We just returned from five glorious days in the Black Hills of South Dakota (no Rocky Raccoon, though we did see bison, pronghorn, lots of deer, and a few prairie dogs in Custer State Park).
With our laptops at home, we didn’t check email, or Tweet, or blog. We barely used our mobile phones except to call home once or twice and to let our friends know we were coming.
Instead of being connected online, we spent the time reconnecting with the natural world in the warm embrace and good company of dear friends, attending the wedding of our honorary niece Lilly and her new husband Jon, rocking out at their reception on beautiful Sylvan Lake and bicycling the Mickelson Trail from Hill City to Custer and back again (where you get to ride by the Crazy Horse monument).
We beamed enjoying the talented Hannah’s performance as Laurey in Custer High School’s production of Oklahoma! (on video, we couldn’t be there in person), climbed to Little Devil’s Tower for the most glorious of views and played tourist in Deadwood at Mt. Moriah Cemetery and at Roughlock Falls.
We didn’t worry once about client projects (sorry! we do love you though) as we watched horses frolic (they did) in the meadow over breakfast, reveled over every newly discovered wildflower, and even spotted a bird for our life list (red naped sapsucker), though no golden eagle.
We shook our heads in dismay over the infestation of the forest by mountain pine beetles and learned all about forest and bug management from Lilly’s entomologist dad Bill and her park service step dad Duane.
While eating lunch admiring the view from Little Devil’s Tower, dear friend Marie taught us plant identification with this ditty: “Sedges have edges, rushes are round, and grasses have knobs from their knees to the ground.” (I spared sharing identification techniques for finding excellent board members — anyone have a ditty for that?).
I’m concerned that the word Volunteer may be limiting our ability to recruit some very needed assistance.
If I had to wager a guess, I’d bet that when most people hear the word Volunteer they are likely to think of direct service – like building a house for a deserving family, or serving meals at a soup kitchen, or cutting trails or dragging debris out of a river on Earth Day.
Programs that promote volunteerism or community service jobs tend to focus on these shorter term, immediate reward type of assignments.
But every day I encounter small organizations that desperately could use a different type of volunteer, like someone to:
show up each day to answer the phone or file papers,
see that important communications tasks are completed, like getting the newsletter out the door (or into email) on a regular schedule, keeping the mailing list up-to-date, managing the twitter feeds, or sending thank you notes to donors,
organize the monthly open house to introduce prospective donors to their organization,
help with cash flow analysis or long-term revenue projections, or
plan and implement those monthly programs from start to finish.
They especially could use someone willing to serve as their volunteer coordinator, a volunteer who understands that some of the best service they could give would be to help recruit self-managing volunteers for these other important, but not so obvious, assignments.
Did I forget to mention serving on the Board?
The Samaritans have telephone befrienders, those highly trained volunteers who staff their 24 hour suicide prevention hotlines.
Museums and zoos recruit docents, those volunteers who agree to specialized training and a long term commitment so they can lead tours or provide information to visitors. Docent sounds so much more important than a mere volunteer, don’t you think?
I think it’s time for some serious brainstorming to come up with a slew of new words to describe fundraising, financial, operations and project manager volunteers.
On the bike ride home from a meeting with a client this morning, I decided to take a quick inventory of the ways we’ve tried to lower our environmental footprint over the years. While I never feel sufficiently green, I hope that our small acts have had some small impact over the years.
I thought you might enjoy seeing the list. It’s organized by the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle.
Reduce/ Conserve:
Bicycling. Jon and I love to bicycle for pleasure and exercise. We are blessed with a number of lovely rail trail bikepaths in cycling distance from our home. Now, whenever I can, I try to take the bike to meetings that I can get to in a 20-30 minute ride. I’m still figuring out what “dress up” clothes work on the bike - so far, knee length skirts, capri pants, and some knee length dresses. (I’m a casual kind of gal and so are many of my clients so I don’t find myself in business suits a whole lot.) Jon’s better about biking than I am. I’m a wimp about the weather, so I don’t bike when it’s raining. And as its icy and snowy here a good part of the year, I skip those months as well. But I’m trying, and every ride is a time I’m not using fossil fuels.
Walking. We live in a fabulous neighborhood, Summit, in a great city, Providence. Our neighborhood is like a small village. Within a half mile walking, we can be at an artisan bread bakery/coffee, myriad restaurants, a couple of pharmacies, a deli, an Indian grocery, our work and personal ATMs, cute cute gift stores, a flower shop, a Saturday farmers market and two city parks. We’re also really close to this incredible tree-lined boulevard that has just under a 4 mile round trip walking path and is bordered by one of the loveliest cemeteries on earth near a river and that the public is allowed to stroll through. Did I mention our wonderful neighbors? And the bus runs through it. I rarely drive to bank or run small errands.
