didn’t want her when she came in. She’d begged them to consider her for at least a desk job but they’d apologized and instructed her to look elsewhere. They needed the funding for the Ph.D. students they had so she sent resume after resume to every open position she could find. She’d been offered several different assistantships around campus (one of which came without an interview because they liked her resume that much, they’d even emailed her earlier in the week to see if she’d made a decision about her second year yet), each of which was better suited to her future career goals than teaching so she wasn’t exactly bothered by the department’s focus on their Ph.D. students. Now, however, with so many of their Ph.D. students leaving and not enough faculty members to cover the intro courses, they’re getting desperate.

Her cohort (the students that came in with her in September) only had seven members, four masters students and three Ph.D. students. Each of the Ph.D. students has already agreed to teach classes the next semester (not like they had any choice if they wanted to be funded), one of the masters students has already agreed (Abbey also didn’t have much choice), another of the masters students wasn’t even considered because she raised so much hell about keeping her current assistantship (she’s funded through the department but her boss had even gone so far as to threaten to resign if they took her from him); that just leaves Isabelle and Calum, the only two not currently funded through the department.

She knows that Calum is currently across the hall getting the same offer from Dr. White and she knows that he’s attempting to do the same delicate dance that she is. He’s made it very clear that he’s not interested, either, and she understands why they’re trying so hard but she wishes they’d quit. She hates being put on the spot like this and she’s desperate for a way out of Dr. Bennett’s office. But she knows that she needs to stand her ground if she wants to avoid being put in front of a classroom full of bored freshmen so she wracks her brain for a way to respond.

“Do I still have to talk to Dr. Adams about this?” Isabelle finally asks as she notices Dr. Bennett and Abbey staring at her, waiting for her response. “To officially accept or decline?”

“Yes,” Dr. Bennett nods, “she’s still the interim department chair so she makes the official teaching decisions. She’s also your advisor so the classes we added to your schedule still need to be run by her. You also need to finalize your plan of study so I’d set up an appointment with her as soon as possible. She’ll be back in the office after spring break.”

Isabelle frowns at this before she releases a quiet sigh and nods. She doesn’t want to wait, she wants to get this over and done with, but she knows that this is the only way her declination will be accepted. “I’ll email her when I get home,” Isabelle promises as she grabs her backpack and stands from her chair. “Thank you for the help, Dr. Bennett. I’ll work on the abstract for my conference submission and email it to you when I finish.”

“No problem,” Dr. Bennett nods, a smile on his face. “I look forward to reading it. And I’m sorry that we haven’t been more proactive in talking to you about teaching but I’d appreciate it if you considered it. Even if you don’t go on to get your Ph.D. or stick with academia, I think you would make a fantastic teacher and that it would be beneficial for you.”

Isabelle doesn’t want to but she knows that she’s going to end up spending the next week and a half thinking about it. She knows that she’s going to agonize over this decision and annoy the living hell out of everyone in her life until her meeting with Dr. Adams. So, she nods. “I will,” she promises as she fishes her keys out of the pocket of her backpack, “I’ll see you in class, Dr. Bennett.”

Isabelle doesn’t look back as she exits Dr. Bennett’s office, doesn’t slow down until she’s left the second floor of the building, and only pauses on the first when she hears Calum call her name. She waits long enough for Calum to catch up with her and sighs when he falls into step beside her. The pair are quiet for a moment, each mulling over their respective meetings, before Calum glances over at her.

“Bennett tell you that you’re on the shortlist for teaching next year?” Calum asks as he opens the door for her.

“Yep,” she nods as she shoves her phone into her pocket. “Told me that I’d need to be in the teaching competency class and when I asked why, he looked confused and then embarrassed. It took him a minute to realize no one had seriously mentioned anything about it until that moment. It’s ironic to me that the communication department is the worst at communicating.”

“Why the fuck did we think getting our masters was a good idea?” he asks as he steps behind the building and pulls his cigarettes from the pocket of his jeans. “This whole process has been a fucking nightmare.”

Isabelle huffs an unamused laugh as she leans against the side of the building. “You’re telling me,” she sighs as she shakes her head when Calum offers her the pack. “I’m here because I had no fucking clue what I wanted to do with my life. Honestly, though, living with my mom while I figured it out seems like a better idea than this at this point. At least she tells me what she wants.”

Calum laughs at this before he shakes his head and frowns. “I still have no idea what I’m doing for classes next semester. Theory’s the only thing they’re offering that we haven’t taken,” he sighs before he takes a drag off his cigarette, “and it’s not even general theory, it’s rhetoric.”

“With Dr. Deets,” Isabelle reminds him, laughing when he grimaces. “Bennett told me I’m gonna have to go ahead and start my thesis hours, even though I don’t feel ready to. I’m taking a class out of department but I’m thinking about switching it to that qualitative methods course they’re offering in anthropology. I need it more than I need some fucking seminar that deals exclusively in busy work.”

“Let me know if you can take that one and I might join you,” Calum sighs as he kneels down to stub out his cigarette before he drops the butt in the garbage can. “I’m going qualitative for my thesis, too. Miles on your committee?”

“Yeah,” Isabelle nods, “I have the golden trio. Miles, Bennett, and Adams. How about you?”

“That’s looking like mine,” he nods as he runs his hand through his hair. “If I can ever getting a meeting with Adams to officially request her.”

“She’s supposed to be back in her office after spring break,” Isabelle informs him. “So, give it a month and maybe she’ll have a minute for you. D’you hear that she told Laura to fuck off, that she didn’t have time for her bullshit when she stopped to ask a question about her thesis?”

Calum frowns at this and shakes his head. “No,” he sighs, “but that doesn’t surprise me. Now that Watson’s leaving, do you think she’s gonna be the official chair?”

“Probably,” Isabelle sighs as she tugs her phone from her pocket. “I heard they haven’t had a lot of interest. Two interviews and neither were super impressive.”

“We’re fucked,” Calum groans and Isabelle nods. Calum watches as Isabelle checks her notifications and frowns when she holds the device up to him. He stares at the department group chat, the one that he never checks, and laughs at the message Abbey had just sent.

A picture of himself and Isabelle standing behind the building, deep in conversation, greets him along with the message, ’@Isabelle, @Calum; you guys plotting to burn down down the building down there?’

‘Thinking about it,’ Isabelle sends back quickly. ‘Save anything from the TA office that might be important to you.’

“I’m gonna go get some bubble tea and calm the fuck down,” Isabelle sighs as she locks her phone and shoves the device back into her pocket. “I might even run by the liquor store. Who knows, honestly?”

“Still not a coffee person?” Calum asks as he follows her toward the parking lot across from the building. “Not gonna go get a black coffee and drown your sorrows like some shitty drama?”

“I like to enjoy my caffeine, thanks,” Isabelle laughs. “Black coffee just seems like a punishment.”

“When they break us both down and get us to agree to teach, I’ll bring you a black coffee after your first class. You’ll need it.”

Isabelle grins at Calum’s promise and shakes her head. “I appreciate it, Cal,” she laughs. “But I don’t think I’ll be teaching. I want to keep my current assistantship. But if you end up teaching, I’ll bring you that black coffee.”

“You know, even if we don’t want to teach, I feel like we’ll both end up in front of a bunch of freshmen next semester.”

“I hate to say this,” Isabelle sighs, “but I feel like you’re right."

Author’s Note: Grad school is weird. It’s a different planet, tbh. Anyway, here’s the prologue for TA!Calum. Camp counselor!Calum is coming. I’m too stoked about both, sorry.

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Another Pandemic ‘To Do’ on the List for Schools: Contact Tracing

Chris Hodges, the principal of Gaylord High School in Otsego County, Michigan, never thought he’d be a contact tracer.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes WCMU, NPR and KHN. It can be republished for free.

“I definitely thought, you know, ‘Why — why am I doing this?’” he said with a laugh. “That’s not what I went to school for.”

In what has become a regular part of his school day, Hodges fields reports on his charges such as hearing from the Health Department of Northwest Michigan that a student had tested positive for the novel coronavirus and was in school for three days when she might have been contagious.

One Tuesday in April, after the school day was over, he found himself walking the almost-empty halls with a laptop and a tape measure, making a list of other students who sat close enough to their sick classmate that they would need to quarantine.

Lisa Peacock, health officer for the department, said that without the school district’s help it would be “literally impossible” to keep up with contact tracing.

The school-age population has accounted for a growing share of recent coronavirus cases across northern Michigan, and Peacock said quickly identifying people exposed to those cases and telling them how to quarantine is crucial to protecting communities and containing spread.

When Hodges first started helping the health department with contact tracing, he found himself calling teachers on weekends, holidays and late in the day after they’d gone home, asking them where a particular student sat and struggling to orient himself in the classroom as they described the student’s position over the phone.

It happened so often that he’s now requiring each teacher to keep an up-to-date seating chart in a bright-yellow folder on top of their desk so he can find it easily.

But in this case, the teacher, Hannah Romel, was still at school. The student Hodges was tracing is in her yearbook class, which has different seating arrangements every day. Romel handed Hodges the three charts, and he got to work.

In each place Romel had marked the student, Hodges extended his tape measure to the surrounding desks.

Teachers have spaced their seats out as much as they can, he said, but sometimes they can’t quite get to the 6-foot distance required to avoid counting as close contact.

(The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance last month to allow for 3-foot distancing between desks, but only in communities where transmission is low. In this district, Superintendent Brian Pearson said, during Michigan’s recent surge in cases, 6-foot separation is the standard.)

Hodges moved quickly, both because if he didn’t complete the contact tracing the same day, the school can’t open the next, and because he wanted to get in touch with the families of students exposed to the virus right away.

“We want to make those phone calls as soon as we can, so that those students aren’t at work, aren’t at church, aren’t going to other people’s houses. We want to prevent the spread of covid not only inside our walls, but in our community,” he said.

Hodges will then pass on information about who was in close contact with the student to the local health department. Other nearby school districts run similar operations.

Nationally, this kind of relationship between schools and health departments is not typical in normal times, but it is happening with some regularity during the pandemic, said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Public health funding has declined over the past few decades, she said, forcing local departments to cut staff members who could have boosted their contact-tracing capacity.

Still, getting schools and health departments to work together can greatly help communities, Casalotti said.

Peacock, the local health officer, said that once her staffers get word of exposures at local schools, they will also get in touch with the families to talk them through the details.

