Category Archives: not-for-profit

The Unexpected Reward for Mild Sincerity

I have been running an animation workshop for children ages 7 to 11.   My plan, without any business experience, has been to scale up this successful experiment into a small but expanding business.  A modest income for me and a fair wage for a few assistants who I would groom to replace me as the business grows.  When adults see the workshop in action they are often amazed– the children are working independently and with great focus on any number of their own projects, a couple work at the computer editing, a few more wear headphones and record parts of the soundtrack.  Other kids collaborate at the camera stand, lighting and moving things that will become animation.  A couple of adults are casually interacting with the kids, but nobody seems to be in charge. “I love the way it challenges hierarchy,” commented one parent, an architect, a man more insightful than most.

At times singing bursts out, one kid starts singing some idiotic ditty and others chime in.  It sets my nerves on edge, sometimes, but I resist stifling them.  They are singing because they are happy, free, nobody is telling them to shut up.   They take me aside to tell me inappropriate jokes, on the sly, because I never act offended.  I don’t laugh, I nod and I agree with them that the joke is inappropriate, but I don’t censure or censor them.  They understand I will nix such things in the animation they produce, but my theory is to leave them as free to express themselves as possible in the workshop.  Creativity demands no less.

From time to time they’re wild.  Part of this is my fault– in my excitement over how quickly they took over the various tasks of the workshop I neglected to install the crucial shut-off switch that is necessary for every teaching situation with young students.  This switch is needed when they are wild– the reminder that they have to stop and calm down or there will be consequences they won’t like.  It’s a trade off, freedom and order, and without the line they cannot cross being firmly etched, things will sometimes tip over into chaos.

As they did the last few weeks.  Last week my strongest, most street-wise and no nonsense assistant was out.  I was left with only my young, sweet, talented, easily manipulated assistant. Things got out of hand.  Kids were yelling, running with scissors, calling out for me to press the TIME TO STOP AND CALM DOWN button, but it hadn’t been installed properly.  Idle threats and the sense that no adult is really in control make them even more wild in  pushing the limits.  The thing it took me a while to realize, when I was teaching a few decades back, is that children need this control from an adult when they are unable to control themselves.  They will push for it far beyond the limits of reason by acting nuts.  Nothing they were doing the other day succeeded in actually bringing things to a boil, though.   Eventually a seven year-old leaped at me from the chair at the camera stand, throwing his arms around my neck.  I turned to catch him as he launched himself.

Unbeknownst to me, and probably to him, he was clutching a 0.7 mm mechanical pencil, point up, as he flew at me.  The pencil’s sharp metal tip (which I later showed the kid is retractable and should be pulled in when not drawing with it) went into the skin of my neck and ripped a short tear upwards as I caught the kid in midair.  There wasn’t much blood, but enough to smear my fingers with, show the kid as I took him with my other hand and guided him into a corner.

“When you act like an out of control baby you get treated like one.  You have time out.  Do not move from this chair.”  I left my young assistant as the only adult in the room and walked down the hall to the sink where I washed off the gash and threw some cold water on my face for good measure.  The kid hadn’t moved from the chair, but he was fidgeting with some blocks that were nearby.

“Time out means no playing,” I said, pushing the box of blocks out of his reach.  I reminded him that there is something you say to someone after you accidentally hurt them.  He managed a sheepish, insincere apology, accompanied by a variation on the simian fear grin.  A few minutes later I set him to work cleaning up, and he did so without complaint.  When his mother came to pick him up and expressed horror at what he’d done, he was defiant, hit her and shoved past her.   I was too tired and disgusted to intervene, beyond calling after him with a rhetorical question as he rushed out the door: “You hit your mother?”

