From Profiles of passion and courage

Goodbye to hate. Good riddance 2020.

Say goodbye to hate.

Kick out racial injustice. And every injustice.

Say goodbye to this pandemic (soon, a little longer still).

Ring in  the opportunity to rebuild better.

I’m inspired by this reflection from author Arundati Roy:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

I would like to acknowledge the amazing feats that my colleagues and clients in the charitable sector pulled off in 2020. Our nonprofit world is too easily denigrated by those on the outside. But your hard work, creativity and perseverance in the face of adversity like no other were a bright beacon of hope this year amidst the chaos. You inspire me. I am thankful for your presence. Here’s to new beginnings in 2021. #creativity #nonprofit #leadership #gratitude

Goodbye to hate.

Latino scholars share American Dreams

And now the road approaches its reward – the completed destiny of the first child to graduate from college. The first child who will become not what they must be, but what they can dream of becoming – a teacher, an artist, a doctor – maybe the President of the United States. If this is a cliché, we need more clichés.

After a LADO dinner I’m farther than ever from understanding America’s anti-immigrant, anti-urban, anti-education anger. America needs these young men and women. We can’t afford for them not to realize their dreams – our dreams – the American Dream.

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Roger and us – start-up lessons from our past

4. Make your own luck. No one could have predicted two game-changing gifts that came to Growth Through Learning, including a $1 million bequest that has essentially solved the problem of paying GTL’s current very lean overhead. But we could easily predict that they would never have come about without Roger’s persistent effort at steps 1, 2 and 3 above.

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Take action for women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo

What seems so far away and removed from our lives came to us up close Sunday when Congolese refugee Albert Mulenda Rajabu spoke about his experiences in the DRC at the Write-a-Thon for Human Rights sponsored by Group 49 of Amnesty International USA.

Mr. Rajabu, a former teacher, stoically shared his own story of surviving two civil wars despite arrest and jailing for his human rights work in the DRC. But he wept when he reported incidences of sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls. He shared with the room the following story of a survivor’s account of the sexual violence.

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