Books. I can’t say enough about public libraries. In our case, the public library is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Someone in our house always has a book out of the library. It was particularly a godsend when my daughter lived with us as she devoured a book a day. While I love a good bookstore and try to shop in an independent when I must buy a book (as I’ll often do as a present), I have to admit that I do a lot of “shelf shopping ” (kind of like window shopping) for new book titles and then order them up from the library. With our statewide lending system, I rarely wait more than a few days for even the very latest books. Plus, our closest branch is just a half mile away so it’s a lovely walk. (Here’s a library fundraising tip: when I hand you the bill to once again pay my overdue fine, how about asking “would you like to donate the change?” I always donate the change, but no one ever asks.)
Tap water. We’ve got some pretty good tap water here in Providence and with a water filter, the taste and safety can’t be beat. We fill our water bottles (which we’ve got for the bikes anyway) and try to take them with us, even on long trips, to reduce our purchase of bottled water to infrequent occasions.
Cloth napkins. We’ve used cloth napkins for all of our regular meals and for small dinner parties since we started housekeeping. I find them so much more pleasing than paper. If we are having a really big party, then I’ll use paper dinner or cocktail napkins. I save leftover napkins, plastic plates, forks, knives and spoons and wash and reuse them. ( Though now I’m nervous about doing that with all the concerns about plastics exposed to heat. Luckily, we really don’t use them very often… maybe once or twice a year).
Buy local. I’ve been trying to revamp my buying habits to buy from local stores as much as possiblewith the hope that we can reduce the need for more big box stores and their miles of pavement. Unfortunately, the big boxes have been winning. Though I think the recession has slowed them a bit for now.
Washing. We’ve always waited until we have a full load of laundry to run the washing machine. And a full load of dishes to run the dishwasher.I’ve been feeling guilty, though, about not stringing a clothesline across the back yard. I know I’ve been reluctant on the clothesline as I hated hanging clothes as a kid — cold fingers in the winter and leaning over the third floor porch railing to pull in the clothes line was just frightening to miss afraid of heights me.
Energy. We switched all of the incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents very soon after CLFs came onto the market, with the exception of the few lights that are on dimmers. We also upgraded our ancient refrigerator to an energy star version a few years ago. I now walk around the house with an eye to shutting lights offthough we haven’t purchased one of those super shut off gizmos that you plug appliances into to stop them from consuming electricity even when they are off. And while we do own two cars, one of which is a minivan which was essential for a family of five, we also worry about gas mileage. I balance the minivan by owning a compact car that gets good mileage. Right now I’m driving a 2000 Honda Civic which does pretty well.
Toxins: We try our best to buy non-toxic cleaning products and use a lot of white vinegar. We are organic gardeners which means I spend a lot of time picking evil bugs off my flowers (has anyone figured out how to scare away lily leaf beetles?) and tolerating a fair amount of diversity in the small amount of lawn we have left remaining. With all the rain this spring, we haven’t had much watering to do.
Our backyarnd compost bin
Reuse:
Hand me downs: Thank goodness for friends and family with older children. With a few exceptions, we didn’t need to buy very much for our kids when they were babies and toddlers. We were very grateful to accept any offers of clothes, equipment, toys and furniture. We even rented car seats from the local chapter of the Red Cross. And while I do like new clothes, I also enjoy second hand stores where I’ve found some of my favorite wearables.
Recycled paper: I look for recycled paper with as much post-consumer content as possible. That includes our office paper as well as toilet paper, tissues and the paper towels that feel very indulgent to me (though a standard roll of paper towels lasts about two weeks around here). I buy the paper towels that you can tear off in small sizes so we don’t have overuse them.
Composting: We’ve been composting yard and kitchen scraps almost as long as we’ve lived in our house – and that’s 26 years. We keep a bin in the kitchen where we toss the inedible vegetables and other non-meat scraps (though I do recycle shellfish shells) for the compostor. We miss having the buckets for other scraps that we remember from our childhood – when the farmers came to get them for the pigs. Or at least that’s what we remember. Fall leaves go into the compostor, and with a fair amount of turning, some peat moss and lime now and then, we get enough compost to add to my flower garden and containers where I grown vegetables.
Reusable grocery bags. I can’t remember when I started bringing my own bags to the grocery store. My sister bought me one of the cotton string bags many years ago that weren’t the best grocery bags but were all we thought of then. I’ve added to my collection over the years. It now includes about a dozen canvas bags, including some from the many years defunct Almacs Grocery Store (which closed in 1995), Bread & Circus (which became Whole Foods) and just about any conference that I’ve been to where they were handing out tote bags. I’ve been getting better about keeping a few in the trunk of my car so that I have them ready to use beyond the grocery store and can take them on clothes or other shopping sprees.