The whole incident left me in a foul mood.   There was absolutely no pain from the scratch and within a couple of days it healed without a trace.  But the incident left me with a certain bitterness.  The reward for my inexhaustible patience and this innovative program that allows kids to grow their little wings and fly is a kid slashing my neck?  Fuck this, fuck them, I thought.  The email from a parent who runs the program that was waiting for me when I got home did little to change my feelings.  She asked for an incident report and it was followed by a lecture about consequences for misbehaving children, like my tiny assailant, who has apparently been out of control in every one of the other after-school groups he attends.  Inquiring as to how I was after the slashing would have been a nice touch, regrettably it was neglected.

“Fuck her,” I recall thinking.  The next day I wrote her an email describing the chaotic situation her own son had done so much to foster with his surliness, uncooperative attitude and racing around after the other seven year-old who provided a bit of my blood for the actual “incident”.  I never heard back from her.

I did hear back from a woman who runs a summer day camp for an organization that has a number of after-school programs for the fall.  She was interested in having the animation workshop at the camp.  She asked me to prepare a bid, a detailed proposal laying out all kinds of things.  She needed it immediately, although she could offer no guidelines for what they pay, I would have to include the price in my proposal.  I spent the last twelve hours of my birthday and the first few of the next day writing a proposal and reaching out for advice on pricing.  I got several pieces of wildly divergent, mostly passionately stated, opinion.  I gave the most weight to the advice of a self-made millionaire businessman friend of mine, and an even older friend who has been in high end sales for years, and made my proposal.  I noticed an increasing flow of stomach acid and distress as the process wore on.

The price I quoted them was based on the value of this innovative program and also on what this group can afford, based on the tuition that kids are paying.  I quoted a fair price, much higher than they probably want to pay, and more than twice what the PTA pays for the current program, but not inflated to leave room for much negotiation.  The floor and ceiling price are fairly close to each other.  If they won’t meet the floor price I have to walk away, since I didn’t quote them an arbitrary price but one based on my actual expenses, the value of the program and their ability to pay.  But so far, no reply at all.  The only urgency, apparently, was an immediate price quote from me.

As I made my way to the workshop yesterday it was with great reluctance.  Usually I look forward to it, for the first time yesterday I’d rather have not gone.  I gathered the kids and reminded them how fortunate it had been that I was the one whose neck had been gouged the previous session, rather than one of them.  They would have been very upset, and their parents would have been very upset.  I pointed to where the metal tipped pencil had gone into my neck and showed them that one inch over it would have gone into a major artery, and that my blood would have sprayed into the air, my hand traced the spurt so they could picture it, and I’d have had to go to the hospital, in a hurry.  Or, a few inches higher and the pencil would have gone into my eyeball, and I’d be in the hospital with the possibility of losing my right eye, depending on how the pencil went in.   This is what can happen when people are out of control, I pointed out. They were uncharacteristically pensive after this little speech.

“Would you sue Max?” a kid asked a couple of times.  I turned to him and said if I lost an eye I’d have to sue Max’s parents.  “If I sued Max what could I get?  His backpack?”  The kids agreed I’d have a better shot suing the parents.  I reminded the group that anyone who was wild and could not calm down would be escorted out, that there was no room for wildness in the animation workshop.  Then I told them to get busy.

They did, and there was no wildness.  

Q & A for TED Fellowship application

How would being a TED Fellow directly help you in your mission?

I’m glad you asked!   I am in the strange position of having a program that works very much the way I drew it up, as long as I am doing 99% of the necessary work, much of which I have no experience in.  Children are really engaged with it, I’ve simplified the process so that children can work quickly, and the possibilities of the program are vast.  But unless I meet the right cohort of people to help me expand the program, the entire project is on very thin ice.  In addition the project is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, with no shoes.  Try sliding around on thin ice in that outfit, TED.  I imagine that I will be energized and inspired by my contact with other TED Fellows and might, directly or indirectly, meet the people I need to meet to let this successful program expand and begin working with its target kids.

Why are you typing instead of going shopping for food before you have to go to a funeral?