“People always have questions,” she said. “They have questions about ‘What does this mean? What does it mean that I’m quarantined for 14 days?’ We recognize that.”

And, in some cases, the health department needs more information than Hodges can give, Peacock said. They might want to find out whether a coronavirus variant is at play, or do a more detailed investigation of how students got sick and where they were when contagious.

Back in Romel’s yearbook classroom, Hodges found two students sat just shy of 6 feet from their classmate who tested positive. They’ll need to quarantine for two weeks from the date of their last exposure.

Romel said she’s still surprised to hear the news that a student is sick.

“I worry about the kid,” she said. “I hope that it’s a mild case, and they get to just be OK and get back to school after their quarantine period and come back and be learning with us again.”

After a quick chat with Romel about whether the class did any group work on the days in question (they didn’t, which Hodges said is a relief, because it complicates his process), he headed off to the next classroom.

In all, 14 students will be quarantined as a result of exposure to this coronavirus case.

It’s a lot, Hodges said, but it’s a far cry from the number of quarantines stemming from a single day last month when 15 students tested positive, and each of them had several close contacts.

Making phone calls to families informing them their child will need to stay home from school for up to two weeks is not an enjoyable part of the day, for him or the families, said Hodges, but he’s gratified to play a role in mitigating the extent of the pandemic.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes WCMU, NPR and KHN.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Another Pandemic ‘To Do’ on the List for Schools: Contact Tracing published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Another Pandemic ‘To Do’ on the List for Schools: Contact Tracing

Chris Hodges, the principal of Gaylord High School in Otsego County, Michigan, never thought he’d be a contact tracer.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes WCMU, NPR and KHN. It can be republished for free.

“I definitely thought, you know, ‘Why — why am I doing this?’” he said with a laugh. “That’s not what I went to school for.”

In what has become a regular part of his school day, Hodges fields reports on his charges such as hearing from the Health Department of Northwest Michigan that a student had tested positive for the novel coronavirus and was in school for three days when she might have been contagious.

One Tuesday in April, after the school day was over, he found himself walking the almost-empty halls with a laptop and a tape measure, making a list of other students who sat close enough to their sick classmate that they would need to quarantine.

Lisa Peacock, health officer for the department, said that without the school district’s help it would be “literally impossible” to keep up with contact tracing.

The school-age population has accounted for a growing share of recent coronavirus cases across northern Michigan, and Peacock said quickly identifying people exposed to those cases and telling them how to quarantine is crucial to protecting communities and containing spread.

When Hodges first started helping the health department with contact tracing, he found himself calling teachers on weekends, holidays and late in the day after they’d gone home, asking them where a particular student sat and struggling to orient himself in the classroom as they described the student’s position over the phone.

It happened so often that he’s now requiring each teacher to keep an up-to-date seating chart in a bright-yellow folder on top of their desk so he can find it easily.

But in this case, the teacher, Hannah Romel, was still at school. The student Hodges was tracing is in her yearbook class, which has different seating arrangements every day. Romel handed Hodges the three charts, and he got to work.

In each place Romel had marked the student, Hodges extended his tape measure to the surrounding desks.

Teachers have spaced their seats out as much as they can, he said, but sometimes they can’t quite get to the 6-foot distance required to avoid counting as close contact.

(The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance last month to allow for 3-foot distancing between desks, but only in communities where transmission is low. In this district, Superintendent Brian Pearson said, during Michigan’s recent surge in cases, 6-foot separation is the standard.)

Hodges moved quickly, both because if he didn’t complete the contact tracing the same day, the school can’t open the next, and because he wanted to get in touch with the families of students exposed to the virus right away.

“We want to make those phone calls as soon as we can, so that those students aren’t at work, aren’t at church, aren’t going to other people’s houses. We want to prevent the spread of covid not only inside our walls, but in our community,” he said.

Hodges will then pass on information about who was in close contact with the student to the local health department. Other nearby school districts run similar operations.

Nationally, this kind of relationship between schools and health departments is not typical in normal times, but it is happening with some regularity during the pandemic, said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Public health funding has declined over the past few decades, she said, forcing local departments to cut staff members who could have boosted their contact-tracing capacity.

Still, getting schools and health departments to work together can greatly help communities, Casalotti said.

Peacock, the local health officer, said that once her staffers get word of exposures at local schools, they will also get in touch with the families to talk them through the details.

“People always have questions,” she said. “They have questions about ‘What does this mean? What does it mean that I’m quarantined for 14 days?’ We recognize that.”

And, in some cases, the health department needs more information than Hodges can give, Peacock said. They might want to find out whether a coronavirus variant is at play, or do a more detailed investigation of how students got sick and where they were when contagious.

Back in Romel’s yearbook classroom, Hodges found two students sat just shy of 6 feet from their classmate who tested positive. They’ll need to quarantine for two weeks from the date of their last exposure.

Romel said she’s still surprised to hear the news that a student is sick.

“I worry about the kid,” she said. “I hope that it’s a mild case, and they get to just be OK and get back to school after their quarantine period and come back and be learning with us again.”

After a quick chat with Romel about whether the class did any group work on the days in question (they didn’t, which Hodges said is a relief, because it complicates his process), he headed off to the next classroom.

In all, 14 students will be quarantined as a result of exposure to this coronavirus case.

It’s a lot, Hodges said, but it’s a far cry from the number of quarantines stemming from a single day last month when 15 students tested positive, and each of them had several close contacts.

Making phone calls to families informing them their child will need to stay home from school for up to two weeks is not an enjoyable part of the day, for him or the families, said Hodges, but he’s gratified to play a role in mitigating the extent of the pandemic.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes WCMU, NPR and KHN.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Another Pandemic ‘To Do’ on the List for Schools: Contact Tracing published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[hballou]

Virtual Event Preview: Nonprofit Reactivation Symposium

Organizational impact is a result of effective leadership!

The SynerVision Leadership Nonprofit Reactivation Symposium is a one-day intensive virtual event for you to learn the skills to stand up or grow your nonprofit, recruit the right board and volunteers, create a winning strategy, and attract donors to support your mission.

This symposium is designed to equip nonprofit leaders and clergy to break through barriers in performance for themselves, boards, staff, and volunteers; and to attract the funding to support the fulfillment of the organization's mission.

To register for this Virtual Symposium go HERE

  Read the Preview Conversation

Dr. Thyonne Gordon: Well, I guess we can introduce ourselves, huh? I am Dr. Thyonne Gordon. I am here in sunny Los Angeles, California. I am your story strategist. I help people with curating and creating the best story of their life, their project, their idea, their business. As Hugh continues to pull me back into the nonprofit world, I help nonprofits to curate their story of great success.

Hugh Ballou: You’re so valuable to this sector. Let me introduce who’s here. We’re here to share with you. It’s a preview session. Thank you for being here today. Today is a special edition of The Nonprofit Exchange. It’s thoughts, ideas, encouragement, empowerment, learning, examples to learn from. It’s people who have something to share. Everybody here has been a guest on previous episodes of the podcast. We’ll have some more people joining us. These are presenters for the Nonprofit Reactivation Symposium that will happen on May 1. I wanted the presenters to give you their story about what they’re going to share with you. Also, why did they want to show up?

I am going to start with Dr. David Gruder. David, you’ve been with me doing this kind of stuff for a way long time, back since water. This is #27 of these live events. This one is the first one that is virtual, and it’s very different. It was the Leadership Empowerment Symposium for years. You and I started noodling on the title. Share a little bit about what we talk about and why we named this a reactivation symposium.

Dr. David Gruder: Right. Well, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be here with you, Hugh, as always, and to be with these wonderful, esteemed colleagues who I so respect and appreciate and love. The changes that are going on in our society right now that have been brought to the forefront through the COVID-19 crisis are changes that have been under way for a while in a lower-key manner, that in a sense flew under the radar. Because of what’s been magnified through the COVID-19 crisis, we really are in the process of establishing what’s being called a new norm. Nonprofits are going to be dramatically impacted by this new norm. So what we at SynerVision Leadership Foundation are committed to doing is helping nonprofits stay ahead of that curve so that we craft the new norm together as the nonprofit world so that nonprofits can fill their proper place in the world in a more effective way in the new norm rather than be drowned out because of the craziness that is going on as the new norm emerges.

Hugh: Craziness. Whoa. I love it. We were talking a little bit before we officially started. I had a technical glitch, and my Zoom disappeared off my computer. I am back. We were talking about being busier than ever. When somebody says, “Why do we need reactivation?” you are going to talk a little bit… Tell them about what you’re talking about.

David: The topic I am going to be speaking on is reenvisioning leader development in the new normal. The things that have been emerging during this COVID crisis really illuminate the necessity of, I don’t want to be dramatic here too much, but pretty much an overhaul of the vision of what leadership is going to need to include that people were thinking of as optional before now. Now it’s mandatory. I am going to be covering four key areas of new norm leadership and leader development in my talk.

Hugh: We won’t tell them exactly what that is yet.

David: Ooh, it’s a secret. You have to show up to find out.

Hugh: It’s a secret. Each of you have recorded a little promo that we have put out on the Internet and invited people to come. The latest one I got a few minutes ago was from Dr. Gordon. We have some California people here. David Gruder, you’re way south, Spanish-speaking San Diego. Thyonne, you’re a little north of there in Los Angeles. Talk a little bit about what you’re talking about, and why.

Thyonne: Yes, I’m Dr. Thyonne. I will be talking about shifting your crisis story through board leadership. I’ll be speaking in regard to how boards and executive directors and organizations overall need to work together during the time of crisis more than ever. No matter what, board leaders and their executives should always be in mind step. But during a crisis, it’s really important for the board to step up and take their leadership role and do it in a more advanced way than they have in the past. I’ll be speaking about how board members can show up in that type of way.

Hugh: We’ll be talking more about that. This is the special edition of The Nonprofit Exchange. This particular event, we have a key sponsor, EZ-Card. *Sponsor message from EZ-Card*

We have Greg Sanders today. Greg represents the EZ-Card company. It’s his company. He founded it. But you’re not just a tech guy, are you? Just a little bit about Greg. Why are you supporting the work of SynerVision Leadership Foundation?

