Tag Archives: arts

Ensuring cultural & social interactions: as important as water, food & shelter.

ACAPS is a nonprofit, nongovernmental project founded in 2009 with the aim of conducting independent, groundbreaking humanitarian analysis to help humanitarian workers, influencers, fundraisers and donors make better-informed decisions. ACAPS is not affiliated with the UN or any other organisation, allowing it to be a more neutral, critical voice regarding such initiative. ACAPS is overseen by a consortium of three NGOs: the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children and Mercy Corps.

ACAPS published a report in May 2022, Life goes on in Yemen: Conversations with Yemeni families as the war nears its eighth year, that illustrates why humanitarian response cannot be just about providing water, food and shelter, and why it’s a mistake for charities to limit their communications with donors to only these needs. Water food and shelter are often called “basic needs”, but the reality is that social interactions, cultural practices and trust in the strength and work of institutions are all a part of basic human needs as well. The report is about Yemen, but it applies to every country.

This image is, to me, oh-so-powerful – and applies to every community, not just Yemen:

An image of a family as a part of a cycle that includes life-cycle events like weddings, deaths, births, etc., and the essential nature of having a social and cultural life.

This excerpt from the report is a good summary of what the image and the entire report is trying to say:

This research serves as a reminder that Yemenis are interested in more than just the satisfaction of their essential needs (such as water, food, and shelter). It highlights the diversity of households and the creative ways people adapt to economic challenges and accommodate long term strategic needs. Yemenis continue to participate in life-cycle events, celebrations, and social obligations. Having a social life maintains and creates networks and connections that build social capital, enhance the quality of life, and form the support network people can rely on when they most need it. Understanding the key role social capital plays in Yemeni life highlights that social capital is something built, maintained, stored, and used in a continuous cycle. Connections are important, but social capital is the glue that keeps these connections alive. When Yemenis keep celebrations modest by inviting fewer guests or keeping events shorter, they build less social capital. Similarly, they lose social capital when they hold fewer gatherings or visit extended family in their ancestral villages less.

So many people want to volunteer and/or donate financially to help people experiencing extreme poverty caused by social injustice, historic oppression and inequities and armed conflict. That should continue to be encouraged and cultivated – but people also need to understand that community development is every bit as important as charity and the provision of water, food and shelter.

Shout out to the Aidnography blog for bringing this to my attention.

Also see:

Decolonizing International Aid (including international volunteering).

humanitarian stories & photos – use with caution.

Extreme poverty is not beautiful.

Advice for teaching children compassion & understanding instead of pity with regard to poverty.

Nope, volunteering is not always inherently “good”.

Arts education is ESSENTIAL, not a nice extra

Amy Cuddy and CBS This Morning are in love with “power poses.” The “news” story they did recently was all about how standing or sitting a certain way, even if no one is looking at you, can help you feel more confident and powerful, and when done in front of other people, allow them to see you as such. Certainly body language is very important in presentation, for both the presenter and those you want to listen, but I was cringing over some of the recommendations, like for the pose where you sit in your chair and put your feet up on your desk as you talk to others – which, as anyone who works internationally knows, is profoundly disrespectful to people in a room with you. And the reporter’s fawning over a photo of Cuddy’s husband, in a pose they loved but that, to me, was demanding and demeaning to the viewer in a way that made me want to leave the room and get as far away from him as possible.

But what really ticked me off was this exchange:

“We don’t learn this stuff in school,” the interviewer, Rita Braver, said.

“No, we don’t teach it,” replied Cuddy.

Um… I learned it in school. I learned it in choir. You know, one of those arts classes that a lot of people that want to “revolutionize” and “disrupt” schools think are unnecessary in schools and should be replaced with more practical classes? If you were in any of the choirs in the Henderson County, Kentucky school system, you learned very quickly how to sit and how to stand, even when you weren’t singing. Certain postures were required, and other postures absolutely banned in the classroom. And those posture requirements have stayed with me to this day, decades later; I don’t sing in a choir anymore, but I know how to sit or stand in a meeting to indicate I am listening, that I hear you, and how to sit or stand so that you will feel compelled to listen to me. Performing in school plays also helped me with posture, with saying something by the way I was standing or sitting: fear, disinterest, confidence, surprise, and on and on.