While I don’t believe this is strictly a question for the TED application, it is the best one to ask at the moment.  I would have to think about this one.   A conundrum, a riddle wrapped in an enigma.  Damn.  Funny as hell, as shit, as enhanced interrogation and root canal.  Funny as the party line, as idiocy itself.  I have no answer for this.  It is a symptom of something much more serious, something I dare not consider.

Any more questions, wise ass?

Not at the moment.  No, ma’am.  I’ve got about 15 minutes to get ready to get out of here.

Living In My Own Head

An imaginary application to participate in TED talks as a 2013 TED Fellow:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF

We take this portion of the application very seriously. Please take the time to answer the questions thoughtfully, with enough detail to help us understand who you are. 

All responses are limited to 1500 characters except where noted.

What is your current primary activity? *

 

I am the facilitator of a child-run animation workshop and the Creative Director of the nonprofit wehearyou.net.  Our mission is to carefully listen to the children’s ideas and concerns and to encourage them to express these things in animation.   And they do.  The children set up the camera stand and lights for each session, create the animation, shoot all the frames, input them to a computer, edit the frames, make the soundtrack.   There is virtually no creative input from adults, whose role is to keep an eye on the clock and make sure things run smoothly.  Being this hands-off is hard work, too, and requires a high degree of calmness, alertness, discipline, attentiveness and humor.  Also, perhaps most importantly, flexibility on the fly.    

In addition to my work as lead facilitator of the workshop I am also the organization’s Director of Development, recruiter, fundraiser, corresponding secretary, trainer, marketing and branding officer, writer, webmaster, social media director, head of outreach, bookkeeper.   I also do the final edit of the weekly animations and mix the soundtracks.   (1,068 characters)

 

What are you best known for? *

Oddly enough, cool under fire, sang froid.  I’m aided in this by an overdeveloped sense of irony acquired during constant warfare in the contentious family of my childhood.   I am known for several skills and talents that I’ve made no efforts to exploit financially, to the puzzlement of many.  I am considered an inventive draftsman, I play guitar and keyboards and arrange, I’m a clear, concise and sometimes moving writer.  I am also known for dreaming and my many ideas, which I have never hesitated to share.  Also for a sometimes uncanny memory. 

In the professional realm, I am best known for variations on the above.  As a subsistence lawyer I was probably best known for my deadpan style, quickness of tongue and odd grace dancing before judges, especially when they were being disrespectful.   As a teacher I was probably best known for my easy rapport with children, candor and quickness of retort.  I also gave a high priority to the students’ creativity and took pains not to pour water on any idea they expressed.  Parents and colleagues often remarked on how creative my classes were.

As a young man I was probably best known for my angry words.   I have been transforming myself into a more deliberate, milder person.   A quick, cutting response may be fun to make, and satisfying in the moment, but one learns (with luck) that it does little to advance a real conversation.  I am known for being someone you can have a meaningful conversation with.  I place a high value on real conversation.

 

What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share? *

As hinted at above, my achievements are difficult to quantify, in worldly terms.   My biggest achievement to date has been my ongoing dedication to my beliefs as embodied in wehearyou.net.  My creation of and involvement with this program, which I consider radical and sorely needed, has necessitated many positive changes in my thinking and action.  

I’ve come to understand that most people are mostly preoccupied most of the time and that the modern attention span is very short.  I’ve had to learn things I’d never thought about.   I’ve had to learn, for example, that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not poor children in Harlem make animation.   I am, after a long digestive period, able to keep those perceptions in mind without letting them deter me or slow my progress.

My mission is to encourage people to listen to and respond to each other gently.  It’s a life-affirming thing for a child to be listened to attentively by an adult, to have a moment to dream out loud uninterrupted.  While this is a sadly rare thing (for anyone of any age) in our hyper digital world of virtual connection and overloaded distraction, the program and I have made some very encouraging first steps in this direction.

 

Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about? (e.g. hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section) *

I am passionate about playing music, listening and preserving the spaces in music that are where the action is.   I am passionate about improvising and helping to bring out the creativity of others.   I play the guitar, mostly, and am always most pleased when another musician comments on how much space I leave for other people’s ideas.  I also enjoy accompanying singers.