Greg Sanders: I just want to say what a privilege it is first of all to be here. I understand this is a relatively informal gathering, so I did not wear a suit and tie. I agree with Dr. Gruder. This time is a time of transition. So many people are learning new technical skills, supportive technologies, to enable them to conduct business and do face-to-face meetings in this type of venue as opposed to meeting at Starbucks and going to live venues. Not just businesspeople, but their customers. If I am going to do an estimate and put a roof on your house, I am not going to come to your house anymore. I am going to ask you to hop on your phone or computer. The normal person on the street is also developing all of these online skills. So to David’s point about nonprofits, every nonprofit I’m aware of works with a skeleton crew. They are time-challenged and resource-challenged, and they probably don’t have time to think about what Dr. Gruder is going to talk about, which is how to rest and reshape and reform. They are trying to survive. Coming on Friday is so valuable.

What we’re doing at EZ-Card is we are the supportive technology. I am not a major speaker. I will speak briefly about possibly using EZ-Card along with Zoom or other technologies which move your message forward in this particular environment. That is what EZ-Card is. I will be explaining the benefits of EZ-Card as a mobile app. When I think of a nonprofit, they have to get their message out. They have to raise money. They have to let their supporters know this is our valuable work we are doing day in and day out. Any video they can show where they are caring for children or at-risk populations, any way to get their message out there, and they can do that with EZ-Card on their phone. That is what we’ll be doing, and we are happy to support the event itself.

If you’d like to look at it and share it with people to get there on Friday, you just text LDR, which is an abbreviation for leadership, to 64600. Two things will happen. You will get a link to your phone. You click the link, and the EZ-Card opens. It could take you to the SynerVision website. It could take you to details about Friday’s event. You can register. But it will also give Hugh and the leadership team your mobile number so they can send you text reminders about the event. Text LDR to 64600. We’d like to provide similar technology to any nonprofit if we can help you do what you do better and help you raise more money.

Hugh: It’s an amazing tool. I know David Gruder has one. The others of you who have seen it. Sherita just saw it for the first time. Bob Hopkins out there in Big D, Dallas, Texas. You’re recording as you were wearing this ten-gallon hat. So passionate about philanthropy he even named his horse Philanthropy.

Bob Hopkins: I did. I did, and I do.

Hugh: It’s this kid who said to his dad, “Your ten-gallon hat won’t hold ten gallons; it only holds four quarts.” Tell us what you are going to talk about and why you want to talk about that.

Bob: It changes every hour quite frankly. I just got off the television looking at the president of Brown University. By the way, universities are nonprofit organizations. Talking about how hundreds of thousands of colleges are going to stay afloat because they depend upon tuition, and lots of kids aren’t going back to school at this time because they don’t know what they’re going to do, and they don’t have jobs anymore. They won’t be able to afford to go. I’m sure every board of directors of every university or college in the country is madly trying to figure it out. One of the people I invited to come on Friday as a student is Alfonse Brown. He’s at a university in Florida, an African-American law university, the oldest one in the country. He has board meetings all day Friday and Saturday, trying to figure out what they are going to do in the fall. Not in the summer. We have already figured out the summer; we are doing Zoom, just like we’re doing now. What are they going to do in the fall with those huge buildings, with billions of square feet? With students, I have 22-24 students in my classroom. We cannot handle six feet apart. If every classroom doesn’t have 24-26, they will lose money. Thousands of colleges will have to close.

Then I’m thinking about my students. My students have been introduced to the nonprofit sector in my class because I teach communications with a focus on nonprofit management. I’m thinking about them because what are they going to get out of it, and what message am I going to give them? I have a requirement that all my students come to this class on Friday. It’s half of their final. Then they have to write a critique on what they experienced, what they got out of it as 50 points, and they have to write their eulogy for the other 50 points. After this semester, they will probably want to die anyway, so their eulogy might be appropriate. I don’t know.

I’m going to look at what you all are going to talk about, so I will try to fit in so I am not talking about the same thing. I listened to speaking about boards of directors as well as Thyonne. There are so many avenues of how to talk about boards of directors. How to get them, how to keep them, how many to get, what are their responsibilities, those kinds of things. I think, and you already messaged it to me right now, is how they will stay afloat. That’s what boards of directors are going to want to know when they come to see us when we are talking about nonprofit management and organizations. How are we going to stay afloat? What is the new normal going to be? I think that changes every day, too.

We are supposed to in Texas open up last Friday. I went to the bank just now. There was one man in there without a mask on. I went to the president sitting in the corner and said, “Is it a requirement to wear masks now?” He said, “Yes, it is, but we’re not enforcing it. It’s a $1,000 fine, and we’re not enforcing it.” I said, “Why not? It’s a rule and a law. If I have to do it, they have to do it because I am not being protected, but they are being protected from me.” I tell you every minute I find something different. Our lives are going to change not just from the board level, but from the people who come to participate with us. All of them won’t be board members. They will be people who are not involved in the nonprofit sector as a living or in a vocation, but as maybe just a volunteer.

Hugh: Bob and I met recently. My wife was going to Dallas for a conference at SMU. We were introduced by guests on my show who were the founders of Barefoot Winery. They accidentally founded a winery; it’s a great story. We connected. Bob, you have a book in your hand there?

Bob: Hugh, I’m so sorry you asked. This is my book. It’s called Philanthropy Misunderstood. Is that appropriate for the time. I think it should be Management Misunderstood, Nonprofits Misunderstood, Our Planet Misunderstood. My next book will be called Philanthropy Understood. Hopefully in the next two years, we will figure that out.

Hugh: Sherita and Thyonne will have some stories for you there. They have a massive amount of connections and nonprofits they have worked with. The new normal is you go into the bank with a mask on. It used to be when you walk into the bank with a mask on, they will be nervous. Now if you don’t have a mask on, they’re nervous. The new normal is opposite polarity.

Bob: They are still nervous because they arrested two men and asked them to leave. Unfortunately, you people of color will understand this. These were two black men with two black masks on. The people behind the counter were uncomfortable with them and asked them to leave, not knowing if they had a billion dollars in the bank or whatever reason they were there. It didn’t matter. We have a lot of challenges coming up.

Hugh: Sherita, on that happy note, tell folks- Bob has been a lifelong champion of nonprofits. He has been a CFRE with the fundraising professionals. He is a wee bit older than me. Finally I am in a group with one person who is my senior. My sister Sherita out there, where are you now? Arkansas?

Sherita Herring: I am in Hattieville, Arkansas, of all names, right?

Bob: I know Hattieville.

Sherita: The fact that I am even here in Hattieville. When I was a young girl, do you guys remember Petticoat Junction? I used to want to live there. I loved Betty Jo, Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo, Uncle Joe. I loved the pig Arnold. Most people did not realize how much I am a country girl.

I am telling you that story because what I am going to be talking about on Friday is there are grants that exist even now that will allow you to live your most unbelievable dreams. I am living my dream. I am sitting here on 30 acres of land that has been passed down in my family for over 100 years. It’s been almost 50 years since my great-grandfather passed away and anyone has lived here. It’s not a cliché for me. I am living my best life right now in an RV with chickens and Guinea, and he is out there spraying. That’s what I’ll be talking about. Thank you for having me on with these other experts, Hugh.

Hugh: We have Wil Coleman. He is a great musician out there in Raleigh, North Carolina. We will hopefully have Dr. Williams here in just a minute.

Sherita: He is coming on now.

Hugh: We also have a presenter who is not here, Bishop Ebony Kirkland. If you go to the landing page for the symposium at NonprofitLeadership.live, I am watching my phone. People are registering. It’s exciting. We want to fill the house because there is so much important work to do. If you click on the pictures for these good-looking people, a video will pop up with an invitation as to what they are talking about in more detail and why you should come.

This word “reactivation,” it’s a mystery word for some of us because we are working as hard as we can. It’s a new era. It’s an important era. Bob has invited students. He is in the classroom again. He’s worn a lot of hats. I gotta tell you, I have been in his class with his students. They come to our nonprofit leadership group on Thursdays. You are inspiring a new group of leaders, profound group of leaders coming up. There is a lot of untapped potential for people who might get overlooked. I remember, Bob, when I was 18, I had a chance to conduct when I was nothing but potential. Somebody like you believed in me. Somebody like you said, “Hugh, give it a go.” I was able to step up into a whole career.

Let’s go back to David Gruder for a minute. I want to ask any of you to shout out when you can. This is such an important occasion. Bob just talked about colleges who are a specific type of nonprofit. Big universities with big budgets and a lot of foundations and history are having challenging times. Imagine a small community organization that wants to feed people, clothe people, house people. They are working on a bare strings budget. David, what’s important for our mindset? What’s important for how to equip ourselves to rethink leadership and our work?

David: Oh my. Well, okay. Short version is that we need to shift our, what’s called in psychology, locus of control. Right now, in society, there is an external locus of control. What locus of control has to do with is how a person centers their ideas about where control lives. Right now, a lot of people are thinking that society and government and COVID-19 and external circumstances are the boss of them. That is a mindset that is a surefire recipe for victimization, powerlessness, and empty, unhelpful forms of rebellion. That has to shift into what in psychology is called an internal locus of control, where I’m the boss of the future I create. I’m the boss of my own stories that I tell myself and the emotions that I have and response to those stories and the words and actions that I say and do in response to the emotions I have about the stories I create. That is a skillset that is developable, and it is a crucial skillset, not only for leaders to embody, but for teams to be trained in how to do because without that, there will be no conscious, elevated, spiritual architecting of a new norm that is helpful to humanity rather than harmful to humanity.

Hugh: David Gruder says things, and I say, “Gosh, I wish I would have put those words together like that.” He is a champion wordsmith. Anything else you want to share? Thyonne, I was so impressed by your short video. Of course, I was impressed by all of them, but yours is in mind because I got it most recently. It was passionate. You used to be part of a foundation that sent you out to do board capacity building. Why is it so important for us to learn ourselves as leaders, to equip ourselves as leaders to grow and engage our boards at a higher level?

Thyonne: Thanks for the compliment on the video that you had me do at the last minute. It’s really important for us as leaders to engage and interact with our boards because our boards are what make our organizations. They hold the fiduciary responsibility for our nonprofit organizations, which means if they’re not working in step with the executives and the team at the organizational level, you absolutely could slip and fall. Your board is like your safety net. They are looking at things. Their role is to actually make sure the organization is staying afloat, is sustainable, is doing what it says it’s supposed to do, staying in line with the vision and the mission. Your board is your support system. It’s important for leaders to understand the relationship and the role they have with their board members.

The foundation that I worked with prior was the Annenberg Foundation here in Los Angeles. We did do capacity-building by teaching board leaders how to work in alignment with the executive director. The program was called Alchemy. It was a magical program to bring together the executive director and a support person, or a champion, and the board chair. They had to come together in the program, which we would do quarterly. We came for classes and learning how to work together, how to build the capacity of the organization, and even how to fundraise. With them working hand in hand, they were able to have much higher success rates.