But posture and presentation skills aren’t the only things that choir and drama activities in school gave me and that continue to serve me: I also know how to work in a team and meet a deadline, and how to dream, how to imagine, how to think creatively. There is a creative process, one that gets kick-started and flourishes when you go to art galleries, watch movies, read novels, and if possible, participate in making art yourself – singing, dancing, drawing, performing. You stare at clouds or a field or trees instead of a lit screen, and you let your mind wander, so that you can actually get ideas, so that you can formulate your own ideas. A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. Creativity is vital for most successful entrepreneurs or people brought in to improve a project, a program or an entire business. You don’t just disrupt a project or program or entire organization just because you can – you look for new ways of doing things that are needed by those served, an innovation that increases efficiency, that better addresses needs and challenges, and that keeps staff inspired – not just a change for change’s sake – and those disruptions come from inspiration, from creativity.

Neil de Grass Tyson, David Byrne, talked recently in an interview on Star Talk about the VITAL importance of arts education to innovators in any field – business, engineering, scientific research, whatever. I cried over this 3:44 minute part of the show, where an astrophysicist talks about why arts is VITAL to creativity. I could not agree more.

Instead of taking arts-related classes and learning to imagine, some Silicon Valley tech workers are taking LSD to be more creative. That’s so sad. Start a company choir. Dance. Try out for community theater. Have a reading of a Shakespeare play at your house. And sit up straight!

Also see:

That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket

Why Top Tech CEOs Want Employees With Liberal Arts Degrees

Learning from a nonprofit’s failure

logoA couple of the nonprofits where I have worked over the last 30 years have closed for good. I don’t count my time at either agency as enjoyable, and I don’t mention either on my résumé. It was many of the things that made these places so unenjoyable for me (and others) that ultimately lead to their demise. But both organizations did teach me quite a bit in terms of how not to run a nonprofit.

As I read an article today by some of the board members that tried to save one of those organizations from closing its doors, I shook my head at the level of denial about what they said the problems were at the organization: they lamented how they were unable to find that one big donor that would have saved the organization with an annual massive donation and connections to friends who would also have made an annual massive donation.

Here are the actual reasons the organization closed:

  • The organization’s leadership never made an effort to connect with and serve the many diverse communities that made up their region. It’s not at all a cohesive community. It’s a community that’s known worldwide for people working in high-tech, but it’s also a community with a massive Hispanic population – both new immigrants and third, fourth, even fifth-generation families. It’s a community with massive wealth, but also massive poverty, with a homeless population that’s one of the largest in the USA. There’s no one style of music listened to by most people, no one type of food eaten by most everyone there, no one set of religious values most people in the region adhere to – it’s not a melting pot but, rather, a tossed salad of diverse thoughts, beliefs and lifestyles. This now-closed organization didn’t initiate meetings with representatives from the many different populations that make up the area, to talk about how to serve them better or better reach different people. There were no special employment or volunteer recruitment efforts to attract staff from those different communities – in fact, there was no volunteer engagement scheme at all outside of having ushers at events (almost always the same people, people just interested in getting community service hours rather than doing something to serve the organization’s mission). Programs were developed in a bubble, and leadership just never understood why people outside that bubble didn’t participate.
  • The organization never successfully marketed its fee-based programs to groups. Group sales are everything when you are trying to sell something for a price, something that people have to pay something for to be a part of. You must have a crackerjack person, or team, that knows how to sell blocks of items or event tickets in order to generate the proper amount of income. Successful ballet companies, art museums, live theaters and other arts-based groups know this. Roller derby leagues in the USA — all nonprofit — know this. For-profit sports leagues know this.
  • The organization didn’t really try to cultivate young people as participants. People that grow up participating in a particular activity often want to continue to participate in that activity as adults. Integrate your nonprofit program offering into schools, and you will have, in a few years, new supporters, new donors, and new participants. It takes more than just having a “youth day” or one “youth event.”
  • Leadership didn’t engage with the leadership of other nonprofits. There were no regular meetings, formal or informal, with others serving the community through nonprofit services, and, therefore, no relationships – instead, other nonprofits were seen as competition for audiences and donors. The long-time head of the organization’s programming was particularly isolationist, and saw no need for building professional friendships with other nonprofit leaders. Without those relationships, the organization wasn’t hearing about what was important in the region it served, wasn’t hearing fresh ideas, wasn’t learning new approaches that could have helped improve their own offerings.
  • Leadership ignored criticism. Certain actions by this organization had ignited hostilities of some rather outspoken folks who claimed to represent a certain population of the area, and such has received a lot of media attention. I’m not sure if those criticisms were legitimate, but they were loud and they created a mindset about many people about the organization that was quite negative. The organization chose to ignore that criticism, rather than sitting down not only with the people claiming to represent that group, but with other representatives from that group to find out if they felt the same way and what might be done to build bridges. Instead, the leadership said, internally, “This isn’t our audience anyway,” and took no action.