I am passionate about justice, which is one reason the law was such an unappealing detour on the road of my life.  Justice in America is largely the justice you can afford to purchase.   I can point you to the relevant provisions in our constitution which obliquely say as much.  The gulf between what is legal and what is right is an enormous, stinking crevasse.  My powerlessness in the face of recent injustice,  “the war on terror” and its related excesses, the widespread,  crippling criminality of the financial sector, led me to imagine a program that would encourage children to plan, stage, critique, problem-solve in groups.  To help them become informed, effective citizens of a democracy.

I dream of helping create articulate young citizens who are able to inform themselves about issues, argue them and organize to change intolerable conditions in our democracy.  I plan to give a digital megaphone and increased sense of agency to children, particularly those society has decided get all the help they need from programs for “at-risk” and “underprivileged” kids.   

I am passionate about letting the larger society, the one busy piously acquiring wealth, see what is in the minds and hearts of young people who are seen, if at all, as profitable widgets for privatized prisons. 

I am passionate about drawing, writing well and, whenever possible, having deep conversation.

 

Share an example of something you have been a part of (including created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould breaking? (Limit 2250 characters) * 

Not to harp on wehearyou.net, but I consider our approach unique and mould breaking.   Here’s the idea, with illustrations at the end.  The creative potential of young children is increasingly discounted.   When children are allowed to choose their projects, &  control all aspects of production, remarkable things emerge.  Week after week children ages 7 to 11 create, in the chaos of a free-form workshop, surprisingly inventive animation.   I am amazed by some break-through just about every session.

The great Sugata Mitra demonstrated children’s ability to self-organize, learn and teach each other things they are passionately engaged with.   Mitra used a computer embedded in a wall and documented the progress of illiterate children, as a group, who mastered the technology with no outside help.   Wehearyou.net is using the canvas of animation to help demonstrate the rich creative lives of children who are increasingly forced into ever more restrictive learning environments where most of them will learn failure rather than any kind of success.

In the test-prep age of No Child Left Behind children are seen as passive vessels to be filled with information and skills geared to standardized tests rather than as partners in their own education.  Kids are capable of learning much more than most educators give them credit for, particularly if license is given for their creativity to enter the classroom.

8 year-old with cut-out and three foil coins asks how to make the little character juggle.  I tell him I have no idea, see what you can do.  Within moments the little cut-out is juggling, the kid is already on to the next thing, with barely a backwards glance.  Two seven year olds create a guitarist and drummer.  Passing by I suggest they cut off and move the guitarist’s arm to make him strum.   A short while later they shoot a sequence where the two tiny musicians play perfectly in sync, the guitarist strumming then flipping his guitar in the air to catch and strum it on the beat.  The drummer, meanwhile, flips his drumsticks in the air, catches them and, bam!, exactly on the same beat.  How they did it, truthfully, I have no idea.

Idea Girl, nine, with five ideas a week she is too distracted to carry out, describes sequence where character will take part of his stomach, make a basketball backboard and hoop out of it, dunk a basketball, turn a somersault, pick up the backboard, eat it, get fat and then turn into a ball.   I ask if she’ll do this with clay.  She nods.  A few hours later, when first looking at the frames they shot during the session, I am amazed to see the frames, which needed no editorial improvement, doing exactly what she described.  (2732)

 

What questions should we have asked, but didn’t? Please write them down and answer them! (in other words, tell us something about yourself that we don’t know yet). (Limit 2250 characters) *

(I’ll get back to them on this one) 

Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

My father was brilliant and very funny but also brutally defended at all times.   I learned, at age 40, that he’d been the victim of atrocious abuse from his mother, whippings as soon as he was old enough to stand.  Learning this unspeakable secret, from Eli, an older cousin, gave me great insight I could never have had without knowing about the abuse he’d endured.