It’s important for leaders to understand the importance of their board and what their board roles are. Especially with small organizations, when you start an organization, my mom is on the board, my brother is on the board, and my sister down north. They’re like, “Yeah, sure, you can put my name down.” They have no idea what it means to be responsible on a board. They don’t know anything about board governance. It’s important for leaders who want to start these nonprofits to understand your board is a serious thing. It’s not just your mom and grandma and everybody who said, “Yeah, we should do that. That sounds cool.” And you’re selling pies or chicken dinners or whatever it is to raise money. That’s great, but if you have a board who understands their fiduciary responsibility, they will say, “We can sell these chicken dinners, but we also have to expand and talk to somebody like Sherita about how we find grant funding and how we are in alignment with that and how we stay with our vision and our mission. If you’re working with saving the chickens, selling chicken dinners might not be a good idea.”

Hugh: Absolutely.

Thyonne: It’s important for us to know what we’re doing and that our boards know their roles.

Hugh: I want to get Sherita on here for a minute. Sherita has some family issues, and she needs to go tend to some of those important things. She set you up for this thing that you are going to talk about. Everybody thinks there is grants, and it will be a smooth road going after them. You send in an application, and people will give you all this money. We have to learn some things as leaders, don’t we?

Sherita: Yes. For one, grant funders are investors just like any other investor. People think that there is a magic potion or something when it comes to grants for the nonprofit arena. That’s why another time when Hugh and I worked together, and I wrote that article, “Nonprofit - The Stepchild of Business,” people treat a nonprofit like a side gig or a hobby. They don’t put much into it. They might submit one grant or two grants and don’t receive it and say, “See, everyone told me not to do this.” But they have been trying to get money for their for-profit business for 20 years and kept trying until they succeeded. They will not put much into the nonprofit arena but expect a greater return. That’s what tends to happen. When you’re going after grants, it’s a joint process with the executive or whoever they choose to work with the person that is writing the grants because even myself, I raised over $30 million. We developed over 600 organizations. But there is no way to just take it upon myself and write about my clients’ accomplishments without their assistance. I am very good at what I do, but I am only as good as the information received. People expect you to write a grant for a building, for the grant-writer to write about it without their input. The grant-writer doesn’t know their accomplishments, who they have worked with in the past as far as collaborations, their projects. It has to be a joint effort in order to make it happen.

Yes, like you said, I lost a very dear uncle this morning. I tried to clear my calendar to be on here with you, but I got the call this morning that my uncle passed away. I am working on a couple of things.

Before I leave, it’s also important for people. Just today or yesterday it was reported, a director of an ER committed suicide. She was in New York at a major hospital. Had contracted coronavirus herself while treating patients. Got well, went back to work, and yesterday, committed suicide.

Organizations after every catastrophe, whether it is Katrina or the 1930s Depression, after every catastrophe, it doesn’t stop there. There is going to be an aftermath. There is cause and effect. Organizations are going to need to get prepared for depression, suicide prevention, PTSD, while also like professionals like ourselves, helping people to regain themselves after this. With every issue or problem, there is grant funding. That is why grants are there: to address problems and issues. This is why the nonprofit arena, and you hear about grants more during times like this. It’s not that it operates less. The nonprofit arena steps up more. It’s important to understand that, understand how you can stabilize your footing, and understand the process of how to go after funding in order to ride this wave. Yes, it is a negativity that is happening right now. Yes, we are losing lives. Yes, a lot of businesses are closed right now. If we understand how to ride the wave of what is happening right now in addition to knowing how to survive and move forward in it, that is what I will be talking about. I thank you for having me on, including me with these other experts.

Wil, hi, how are you? It’s been years. Tell Pastor I said hello, and I do want to speak with you guys following on this. David Gruder, Greg, Thyonne, and Bob, I look forward to being with you on Friday. Have a very blessed day.

Hugh: That was so profound. It’s time for some summary statements. I’d like to start with Bob Hopkins. Every time I talk to Bob, I am amazed at the depth of knowledge he has about a lot of different topics. He is living the sweet life. He could be tending his garden, but he is out there inspiring students and teaching. He has joined the SynerVision team and wants to help us take the magazine up another level and do some work with us. Blessings to you and sharing your gifts, and thank you for being a part of this presenting team. We are going to wrap up here and let everybody have a moment to say something. What would you like to add to the conversation?

Bob: I’m anxious to read the content again of everybody and what we are going to do and where I fit in. I am going to be there for the entire time. A lot of it might be off the top of my head after I have learned what I have heard from you. I don’t want to go on a tangent that doesn’t have some relationship to what we are already talking about. I think as a time when we all speak for 20 minutes at a time, then I’m later on in the afternoon. I’m the last speaker. At least that was the schedule I saw.

Hugh: I messed with it because we had some changes I had to make. I am going to send that out to you right after this session. You do have several times that you are going to be able to influence people and share some of your stuff. I have had to rework it. Our Bishop Kirkland in New York couldn’t be here today. She is sitting in New York talking to people about working together, collaborating. She is going to share with us Friday about that. We will get a report on how that is going in New York City.

Bob, you could speak off the top of your head all day and not duplicate yourself. You have such a wealth of information. We are going to talk about philanthropy. His book is brilliant. He lifted it up before. Your book is 100-something stories of nonprofits and how philanthropy really works. We think we know what philanthropy is, but it really is different. How do boards connect with that? You have experience running nonprofits as well as being a resource to them. We have had to make the schedule a little fluid, but it’s not a whole lot different. I have moved you up in the day a little bit. Whenever you talk, people are going to listen. It’s like one of those big investment companies. When they talk, we all listen. Knowing that, you’re going to have great gifts to share. Don’t put yourself down. You have a lot of important stuff to share. Thank you for being part of this great presentation team.

Bob: Thank you.

Hugh: Greg Sanders. Why is the work of a nonprofit so important? Why are you sponsoring SynerVision?

Greg: My mother and my father were both university teachers. My mom was in foreign languages, Spanish. My father was in music. I taught sociology for 30 years. I have a big heart for students who can’t figure out what the heck they are going to do with their lives when they are 18-22, which is an important thing I felt like I did when I was working at the university. Not just transmitting content, but helping people figure out their futures.

I think about Dr. Gruder who is known for integrity. My feeling is that everything we do should be of service to other people. I love the nonprofit organization because they wear right on their sleeve that we are here to serve. Businesses should have that same mindset. If what you do is not improving the quality of life for other people, you should go do something else. That is what EZ-Card attempts to do. I tell people if you are going to build a house, you could do it with your bare hands, but it’s a lot better to do it with tools, even with power tools, because if you spend $1 on a power tool, it’s going to help you save hundreds of dollars in building that house. That is what we are trying to do at EZ-Card. If the technology fits and helps people to do what they have chosen to do to help other people in a more efficient manner, that is what we’re all about. I think we are right. We need to rethink the way we are doing everything, and we need to think about it in terms of helping other people.

We are trying to make money during this period of time, but we are also caring for people. Just recently, I had one middle-aged adult talking about taking care of her 88-year-old mother right now and saying, “My mom was healthy. She went out with her friends. She went to restaurants. She had an active life. Now she is cooped up in her house and is wasting away. She is no longer actively engaging.” My advice is to maintain your normal life as best you can, even having to shelter in place. How can you maintain the routines? How can you maintain life as normal? It’s that kind of strategic thinking that nonprofit organizations have to be maintained in. You can’t do some things the way you did them before, but you can make a semblance of those activities and try to keep those healthy routines in place. I am privileged to be a part of it. We are trying to drive some traffic to what is happening on Friday from the EZ-Card side.

Hugh: Text 64600 with LDR in the message. You will have the SynerVision card. Dr. Gordon, how would you like to close?

Thyonne: Hugh, I hope you can keep David, Greg, Bob, and Wil because I plan on putting on my mask and kidnapping Bob from Texas. Bob, don’t pay attention. I am going to be grabbing you and bringing you to California.

Bob: My bags are packed.

Thyonne: I have already texted Greg’s site. I am excited about that. David, I know how I feel about you. Wil, I just met you. This is going to be an amazing symposium. I am excited to be part of it. Anyone who misses it, you are about to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime. That is what we have to understand as nonprofit leaders and people in this space. I will speak as an African-American woman. This isn’t our first time in a crisis. We know how to get through a crisis. Nonprofits, we are used to not having a whole lot and making a lot happen. In this crisis, we are the leaders. We actually know what to do already. Our leadership style is what everybody else is trying to do. We have been doing this makeshift thing for a long time. We have such an opportunity to take this thing by the horns and make an opportunity of it.

That is what I will talk about with the board leadership as well. When board leaders step up right now, there are all sorts of opportunities for us to come out of this thriving and leading during this crisis as well as through this crisis to help us get through it. There is so much opportunity. With the people who will be at this symposium, wow, you will get the ideas, the information. You will have the knowledge that you need to break through and make a change in your organization. I am excited. Hugh, let’s make it happen. Bob, don’t look for me, but I am coming to get you.

Hugh: That’s awesome. You may have noticed some old white guy. Sometimes we’re clueless. Some of us know how to dress, but not me. Wil, did you say Pastor is on here? Blessings. Do you have a picture, or will you just talk to us?

Dr. Kevin Williams: I am just going to talk to you. I don’t have a picture today.

Hugh: Thank you for being here. All of us have crazy schedules. We have some awesome folks. You are going to talk about how Paul said be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Talk about the transformation that you are going to talk about. You will be square up at noon EST at the symposium. It’s the spot before we take a lunch break. Tell us why we need that and why you want to share that with people.

Kevin: Right now, I think one of the greatest challenges that that could hinder any individual is to be stuck to an old way of thinking. Everything that has transpired recently has caused two waves of thought. One wave is people believing that things will go back to the way that they were, which is a very dangerous mindset. The other thought is understanding that they won’t go back to the way that they were, but also understand what is getting ready to come. Any time there is going to be advancement, either you are going to be a reactionary person or you will be an initiating individual. Thought leaders nowadays have to initiate so that we can provoke other people to initiate and not be reactionary. Usually, if you are reactionary, you are going to suffer the consequences of reacting.