During my brief time working there, I was frequently reprimanded for how I approached things regarding public relations and marketing. An example: I marketed one program in particular so well that it became one of the best-attended in the organization’s history, but my boss told me that I had not done a good job, because I’d marketed the program to the large gay community of the region, and he didn’t want people thinking of the organization as “a lesbian” one. I once lined up several media representatives to interview a member of senior management, in order to create a blitz of coverage for our organization in a variety of publications, and she cancelled most of the interviews at the last minute, saying this one wasn’t really worth it, that she wasn’t in the mood to do another one, etc.

It’s strange that so many of the things I did at this organization that were so disliked by senior management have ended up getting me hired elsewhere, and have lead me to be successful at other organizations. Because I was so passionate about the organization’s mission, the experience was even more painful. But as a result of what I witnessed in my brief time at this now-failed agency, ties with the community is one of the first things I evaluate when I take on any communications or management task. I look to answer lots of questions:

  • What do different people from different populations say about this organization?
  • Are the different populations that make up our community represented among our employees and volunteers, and/or among the active participants in our programs? Who are we missing, and why?
  • Does this organization have lots of people making small donations, or is this organization funded primarily by just a few big donors and grants?
  • Are there people that don’t like this organization and, if so, why, and how should we address that?
  • Are media reps seeking our leadership out for stories, even to just comment as experts on a particular issue they are covering – and if not, why not?
  • Do emails, calls and tweets from the media get answered promptly?
  • Do we monitor social media about this organization and what people are saying?
  • What nonprofits are doing similar work, or are also serving this region, and what is our relationship with them?

I’m so sorry for the people that have lost their jobs because of this organization’s closing. I hope they have learned as much as I did as a result of their experience there, and I wish them the very best of luck.

Also see:

A few fun links for Friday

logoA few links for Friday, when I’m not sure anyone actually reads my Blog or my Facebook entries and I’m not feeling very creative…:

  • Howard Sherman, Executive Director of the American Theatre Wing and a good friend (and my former boss at Hartford Stage!) has a delightful blog about after-performance discussions following live stage performances. I have attended these more than a few times, and lead two myself at two different theaters, and he’s spot on with these observations. Made me smile. As does this photo of Howard next to one of my favorite people in the world.
  • I also recently reconnected with another colleague from my theater days, Sharron Boilini, now of the Westport Country Playhouse, who helped give me insight into what attendees might be expecting out of the live online event I’m helping to coordinate for TechSoup (it’s March 30 – join me and hear me try to talk about accounting software for nonprofits!).
  • Was thrilled to find this Japan-based organization: Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support. Speaking of Japan, because I’ve raised more money on the monetized pages of my web site (the pages focused on helping individuals find volunteering, community service and humanitarian work abroad), I’m donating anything I raise in March above my target goal to an organization focused on helping in Japan. It won’t be much — I’m not making anything to brag about on these pages — but it will be better than nothing.
  • I’ve created a Flickr set of photos of me at work. Very fun to compile. It’s obvious, isn’t, that I really love to work! See all that I can do when it comes to training for your nonprofit, NGO, or other community-focused organization.
  • Are you a trainer? An online community architect? A techie? A marketer? An oh-so-engaging online facilitator or online event producer? And do you love nonprofits and understand their unique culture and needs? If so, you should check out the cool open jobs at TechSoup.
  • One of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is Frank Conniff. One of his latest: If FAA doesn’t want air traffic controllers sleeping, why not use the screaming babies that always keep me awake on planes.
  • Another favorite Twitter feed of mine is FakeAPStylebook: Affect is verb: “The songs of Liza Minnelli affected the crops.” Effect is noun: “Behold the effect Liza has on the corn!”

One last thing: please don’t be offended if I don’t follow you on Twitter, particularly if I already subscribe to your blog via RSS and have friended you on Facebook and subscribe to your email newsletter, in which case I know what you’re up to, really!