My father and I had a life-long debate about whether people could change.   He argued that only superficial things could be changed, that deeper personality traits were ingrained and set.  I said changes in response were the first step toward making the deeper changes.  He angrily denied any insights I may have thought I’d received from Eli, pointing out that his cousin was a problematic historian and tyrannical father.

At 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life I visited him in the hospital.  His first comment: “Eli hit the nail right on the head, only he didn’t tell you the worst of it.”  He hadn’t recovered from being whipped as an infant.  This brilliant man remained somehow convinced he’d been the dumbest kid in town.  He told me I was right about change.  He wished he’d had the insight to try to change himself.  “I imagine how much richer my life would have been if I had not seen it as a zero-sum war.”  

As sun set the next evening he breathed his last, I closed his eyes. The profound gift of these last moments with my father remains with me, and sustains my beliefs.  (1476)

How did you hear about the TED Fellows program?

I don’t recall exactly.  I think I stumbled on a TED talk on youTube and have watched many since.  I also subscribe to the podcast on WNYC.   Several friends, it turns out, are also great fans of TED (how can you not be?) and I have done some evangelizing and turned a few others on to these remarkable talks.  I probably learned of the Fellows program on the TED website.

 

Have you participated in TED before? If so, to what extent? (e.g. you watch TEDTalks, you’ve attended / hosted / spoken at a TEDx event, you’re a TEDTranslator, etc) 

Only to the extent of being inspired by many of the talks.  The inspirations have been too many to list in 1,500 characters, but for purposes of wehearyou.net, the talks of Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and Seth Godin cannot be praised enough.

Social Welfare Nonprofits 501(c)(4)

A friend and I started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a little over a year ago.  True to our charter, no profits whatsoever have been made.  Any money we do one day raise, over $25,000, I think, requires us to file what I’ve heard is literally sixty pages of paperwork with the IRS to show that we have complied with the complex laws that govern charities.

Part of the application for nonprofit status with the IRS was promising that we would undertake no political advocacy of any kind in connection with our educational activities.  Fair enough, I thought, I don’t support any of these political candidates anyway.   Obama’s voice has become as foul and disturbing to me as Dubya’s, as Rumsfeld’s.  My only political aim is a much broader one— let children think, voice their opinions, teach themselves how to learn what they need to know.  Don’t be sheep jerking your knee in a Rockettes like chorus line of high stepping party line robots.

That’s what 501(c)(4), the Social Welfare Nonprofit, is for– political activity disguised as charity.  Why they put it into law is probably the same reason a dog licks its privates.  Check it out.  You can raise millions for political “education”, even spend tens of millions on direct political advertising (as was done in the last election), as long as you are coy and couch your activities as educational.  For example, Karl Rove raised and spent tens of millions on political TV commercials with his 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS or whatever the non-profit 501(c)(4) analogue to his for-profit political money machine is.  Those commercials were for educational and social welfare purposes first, influencing the outcome of elections second.  And that urine running down your leg is really rain, pure mountain rain.

Was it wrong for the IRS to target right-wing sounding 501(c)(4) groups for extra scrutiny?  Yes, it was wrong.  Heads rolled, apologies were made.  Calls for prison time for the authors of the nasty questionnaires the IRS sent out were made by the man with the strange orange suntan.   It’s not time to compare the crimes of the two criminal conspiracies, Democratic and Republican, that vie for control of our great nation.   One reason is that I don’t have ten hours to spend listing the most recent ones.  Another is that it’s like arguing about who is worse, Mao or Stalin.

But here’s my question– why are the targeted 501(c)(4) groups so outraged that the IRS sought lists of donors?   Transparency is desired by everyone but the criminals opacity protects.   If you give money to a nonprofit, why is that a secret protected activity in an arena where money supposedly equals speech?  I have no idea.  But I do have another idea.