But when your mind is renewed, when Paul talks about that, he is talking about a renovation of taking out some old things, almost like renovating a house, taking out some old things and literally changing the scope of the house and the aspect of it so that it can meet your current needs. The same thing happens in the mind. If a person doesn’t transform their thinking and get out of the old stuck way of thinking, they are going to ultimately implode and damage themselves. But when an individual comes into a mind renewal, this is why symposiums like this are key and important, because what you have then is you have thought leaders who are ultimately like construction workers. What we’re doing is aiding the individual to renovate their thinking because in this renovation, people are not just going to learn about what’s new, but also learn the type of thinking they should have that has hurt them before but also is going to help them now because now we’re open to a new way of thinking. If you look at what’s happening with the United States, with the government, with the marketplace, everything is shifting. Look at stocks. Look at the different kinds of currency now, like cryptocurrency. All of these different things that are happening, our mind has to be renewed.

The next thing is we have to make sure that we don’t fall into the hands of something that we don’t ascribe to because with all of this that is happening, by being a faith leader, I understand that God has an agenda. Even though God has a focus and a vision for all of us, so does the enemy. We have to make sure we are not operating in something that looks like it has a form of goodness, but denies the power thereof. As thought leaders, one of the things I believe that is important is that our thinking definitely has to change in order for us to be effective for this coming time and for this generation right now that is depending on us to see something for them that they cannot see for themselves.

Hugh: Awesome. Dr. Williams, it’s been a few years, but you invited me down to work with your congregation. We did some leadership stuff. Wil and I did some music stuff. Also, the very first symposium happened in Greensboro at your church. Did you know that?

Kevin: Wow. I knew that we did the symposium, but I didn’t know it was the first one.

Hugh: That was a shorter one. It was an evening. You put out the word, and everybody came. I remember Bishop Willimon asked somebody why they came, and they said, “Pastor said to come.” He was quite impressed with that. This is #27. It’s changed a little bit. Of course, we can’t do it live right now, so we are doing it virtually. It’s a celebration of something we started in Greensboro at New Jerusalem Cathedral. Thank you for helping me launch this so many years ago.

Kevin: Most definitely. I always want to be a part of things that you’re doing.

Hugh: Blessings. You’ve been a blessing to me. Thank you for being here. You’re sharing it with your tribe. Bishop Kirkland is out here in New York City getting people to collaborate. She is doing some important work today. She will be with us on Friday. May 1. Be there. Thank you for getting in here. As we close out here, my brother David Gruder, you get the last spot. You know Dr. Williams, don’t you?

David: Yes. We have not talked or seen each other for a number of years, but I am delighted to reconnect.

Hugh: This has been a great conversation. What do you want to leave us with?

David: What I want to leave you all with is a quote from a 20th century thought leader that many of you are familiar with by name at least, Buckminster Fuller. What Bucky Fuller said was, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This Friday, we are going to be talking about how nonprofits get to invent their future in effective, useful ways. I am really looking forward to offering some key psychological foundations for inventing a new future.

Hugh: And you have a book. Do you want to offer a virtual version of it? Tell us about that.

David: Very briefly, yeah. I have been involved in one capacity or another with 24 books now. One of them is a book I was the psychology editor for called Transcendent Thought and Market Leadership. That is by Bruce Raymond Wright. I have been blessed by Bruce to be able to offer a digital copy of the book as a gift to everyone who attends the symposium on Friday.

Hugh: We will have some other gifts, but that is a significant one. David, thank you for being here. Kevin, thank you for being here. Greg, thank you for being here. Bob, thank you for being here. Thyonne is going to capture you and take you to California. He can do a book signing there. He will do that in California. I look forward to putting a spin on nonprofit leadership in a good way and inspiring people to go out there and make a huge difference. Thank you so much for sharing today with everybody.

  Check out this episode!

[gigslist]

11 Cool & Weird Film Funding Grants & Job Boards

Weird and Interesting 

Cool and Weird Funding & Job Orgs

11 Cool and weird arts and film funding grants, film job boards and a little weird bit of editorial.

I’m compiling a new gigs list of film and media job sites and job boards and film funding grants, film sponsors, scholarships, and residencies etc. Over 1000 resources. Billions of dollars every year in cash and in-kind resources. While surfing I found a few weird and interesting and cool resources GigsList.info readers might have fun reading or joining or applying for. These are not paid ads. I just happen to think they are cool and weird and interesting.

Anonymous Production Assistant

Anonymousproductionassistant.com 

“The TAPA blog is a place to freely discuss the life of a production assistant. And a  repository for the knowledge I’ve accumulated to future generations of PAs. Who the hell are you? I’m anonymous. It says so right there in the title. No, really, who are you? I’m not saying, bub. Deal with it. The New York Times recommended my blog. As did The Los Angeles Times. Also, LA Magazine. KCRW’s The Business interviewed me, as did as LA Women. That’s something, I guess.”

Burning Man

Burningman.org 

Funding art that is accessible to the public, civic in scope and prompts the viewer to act. Burning Man has a long and rich history of granting seed money to new and emerging artists around the world. To date, we’ve granted 202 projects in 34 U.S. states and 34 countries. “Burning Man isn’t a ‘place you put art’,  but a ‘context in which art is created.’ You don’t have to have been to Black Rock City to be a Burner. 

Cannabis Media

Fromtheheartproductions.com  

The grant seeks heartfelt documentaries, short films, features, and web series. Revealing how cannabis has benefited and changed people’s lives. With the legalization of marijuana in the U.S. Much of media focus has been on the business aspects of the cannabis industry. Cannabis Media Grant is for filmmakers to create films that show where the cannabis market is going.  How cannabis has become an important part of people’s lives, and how it’s improved those lives for the better.

Celebrity Scholarship

Celebrityscholarship.com 

Through costume, role-playing, props and self-expression. The person with the funniest, quirkiest and most authentic celebrity impersonation. Tell us about your celebrity and why you chose them. Send us your picture or video for scholarship funds. Feel free to use makeup, funky clothing and a smart caption. 

CJ Pony Auto Videos

Cjponyparts.com/cj-pony-parts-scholarship-video-contest

CJ Pony Parts is proud to offer two scholarships each year to students who are enrolling in post-secondary education in their next semester. Create a short video, under 3 minutes long, on provided topics. You can be inspirational, funny, serious, educational, or even musical! Winners will be selected based on creativity and content rather than video editing skill or how many views the video gets. Submitted videos must be your own work.

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

Cbldf.org 

Non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the First Amendment rights of the comics medium. We provide Legal aid, education and advocacy. Protecting the rights of readers, creators, retailers, publishers, and librarians. All involved with comics, manga, and graphic novels. - GigsList Note: Ok so they don’t give money, but they are interesting.

Fine Awards Scholarship

Fineawards.com/scholarship

Competitive award for college students. To share their story about someone in their life deserving recognition. A person who helped, inspired and/or motivated you. A parent, sibling, friend or other role model. A stranger you saw paying it forward without expectation of recognition. Tell us your story.

RxLaughter

Rxlaughter.org  

Improving quality of life through positive entertainment research, therapeutic care and education. Founded in 1998 by ABC and CBS veteran primetime programming executive Sherry Hilber. Founded as a laughter research charity for children with physical illnesses at the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center. How comedy can ease pain and anxiety for children during painful medical procedures. Using the power of comedy to improve quality of life for people with emotional and physical challenges. Our programs are volunteer-based.  

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Thesisters.org 

Grants supporting small organizations and projects that provide services to underserved communities. Projects that are progressive grassroots projects. Promoting wellness and joy, tolerance and diversity supporting LGBTQ+ communities. San Francisco Bay Area projects preferred.

Stockade Works Film Producer Apprenticeships

Stockadeworks.org 

Apprenticeship program for Hudson Valley residents. Feature film and documentary production, admin and marketing. By learning as you work on local productions. Part internship part paid gig. The ins and outs of budget, pitch materials, social media and audience development. As well as hands on training in production and post production.

Tattoo Trends in Australia 

wsartsalliance.com/tattoo-trends-in-australia-a-big-yes-and-a-small-no

In depth article by the Washington State Arts Alliance. Tattoos are officially a serious fine art form. Excerpt: “Tattoos are rapidly finding their market in Australia compared to a few years ago when they were regarded as a tabloid. This massive growth was mostly led by the tattoos designs that included a word or a phrase category. However, a recently conducted surveys reveal that around 70% of Australian’s now prefer to have a symbol or picture...”  (GigsList note: Includes professional tips and howtoos about tattoos.)

Thiel Fellowship $100,000 to Drop Out of College

Thielfellowship.org 

Thiel Fellowship grants $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom. Some Thiel Fellows are programmers. Others have started nonprofits, created consumer products, launched media companies, and built hardware. We look to support young people who want to bring their ideas to the world. Not only film, anything.

GigsList Explains Apprenticeships 

And why apprenticeships can save your ass and your country’s economy. The short version. 

The other day I had to explain what an apprenticeship is to a person with a college degree. I was kind of very shocked. So... I've included a real apprenticeship and explanation of apprenticeships by a former apprentice. Me:)

Apprenticeships are the old school way of learning film business and production ropes. Where  you learn and make industry contacts and get paid. Apprenticeships are how I and my friends learned the biz and production. 

No college loans to pay back and more budget to create art and support our arts friends. Plus we’ve never had to surf job boards for gigs, it’s all who we know from learning on the job. You join a family not an industry. 

If everybody in film in the USA learned on the job. How much money could go back to the USA economy and funding film arts and underserved? And save the whales. Talk to your local entertainment unions and gov film offices. They should be more than happy to help with local apprenticeship programs :)

[oselatra]

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families

Making the case for better health, education and more.

The benefits to people that most nonprofits deliver is easy to grasp: Arkansas Foodbank delivers meals, Our House shelters people getting their lives back on track, The Van takes care of the homeless, the Centers for Youth and Families takes in children to help them with behavioral issues. You can get clothing, escape an abusive home, learn to read, get help kicking a drug habit. So when you write a check to Women and Children First, for example, you know that money will have an immediate, tangible effect on the workings of the shelter.

What might be harder to picture is the work of advocacy groups — organizations that don't deliver services directly but work hard to make sure that their need is known and addressed. These groups could use your charitable dollars, too.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families has been in business for 40 years, using data-driven campaigns to bring better health, fairer taxation, education and juvenile justice to persuade people in power to act on behalf of the good of the state. Such dollars allow AACF to lobby on behalf of such things as ARKids First, the health care program for children in low-income families that the agency helped bring to fruition.