Diapers. When my children were born (my oldest is 25, sons are 20), we signed up for a diaper service first thing. (I remember the stacks and stacks of newborn diapers that arrived each week when the twins were born — 140 total! Scary) The diaper service was heaven. I don’t even think there are diaper services anymore in our whole state. We were just at my niece’s baby shower and she informed us that there was one service in all of Massachusetts! Sad. As the kids got older and the diapering got a bit more under control, we laundered our own diapers. We also used washcloths rather than those icky baby wipes. I know that cloth vs plastic is still controversial as to which is more ecofriendly , but I just can’t imagine that producing and disposing of those plastics is better. We weren’t total purists and did use disposables when traveling and away from laundry.
Recycle:
Paper. I worked for the Social Security Administration from 1976 through 1983. With my friend Sarah, we became the first workplace in downtown Providence to recycle office paper. We recycled boxes of outdated forms and computer paper, which the office burned through each week. We had to separate all of the paper (computer vs color vs white) and load them on the truck from Ecology Action for Rhode Island once a week. Unfortunately, the truck was always breaking down so Sarah and I frequently had to load the boxes into her VW Rabbit and my VW stationwagon and haul them over to Liz’s garage where Ecology Action stored the collected paper.
Plastic bags. When I do end up with a plastic bag, I save them during the week and drop them into the recycling bin at the grocery store.
Curbside recycling. Providence has curbside recycling for paper, newspapers, cardboard, #1 and 2 plastics and even textiles. (I wish they would take more plastics). They also take organic yard matter so we send them the stuff that doesn’t fit in our small compostor like branches and the leaves we simply don’t have room for. We rarely fill our regular trash bin, even half way.
Clothing. Cotton socks with holes beyond repair are great for dusting. Torn cotton shirts make good rags. What can’t go into the yard sale or to Big Sisters will end up in the recycling bin.
Okay, that’s all I can think of for now. I’ll probably think of more things as soon as I send this to publish.
Wait… there is one thing more. Because we know we aren’t perfect and can’t do it all, we contribute to environmental causes. We believe in supporting organizations that are working hard to protect our land, water, air and diversity of life. We hope you will as well.
We’d be happy to share the small things that you’ve done in this column.
While we’ve all heard the Confusion quote, “Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime,” I’d like to put a plug in for fishing together.
Among our clients are a number of very small nonprofits. What it takes to build capacity for a tiny organization with few, if any staff, and a limited number of self-managing volunteers, is significantly more intense than a larger, professionally staffed organization.
At our larger clients, we can help them design a path to the future, and, if they have talented people in place, we are fairly confident that they can traverse the path ahead.
Not so tiny organizations. While these organizations also receive significant benefits from crafting the route ahead, they need much more hands on assistance. Their reality is that they simply don’t have a person or another spare hour to take on a new project.
The people who are there are already responsible for more tasks than any human being could possibly do proficiently.
In a tiny organization, the staff and volunteers are still expected to know and manage all of the tasks, reporting, regulations, best practices, etc that a large, multi-staffed organization has to manage. I often see the desperation in the lone staff member’s eyes when contemplating how he or she can make more phone calls, take on new projects, or even do things a little differently. Not that they want to be resistent. Just that they can’t figure out how they will ever find the time.
As consultants, our job is to help find new ways to build capacity for these organizations. How do we find experienced volunteers willing to role up their sleeves and do? How can we convince capacity building funders that they need to invest in more people doing – along with their investments in planning or redesign or training?
Most people say they hate role playing. But it can be really helpful.
I spent this morning rehearsing interview questions with a few board members and staff of one of my clients. This small nonprofit came to me looking for help building its board. In that initial discussion, it became clear to me that the organization was running a few programs but was pretty unclear as to how relevant and valuable it was to the community it had traditionally served.
Board members agreed to get out and interview about 20 community members face to face over the next month or so. As we talked about who they might interview, I was impressed by their connections within their community … and curious as to when they had stopped having ongoing conversations with all of these people. Unfortunately, I no longer find this unusual among groups that come seeking my help.
So we practiced interviewing each other to test our questions. This helped us structure a nice flow as well as highlighting missing questions or confusing ones.
AND, even though this was just practice with each other, I think we learned a lot about the two people who were interviewed this morning… and a lot about each other’s perceptions of the community and their own organization’s role in it. Just by role playing.
By now you know the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” from the John Guare play of the same name. In the world in which I live, it’s more like two degrees. Here’s an example from last week:
Ilene Perlman, a friend of mine, is a fabulous photographer and documentary photojournalist. She shared a new promotional video via Facebook with her friends and the friends of her friends. The video was aimed at wedding photos, though Ilene’s work has taken her around the world (we first met her when she was commissioned to shoot photos for PLAN International). The videos included a few testimonials from satisfied clients in Boston.