AACF's philanthropic support comes largely in the form of grants from foundations such as the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, which is working with AACF on its Arkansas Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, and out-of-state organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which collects Kids Count data; the Alliance for Early Success, for quality pre-K; and the Kellogg Foundation.

But you can't lobby with grant money, and Rich Huddleston, AACF director, would like to have the spending flexibility that individual gifts provide. "It's an uphill battle" to raise such dollars, he said, because "not everyone gets what advocacy is about." Arkansas Advocates' annual Soup Sunday is its largest fundraiser from individual donors.

Another example of AACF's work, in education: With the Arkansas Early Childhood Association and grass roots support, Arkansas Advocates has pushed for needed funds for Arkansas Better Chance, the pre-K program operated by the state Department of Education since 1990. The ABC budget to prepare low-income 3- and 4-year-olds for kindergarten was a negligible $10 million until 2003; Gov. Mike Hukabee at one point proposed even that sum be cut, by 66 percent. But protests at the Capitol stopped that proposal, and the legislature raised the tax on beer to keep ABC afloat. In 2003, the state Supreme Court's Lakeview decision on equitable school funding increased ABC money by a factor of 10, and AACF and the Invest Early Coalition worked to boost that to $110 million by 2007. In the 10 years since, the state has added only $3 million more, though AACF advocated for a $20 million increase to meet the increase in expenses over time.

AACF "is a huge cheerleader for ABC," said Karla Curry, who runs the nonprofit Friendship Community Care for preschoolers in Bryant. "They have worked so hard to make sure we have quality preschool services." AACF, which offers free training in how to advocate to nonprofits, has helped her agency "make sure we know what is going on so we can be active and let our voice be heard."

So, though a gift to AACF would not go directly to Friendship Community Care, it would relay the needs of the facility and others in the program to those who hold the state's purse strings: the legislature. In the case of Friendship Community Care, those needs are special: Curry's classrooms for 3- to 4-year-olds integrate children who are typical in their development with students with disabilities. "Kids learn really well from their peers," Curry said. "The little children with disabilities learn a lot from typically developing children, and typical children learn to be accepting. They're not scared just because the child is different or is in a wheelchair or has an assistant. They learn we are just as much the same as we are different, and a community spirit is built." That's the kind of spirit in which children thrive and become ready for kindergarten.

Curry talked about "Pixie," a child at the Bryant center who has Rett's syndrome, a genetic and eventually fatal neurological condition that robs a child of the ability to use her muscles in movement and speech and causes seizures. As a 4-year-old, "Pixie" was "a social butterfly," Curry said.

"She loved people, and she was one of the happiest children I've ever seen to be so severely affected," Curry said. "Every child in this building ... could call her by name and they wanted her there. They took care of her, but not as a mother-child relationship. She was their friend. Just to see them embracing her that way ... they wanted her to be included. ...

"I think that's one of the best things about ABC period ... . those children are learning life skills every day that they will use for the rest of their lives."

Debbie Mays operates Bright Beginnings, a Siloam Springs pre-K program funded by ABC, in her home. Mays, who was also just named overall winner of the Southern Early Childhood Family Engagement competition, said Arkansas Advocates has "fought hard for us with the legislators" to increase funding so classrooms can keep staff trained and paid at a rate that encourages them to stay with the program.

Huddleston said AACF is working now to keep ABC funding at a level that quality isn't lost, though he'd like to see it increased enough to expand the number of classrooms. Its popularity in Siloam Springs is clear: There are 27 people on the waiting list for Bright Beginnings' 11 openings.

Geania Dickey, who worked with Arkansas Advocates to get ABC started and who is a consultant in its partnership with the education initiative Forward Arkansas, said that what AACF does really well is "listening to the people they're trying to help. They don't create their own agenda: It's based on hearing from people with needs first-hand."

Dickey also said Arkansas Advocates "will do nothing without solid evidence. I respect that. If I tout Arkansas Advocates' data, I don't worry about it being absolutely accurate."

Arkansas Advocates also serves as a hub of sorts to connect people working in different areas with common concerns. "Because with little kids," Dickey said, "we know education and health go hand in hand, so maybe I'm in a conversation with them and they inform me of another group. They're a conduit of information."

To support the work of Arkansas Advocates, go to the agency's home page, aradvocates.org, where there is a donate tab. The website provides links to its research and issues and the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count data for Arkansas.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/lena-dunham-ready-american-horror-story-plus-blac-chyna-free/

Lena Dunham ready for 'American Horror' Story plus Blac Chyna free

Now that her show Girls has wrapped up, actress and outspoken starlet Lena Dunham is moving on to her next TV-related project. This week, it was announced that Lena has officially joined the cast of the one the most popular shows currently on TV. On Wednesday, Ryan Murphy, who is the mastermind behind the show American Crime Story, which airs on FX, tweeted out about Lena joining the cast of ACS. In the joyful tweet, Ryan posted, “Thrilled that my talented friend Lena Dunham is joining the AMERICAN HORROR STORY family. Always wanted to work together, and now we [are]!” Ryan Murphy, Twitter post: https://twitter.com/MrRPMurphy/status/887844862426468352 In addition to Lena, there are several other new stars that have been cast for the show’s upcoming season (which remains still, for the most part, under wraps). In fact, Ryan Murphy previously revealed that Scream Queens actress Billie Lourd would be joining the cast, as well as comedian Billie Eichner. Stay tuned for more details about the exciting new season of American Horror Story. In a brand new interview with People magazine, reality TV starlet Blac Chyna got candid about the relief she felt after ending her rocky relationship with Rob Kardashian. As you are probably well aware, Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian’s romance was far from one out of a fairy tale. While the duo was quick to get engaged and have a baby together (a little girl named Dream), they were constantly fighting and breaking up. Over the last few weeks, the level of animosity between them bubbled to an all time high, as Rob took to his social media to completely slam his ex and post revealing photos of her for all of his followers to see. In her interview with People, Blac Chyna explained that there was “absolutely no” way that she and Rob would get back together. She stated, “I’m glad I’m relieved of [Rob], but damn, why did I have to get relief in this way? I feel like God does certain things – not to hurt you, but to show you your true strength. I fee like, if I can come out of this, I can come out of anything.” The cosmetic line creator went on to talk openly about her two young kids, King Cairo and Dream, who she shares with rapper Tyga and Rob, respectively. Chyna gushed, “I’m not going to take something that happened to me in the past into my future. First and foremost, I’m going to make myself happy because once I’m happy, then Dream can be happy and then King can be happy and then everybody else around me can be happy.” Later in the interview, Chyna slammed her ex (Rob) for posting revealing photos of her on social media in an attempt to shame her. The starlet ranted, “Words are words, but once you start posting actual pictures, then that’s just not right. It’s actually against the law. If I was to go and do a very artsy, high-end photo shoot exposing my breasts, that’s my choice. This is my body. It’s my right. Once somebody else does it, it’s just not right. I’m hoping that somehow, someday, this will let [more people] know, ‘Don’t do it.’” While Chyna has gone through a lot over the past few weeks, she is not going to let this whole scandal force her into hiding. The star told People, "When somebody that's actually been the closest to you says these things, other people are going to believe it. But the people that I actually care about, my family and friends, they're all I worry about. I'm not going to sit here and hide in my house over somebody else being hurt or jealous or insecure." Seacrest in! Ryan Seacrest will be back hosting "American Idol" when it returns for its first season on ABC. Kelly Ripa made the announcement on Thursday's "Live with Kelly and Ryan," which she has co-hosted with Seacrest since he joined her in May. "I am happy to confirm ... that Ryan Seacrest is returning as the host of 'American Idol,'" said Ripa as the studio audience whooped. Seacrest said he was excited to be doing it again. "I don't know if you've ever been in a 15-year relationship and then, for a reason that you really don't know, you break up," he said. "I thought, 'Gosh, it would be great to get back together at some point.'" Seacrest had a grand history with "Idol" during its smash-hit run on Fox from 2002 through 2016. Reclaiming that job now gives him an additional role in the Disney family, which owns ABC and produces the syndicated "Live." His potential return to "Idol" had sparked much speculation since ABC announced in May that it would revive the talent competition. The program airs from Los Angeles and "Live" airs weekday mornings from New York. But the 42-year-old Seacrest is no stranger to a packed work schedule and cross-country flights. "You can have all the tickets you want," he told Ripa, "and you can come back and forth with me any weekend." Seacrest will also continue his syndicated Los Angeles morning-drive-time radio show, as well as a nationally syndicated Top 40 radio show, from his iHeartMedia studio in the same Manhattan complex where "Live" is telecast. He also hosts and executive produces ABC's annual "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest," and is a busy producer of series in which he doesn't appear, including "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" and its many spin-offs. ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey called Seacrest's talent "limitless, and I can't think of a more appropriate person to honor the 'Idol' legacy as it takes on new life than the man who has been there through it all." On Fox, "Idol" dominated TV in the 2000s and minted stars like Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and Kelly Clarkson, while making its judges, such as Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell, household names. It was the No. 1 series for nine years, peaking with 30 million viewers each episode in 2006. But by its last season the average audience had dipped to 11 million and skewed older, and NBC's "The Voice" surpassed it in popularity. Fox eliminated it. Even so, in today's television world, an audience of 11 million would rank it among TV's top 20 shows, a fact that clearly didn't escape ABC's notice. On the final Fox edition, a hopeful Seacrest told viewers, "Goodbye - for now." The nationwide search for the first ABC-aired "Idol" begins next month. ABC has not announced a premiere date. Oscar and Grammy winner Common surprised a group of New York students by donating $10,000 to help their teachers buy supplies like calculators and science kits. The rapper-actor partnered with the nonprofit AdoptAClassroom.org and Burlington Stores to give Renaissance School of the Arts in Harlem the funds on Thursday. Students cheered loudly after they learned the musician was at their school. Common was on-site with his mother, Dr. Mahalia Hines, an educator and member of the Chicago Board of Education. She said she remembered spending her own money to buy essential materials for her classroom. Common encouraged the students to keep their grades up and to persevere - in school and in life. Burlington has been raising money from its 599 stores to help other schools, asking customers to donate $1 or more. La La Anthony and Carmelo Anthony are going through a turbulent time in their marriage, but she claims they remain close. The “Power” actress opened up about her strained marriage — the two separated in April after he allegedly cheated and impregnated a stripper — and said she’s focusing on herself rather than her marital problems. “I’m having a good time. I’m living my life,” she said on “The Breakfast Club” Wednesday. “Hell, I’ve been through a lot, so I’m just enjoying it; having fun and just really happy about where my life is right now.” But when asked whether she’d move to Houston should Melo get transferred to the Rockets, La La stood firm on her love of New York. “I’m not moving anywhere,” La La declared. “I don’t know about those trick questions, but I’m staying in New York. “We’re not at that place right now,” she added when further prodded about whether she’d move with him if he moved. Despite it all, La La is keeping her head held high by focusing on the other important things in her life. “It’s good to have something to focus on. Whenever things are going crazy in life I usually put my energy on [my son] Kiyan and my work, which is what I’ve been doing,” she explained. “Kiyan has been doing amazing. He’s killing the basketball scene in a way that just blows my mind and my work is going great, so that’s where I put my focus.” The rest of the goings on in her life will figure themselves out, she said. “My [relationship] status right now is putting myself first, which I always say … whatever’s meant to happen will happen.” Until then, she’s not worried. “He’s my best friend. When you’re with someone for 13 years since they were 19 years old, and you have a 10-year-old child, you’d hope that you guys would be cool,” La La told the radio show. “We are the best of friends.” Following his controversial guest appearance on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” Season 7 premiere, Ed Sheeran has been making waves on social media. After his ill-timed deletion of his Twitter account, followed by its almost immediate return, the singer is shedding some light on the issue. Sheeran took to his Instagram account on Wednesday to address some reports that he deleted his Twitter account in the wake of the negative backlash his appearance on “Thrones” received from fans. “Last I’ll say on this,” he wrote. “I came off Twitter Coz [sic] I was always intending to come off Twitter, had nothing to do with what people said about my game of thrones cameo, because I am in game of thrones, why the hell would I worry what people thought about that. It’s clearly f—-g’ awesome. Timing was just a coincidence, but believe what you want.” The idea that Sheeran’s Twitter deletion had nothing to do with his “Thrones” appearance might seem convenient, but the singer did previously rail against the social network while speaking to The Sun. He told the outlet that he only uses his Twitter now to post his Instagram photos and finds it nothing but a place for people to say “mean things.”  

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

[double-birds-blog]

Mike Matheny, a Right-Wing Billionaire, and an Islamophobic Grill Salesman Have a Plan to Change the World

By Chase Woodruff

There is a crisis among America’s youth, a clear and present threat menacing our most precious hearts and minds, and the men of the BASE Foundation are determined to stop it, even if they’re not entirely clear on what it is.

“I’m concerned, quite frankly, about the culture of youth sports in America,” said Rick Sems, a local bank executive and the foundation’s new president, last week. He was speaking to a small crowd of donors at Ballpark Village, at a fundraising event emceed by Cardinals broadcaster Mike Claiborne.

If you’ve never heard of the BASE Foundation, don’t worry—you’re far from alone. It’s a small St. Louis-based nonprofit that offers a program, Baseball and Softball Education (or BASE) Training, designed to teach young ballplayers good sportsmanship; by its own account, a few dozen kids per year have completed the training since the organization was founded in 2006. But the BASE Foundation has plans to get much, much bigger, and soon.

“We’re talking about young lives,” said the next speaker, Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, who is involved with the foundation’s new project in a visible but publicly unspecified role. “We’re talking about changing the culture that we live in through sports.”

“As we create something that helps these kids, we’re changing the world that we live in.”

That “something,” it turns out, is the POWERplex, a $55 million youth sports facility in suburban St. Louis’ Chesterfield Valley, a few hundred yards from the levee that once broke to submerge the valley under 20 feet of water and a mile down the road from the property Matheny once went bankrupt on. Plans for the POWERplex include a permanent 225,000-square-foot sports dome, a smaller temporary dome to be raised every winter, and a 2,500-seat outdoor stadium—in addition to a hotel, restaurants, office and retail space, an urgent care center, a 300-seat auditorium, and other amenities. If all that doesn’t sound quite ambitious enough, don’t worry—it’s just phase one, with an as-yet-undetailed second phase scheduled to follow soon after.

The POWERplex is a joint venture of the BASE Foundation, the Buck Innovation Group, and Big Sports Properties, which is to say it’s the brainchild of broadcaster-turned-nonprofit-executive-turned-consultant Dan Buck, the man behind all three entities.

“What the BASE Foundation is going to achieve in the next three years,” said Buck at last week’s fundraiser, “is going to be truly one of the most remarkable things we’re going to ever see in American sports.”

To hear Buck tell it to the Ladue News in 2015, it was an on-air rant about the evils of Section 8 housing vouchers—“this multibillion dollar program…that just holds people down and disincentivizes work,” he says of the rental assistance that keeps millions of low-income families in their homes—that led the president of one of St. Louis’ most well-known charities to ask him to ditch his broadcasting career for nonprofit work. One way or another, Buck left his KTRS hosting gig in 2003 and went on to spend eight years as CEO of the St. Patrick Center, a Catholic organization that provides services to the city’s homeless.

Buck later joined SSM Health Care as vice president of philanthropy, before leaving in 2015 to start his own consultancy, the Buck Innovation Group, or BIG. The group’s mission, according to its website, is “to improve your business results and organizational performance through improved process, bold innovation and new idea development.” It’s unclear whether any businesses ever took BIG up on the offer; its only known project to date was The Manly Man Show, a product-showcase infomercial that ran for five episodes on Fox Sports Midwest last year.

Buck filed articles of incorporation for the BASE Foundation in Missouri in 2006, and has been pitching BASE Training to local youth teams ever since. By all appearances, it consists principally of material that teaches kids such lessons as how to “Honor the R.O.O.T.S. — Rules, Officials, Opponents, Teammates, and Self.” It’s difficult, however, to find much public record of the organization’s activities before last year; Buck only registered the domain for its website in December 2015. The IRS granted 501(c)(3) status to a separate “Base Foundation,” a Delaware nonprofit registered under the NTEE code for “Amateur Sports,” in July 2016.

Since plans for the then-unnamed POWERplex—and yes, the name is indeed an acronym for “Performance, Opportunity, Winning, Education, and Recreation”—were announced last October, the BASE Foundation has undergone some dramatic changes; its board has expanded to sixteen members, including Sems as president and local sports-development Sisyphus Dave Peacock as chairman. Buck no longer appears to be involved with the foundation in an official capacity; his name has been scrubbed from its website.

It’s unclear when Buck and Matheny’s paths first crossed, but there’s no doubt that it was a match made in heaven. Matheny, of course, had made the leap up to big-league managing after a post-retirement stint coaching Little League, during which time he’d authored a long, fastidious neighborhood listserv post that later became known as The Matheny Manifesto. Buck told the Riverfront Times last year that the book-length version of the Manifesto, published in 2015, “will be brought to life through a curriculum-based classroom program that will take place at this facility.”

If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading it, rest assured that the Manifesto is the perfect holy text for the BASE “curriculum”: headstrong, urgently written, and almost entirely devoid of substance. Mike Matheny has a message, and you may not like the message, but you need to hear the message, and the message is…players should hustle, and parents should be good parents, and Wouldn’t It Be Tight If Everyone Was Chill to Each Other.

A similar fervid, overdetermined vagueness permeates what little information about the BASE Foundation’s philosophy is offered on its website. For one short introductory paragraph it is relatively straightforward in describing the crisis it sees in youth baseball: a “great game…being disrespected on multiple levels,” from “angry parents” to kids’ “lack of respect” to “a glaring problem with ballplayers unable to control their negative emotions.” But if you’d like virtually any other details regarding the organization that wants to raise $55 million to open one of the largest indoor youth-sports facilities in the country—testimonials, perhaps, or sample materials, or evidence for its claim that sports psychologists helped develop its program—you’re out of luck.

The question that hangs over all of this is so obvious that not even Matheny can ignore it: “People ask me, why would you be involved in this? Why is there a need?”

“And the why is,” he said, gesturing beyond the donors gathered at Ballpark Village, “as you look out those windows and you see that stadium, the truth of the matter is, this is the greatest baseball city in the world. And when you have the greatest baseball city in the world, you should have some of the greatest baseball facilities in the world.”

This is an admirable sentiment; it would be terrific if young ballplayers in St. Louis had access to great facilities. It would be terrific, for example, if Ozzie Smith Field, near Vashon High School, had proper grading and drainage so that a little rain didn’t turn its infield into a swamp. It would be terrific if many of the other such fields in North St. Louis, built with funds from Cardinals Care and opened with feel-good ribbon-cutting ceremonies, didn’t soon similarly fall into disrepair due to a lack of resources.

There is a theoretical version of the BASE Foundation that, rather than waging a nebulous war on a supposed crisis of poor sportsmanship, is engaged in a battle actually worth fighting: reaching underserved kids in impoverished, predominantly black neighborhoods in North St. Louis and North County, providing resources and stability to communities that often lack them, helping reverse the decline in African-American participation in baseball in a city where the sport is a lingua franca, a civic religion.

That’s not the version the city is going to get, and as is often the case in St. Louis, the proof is in the geography. Chesterfield is about as far west as the suburban sprawl of West St. Louis County goes, less than four percent black in a metro area that’s nearly 20 percent black overall, and reachable by public transit from communities like Ferguson or Florissant only through an hours-long odyssey. Building the POWERplex within city limits, or even in a more central County location, could have sent a strong message about the degree of inclusivity and civic unity it aims to achieve; its planned address sends an equally strong message in the other direction.

Don’t assume, though, that this was simply the invisible hand of the market guiding Buck and his associates to the most efficient possible location. The most conspicuous speaker at last week’s fundraiser was Mark Harder, the St. Louis County Council Member representing District 7, which includes Chesterfield and other similarly lily-white suburbs like Ballwin and Wildwood.

“I know what you want to hear tonight,” Harder told the crowd. “All I can say at this point is that I’ve been working with [County] Executive Steve Stenger and the County staff on a multimillion dollar package to upgrade the infrastructure to this property.”

He’s referring to water and sewer service, which currently don’t extend to the area of the floodplain where the POWERplex is planned; according to journalist John Hoffmann, Buck had initially told the Chesterfield City Council it would take $4 million to cover these infrastructure costs, then revised the estimate to $13 million. Harder’s comments would seem to contradict Buck’s repeated assurances that no public funds would be directed towards the project—as well as his public confidence that POWERplex is a done deal.