Wouldn’t you know it. The next day, a RI Facebook friend (colleague and client) posted on my wall… a friend and colleague of hers was in the video!
This happens regularly. I like to think it is part of the Rhode Island mystique, but when I talk to friends and colleagues in other states, they frequently have the same experience.
Why does this matter to your nonprofit? A few reasons:
1. Never burn a bridge. You’ll never imagine how how frequently people who matter to you or your organization have family ties to the relationship you’ve set on fire.
2. Want to meet someone? Looking for a contact? Ask your board members, your staff, your volunteers, your supporters. Chances are, someone has the connection.
3. You want to connect to Kevin Bacon. Okay, maybe not Kevin Bacon, but perhaps an author, politician, sports figure, or other celebrity who might be available, with work, to appear at a future event, annual meeting, charity auction. You’ll be surprised when they turn out to be the former roommate or childhood friend of someone in your organization’s relationship web.
4. If you use Social Networking sites, you’ll be closer than you think to just about anyone.
Back to my list of 100 Things I’ve Learned About Nonprofits. I’ve moved this point up to #3 as it’s come up twice in the last few days. (Maybe joy and celebration are really two different points, but they just felt so connected to me that I linked them together).
Saturday, Jon and I attended a dinner hosted by the American Friends Service Committee of Southeastern New England. The guest speaker was Anna Galland, national field director for MoveOn.org and a former program director of AFSC. Anna shared her list of organizing tips with a fairly packed room. Among many astute observations was Anna’s admonition that organizers needed to create joy and not just doom and gloom. Today in a conversation with new client Rhode Island Kids Count, Director Elizabeth Burke Bryant mentioned how important it is to celebrate even incremental progress along the way to a bigger goal.
So, with two mentions in four days, Joy and Celebration were destined to leap to the beginning of my list. Read More >>
On the train to Newark Tuesday ( I was on my way to work on a planning with the amazing staff of ACLU of New Jersey), I thought I’d try an idea I had received in an email just before the end of the year from For Impact, The Suddes Group. The idea was to make a list of 100 memories from the year as an opportunity to reflect and prepare for 2009. Here’s the post if you’d like to read it.
I didn’t make a list of memories (I will do that soon), but instead decided to start a list called “100 Things I’ve Learned About Nonprofits.”
On the train I got to 95 and then ran out of room on my sheets of paper… but I’ll finish the 100. (maybe you’ll help?)
While I’m not sure yet whether the ground moved,? I thought that the list would be great to blog about over the next few months.
I just had to send a colleague of mine a link and the web address (aka URL) was incredibly long … the type of URL that breaks apart in email and it takes a bit of maneuvering to get it back into one piece.
Well, a few years ago, colleagues on another listserv turned me on to TinyURl.com — a handy tool for making long URLs into short ones. (Not quite the same as turning straw into gold, but anything that makes something very long shorter is a good deal in my book).
Did I mention that it’s free?
Not only does this little url shrinker shrink urls, but it also stabilizes the location of that link so it never expires.
It’s not often that I participate in a board/staff retreat where part of the orientation is “before hiking, pick up bear spray and travel in groups of 4 or more to keep the grizzly bears at a distance.”
Just got back from a retreat with Women’s Voices for the Earth. So for this Monday, a quote about Montana was a have to…
“Before Alaska came along and ruined everything, one of every twenty-five square miles in America was Montanan. This much space has nurtured a healthy Cult of Place in which people find perfection, even divinity in the landscape.”
– from Cecil Migrates by Ellen Meloy
We just returned from five glorious days in the Black Hills of South Dakota (no Rocky Raccoon, though we did see bison, pronghorn, lots of deer, and a few prairie dogs in Custer State Park).
o, we couldn’t be there in person), climbed to Little Devil’s Tower for the most glorious of views and played tourist in Deadwood at Mt. Moriah Cemetery and at Roughlock Falls.
h) as we watched horses frolic (they did) in the meadow over breakfast, reveled over every newly discovered wildflower, and even spotted a bird for our life list (red naped sapsucker), though no golden eagle.
Now, whenever I can, I try to take the bike to meetings that I can get to in a 20-30 minute ride. I’m still figuring out what “dress up” clothes work on the bike - so far, knee length skirts, capri pants, and some knee length dresses. (I’m a casual kind of gal and so are many of my clients so I don’t find myself in business suits a whole lot.) Jon’s better about biking than I am. I’m a wimp about the weather, so I don’t bike when it’s raining. And as its icy and snowy here a good part of the year, I skip those months as well. But I’m trying, and every ride is a time I’m not using fossil fuels.