Obtaining County funds isn’t the only hurdle the POWERplex has left to overcome, either. The Army Corps of Engineers must conduct testing on the floodplain before approving the construction plans. And in order for Chesterfield to move forward with a plan to purchase the land and lease it to the BASE Foundation, Buck must secure an initial round of $23 million in binding financial commitments.

While it’s light on details regarding exactly what the program, you know, does, the BASE Foundation’s website is positively overflowing with information on how you can help them reach that $23 million goal. For the price of $200,000, up to nine “Field Founders” will get one of the facility’s turfed fields named after them. “POWERplex Heroes” will receive a place on the “Heroes Wall” in exchange for a $100,000 commitment, and the “Champions Walkway” will feature both large bricks (honoring $30,000 commitments) and small ones ($5,000). A mere $1,500 gets you on the “All Star Wall of Gratitude,” while $100 is only good enough for the “MVP Video Monitor.”

It’s important to emphasize that these are not investments that the BASE Foundation is asking for, but charitable donations. Dan Buck would like very much for some very rich people to give him enormous sums of money, please—not to provide adequate facilities and equipment to young athletes in low-income areas, not to help bridge the tragic divide between kids growing up in North St. Louis and those in West County, but precisely to exacerbate it. He’d like to devote his life to reciting banalities about sportsmanship to bored 12-year-olds, and he’d like to do it at a lavish suburban sports complex with a zip line and a climbing wall—for which his for-profit LLC, Big Sports Properties, will serve as property manager.

Cardinals Care has chipped in with a $500,000 contribution, but the largest donors to date have been the Sinquefield family, who have become notorious figures in Missouri politics over the last decade by spending heavily to promote right-wing economic causes. Matheny is a close friend of Rex Sinquefield, having lent his support to another of Sinquefield’s pet causes, the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis. In honor of the family’s $6 million donation to the POWERplex, young athletes who play at the facility will be taught at the “Sinquefield Center for Human Development.”

If his views on Section 8 housing weren’t enough of a clue, Buck’s political leanings came across quite clearly in a call-in appearance on a local radio show in late 2015, as flagged by the Riverfront Times last year. In voicing his opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to enter the country, Buck called the Koran “frightening” and Islam “an entire religious doctrine that promotes jihad against the founding religion of our nation.”

And as the donors at Ballpark Village bid on big-ticket items in a charity auction—“The IRS always believes a thousand dollars,” Buck cajoled the crowd—there was little doubt what kind of room the speakers were playing to.

“In the words of our president, this is going to be huge,” said Harder—one of the County Council’s two Republican members—as he wrapped up his remarks, prompting laughter and applause. “Let’s go POWERplex!”

I don’t have kids and have never coached youth sports; my only prolonged exposure to that world came as a young player, years ago. So maybe I’m wrong to doubt that the “culture of youth sports in America” is in crisis. Maybe I’m wrong to think that kids are still kids, and parents are still parents; that people love their kids, and sports are a competitive environment, and sometimes that can lead to friction and drama and angst; that the way to deal with this is for adults to be adults, and to communicate with each other, and to try to be good parents to their kids; and that slideshows full of ham-fisted acronyms and trite platitudes about sportsmanship are neither necessary to address this nor capable of making much difference.

Maybe I’m wrong, also, to see the BASE Foundation’s worldview as not merely ancillary to but thoroughly the product of the reactionary politics of its backers. Maybe I’m wrong to think that J.D. Vance-style moralizing about “culture” and “character” isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on; that the best way to make a positive impact on young people’s lives is to provide material aid to the kids most in need of it; that if you want to “change the world,” you should do that; and that if you want to build and run a fancy sports complex in an affluent white suburb, you should just say so.

The clock is running on the POWERplex, with proof of the initial $23 million in donations due to the city of Chesterfield by June 1st. There’s the matter of the County infrastructure funding, and the Army Corps of Engineers study, and then, if all goes well, the hard work of turning big promises and glitzy architectural renderings into reality. But I don’t doubt Dan Buck can pull it off, if for no other reason than that in the world we live in, those who are in a position to ask favors of men like Rex Sinquefield and Mike Matheny and Dave Peacock rarely fail. One way or another, I think, Buck will get a chance to prove me wrong on all of this. Then again, maybe I’m wrong about that, too.

[neptunecreek]

3 New Year’s Rituals for Nonprofits That Can Boost Professional Success

I would like to wish all my readers, colleagues, and friends a happy new year!   I had a fantastic break, including a family vacation in Hawaii, walking, hiking, quiet, and reflection.  How about you?

But before jumping into the daily grind, during the first week of January I use the quiet time to engage in several New Year’s rituals that help me prepare for the year ahead and identify professional growth areas.    My rituals include:

1) Review the Year: For as long as I can remember, I have kept an annual professional journal, using a variation of bullet journal technique. I call it my “To Do, To Done, Don’t Do, Reflection List.”  I use it for planning my work flow for the day, week, month, and quarter and to reflect along the way. I also use it as a year in review tool.  In early January, I read through the year’s journal and think about accomplishments:What gave me a sense of purpose and feeling of professional fulfillment? I also look at what was missing or where I was not so happy or made mistakes.  I look for patterns.

2) Identify “My Three Themes”: I do a combination of Peter Bregman’s  theme for the year, and Chris Brogan’s “My Three Words.”     Chris Brogan’s ritual suggests selecting three words, but I modify it by articulating key themes.  I don’t set goals, but use the themes to guide the type of work I will take on, what I want to write about on my blog as well as my professional reading and professional development.  The themes are less about exploring something new, but to commit to continuous learning and improvement. When you have worked in a field a long time (for me it has been over 3 decades), you have to keep an open mind about remembering and reflecting on what you have heard before — looking at as if it was new.

3) Start A New Journal: As I mentioned above, I keep an annual professional journal, part planner and part reflection tool. I use the large Moleskine (8 x 11.5). I transfer the left over tasks from previous year’s journal – only those from December that need to be done. I create a few pages in the beginning to write about my themes, what makes me happy, and what to improve.  I also write a list of work habits that I want to maintain or modify.  I have different color codes for different types of work that also correspond with color codes on my google calendar and my hard drive/google drive files.

Year in Review

Published Book Three:   In 2016, I published “The Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout,” with co-author Aliza Sherman.   The book was well received and was #1 on Amazon’s Nonprofit Books many times throughout October-December as we presented dozens online webinars and guest posts and articles.   Our book tour starts at the end of January, so if you are in San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, NYC, or Washington, DC, please join us.

Emerging Leaders Playbook:   With the generous support of the Packard Foundation and in collaboration with Third Plateau Social Impact Strategies,  we wrote and published the Emerging Leaders Playbook last year, along with facilitating a peer learning cohort with colleague Stephanie Rudat.  For 2017, we be launching an online site that includes the content and facilitator guides so that any nonprofit or trainer can provide leadership development for emerging nonprofit leaders.   Stay tuned for more information in 2017, but I will be very busy writing facilitator process guides based on my decades of experience as a trainer and sharing that on this blog.

Facilitator for Peer Learning Networks and Cohorts:  Most of my work is designing and delivering capacity building projects for cohorts of nonprofits literally all over the world and here in the US.     In 2016, I completed my work as facilitator for a learning network of community foundations who are hosting Giving Days, funded by the Knight Foundation. It is also a pivotal year for many community foundations as they consider whether to ramp up or wind down giving day initiatives in their communities.

Innovation Lab Facilitation:    For the past few years, I’ve trained in and designed and facilitated innovation labs using the Luma Institute Methods.  This year I facilitated several labs, including several for the Knight Foundation Arts Program to learn about the local arts ecosystem in four cities, including Philadelphia, San Jose, Charlotte, and Macon.

International and Domestic Training and Speaking: I presented over 50 keynotes, panel sessions, webinars, guest lectures, informal talks, and workshops for nonprofits, community foundations, and foundations in the area of networked leadership, leveraging professional networks in service of mission, digital strategy, leadership development based on the emerging leaders playbook, self-care and creating a culture of well being, training trainers and facilitators, and other topics.

I keynoted many conferences, including ConnectVA, American Marketing Association Nonprofit Conference, the Institute of Fundraising in London, and others.  This past year took me to London to teach nonprofit leaders at workshops on digital strategy hosted by LinkedIn and Social Misfits, and to Cambodia to teach a series of workshops for Women’s Rights NGOs hosted by Wake International.

In the US,  I gave workshops at nonprofit conferences in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, California and at SXSW.  I also facilitated leadership and digital strategy workshops for the United Way Leadership Conference,  Stanford University Nonprofit Management Institute, Knight Digital Media Learning Seminar, and Celgene’s Annual Meeting. I facilitated workshops for nonprofits in Kansas City supported by Kauffman Foundation where I also designed and facilitated networked leadership professional development internally.    I facilitated a workshop to train emerging leaders on coaching skills at the YNPN Annual Summit and facilitated  Happy Healthy Nonprofit Workshops, including one for the Americans for the Arts National Conference and Changemaker Camp.  I also taught a workshop for social startups at Singularity University here in Mountain, View on how to create a Happy Healthy Start Up Culture.

I also continued my position as Adjunct Professor  teaching a graduate course at Middlebury College/Monterrey Institute for International Education.  I teach a seminar course on integrated social media strategy for international nonprofits and a session for students to learn how they leverage their professional networks for career and learning in a flexible classroom space.

In order to accomplish as much as possible, I have lived many of the ideas around self-care that in our book, The Happy Healthy Nonprofit.  As part of my quest to incorporate movement as work, according to my Fitbit, I have walked more than 5 million steps this year and accomplish everything above!

My Three Themes: 

Resilience:   This theme is related to all the writing, curriculum development, and instruction that I will do this year based on my work on the Emerging Leaders Playbook and The Happy Healthy Nonprofit.

Instructional Design and Facilitation:  I love teaching and exploring different ways help nonprofit professionals learn.   The work I’m doing for the Emerging Leaders Playbook this to help train other trainers is fantastic opportunity to reflect, remember, and document facilitation processes and techniques.

Networked leadership/digital strategy:   I continue to be interested in teaching “networked leadership skills” which focused on how to use online networks and the Internet in service of your career, professional learning, or organizational goals. But an effective leadership strategy is also dependent on a robust digital strategy that not only uses social media effectively, but incorporate mobile and new emerging digital technologies.

When I look back on 2016, it was a very rich and productive year.     And, I expect no less in 2017.  What about you?  What will you accomplish in 2017?

  from Beth’s Blog http://ift.tt/2hRUSLl