Get rid of 501(c)(4), it’s complete bullshit.   If you want to teach your children that God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh and that all this was 5,000 years ago, go right ahead, God bless you.  If you want to teach your children that homosexuals should be put to death in a hail of fist sized rocks, it’s your right as a free citizen.  Just don’t demand the right to raise millions in tax-exempt money from secret donors to influence the outcome of elections and call it Social Welfare.   

My Father’s Death

When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.”   Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.

“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around.  He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.

We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end.  I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better.  He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes.  Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk.  Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.

I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said.   We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of.  I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill.  Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.

“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self.  “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time.  Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.”  My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset.  I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.  

Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.”  She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.  

“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse.  I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew.  The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time.  She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.

They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room.  My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…”   I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK.  I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last.  His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano.  It was eerie how natural the movement was.  The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils.  “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them.   I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.

I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were.  I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was.  A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.

“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.”   Same phrase.  It struck me.  Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”

Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness.  I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to.  The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.

Throwing out baby und bathwater

It is easier to hold one thought firmly in mind than to have contradictory thoughts active in the brain.  The nature of reality is complex, the nature of human opinion: simple.  The human mind has been programmed to respond to slogans.  It’s easier to rally under a banner with a few bold words on it than under one with a complex of equally true facts. 

Joey Reiman (see Purpose)  has a private jet he bought, presumably, because he is excellent at what he does and well-paid for it.   He advises the richest businesses in the world about how to become richer, while having a work force that believes it is doing something to make the world a better place.   He advises big business how to convince the public it is doing work to make the world a better place.  This makes the world a better place and it also increases the profits of the company that does this well.

I struggle with bitterness sometimes, even with the several things I love to do and the good health I generally enjoy to do them in.  Even in the face of slow, but great, forward progress of my dream from idea to reality, a certain malaise hovers.   I have neither private jet nor any pay for what I do, however well I may be doing it.  I have built no organization.   I live on diminishing savings, unable to shift my focus from this dream long enough to figure out how to bring in more income.  My thoughts tend to darken at times as I dream of things most people consider too abstract to shoehorn into their busy schedules.   The darkness remains even as I realize how little I care about the details of what other people do for a living, and that this unpaid work I’m doing is also my livelihood and why should I expect others to be engaged by that?   Time is money, after all, so if it’s not fun, or at least exciting, it better pay me something for my time.  

Reading Reiman’s book I allow my distaste for Win-Win Kissinger and McDonald’s (though their products are, in my formerly carnivorous opinion, and in the opinion of billions served, tasty)  to color something more complicated and important– how does one carry out a dream and where does one get help learning that difficult thing?

And Reiman has concrete recommendations– make a short, emotional one-minute purpose film that inspires people with your vision.   Bring in outside experts to energize your organization.   He points out the folly of expecting someone from inside an unworkable workplace to be able to fix the problems of that workplace.  This is also basic common sense.  If the people you have don’t care, find people who care.  It may be easier to do when you can pay the expert consultant her enormous fee, but it needs to be done nonetheless.  My program is designed for poor people and is all about workarounds, I have solved a dozen problems already, a dozen more await.  There is a workaround for each one.

I ran a meeting recently, thinking it was very snappy and productive as I went from one agenda item to the next, succinctly, leaving space for discussion, nodding sagely at every criticism, no matter how slapdash, wrapping up precisely when I promised I would.   I presented a lot of information, laid out immediate goals and challenges and succeeded in everything but recruiting anybody to help me in any facet of the work.  Or even getting anyone to respond to a series of subsequent emails about it.  When I got home, still energized by what I thought of as a productive meeting, I had an email from one of the directors.

“When you’re feeling overwhelmed”  was the subject line.  Under it was a long forwarded email about the many exertions the successful, well-to-do business woman turned energetic social entrepreneur had ahead of her in coming days; proofing the new product, expanding the line to Canada, exploring cheaper production of the product line in Canada, hiring a new North American liaison and raising the money for her salary, breaking in a new secretary, meeting with the powerful partner social entrepreneur from India, accepting another award from the Prime Minister.  The email, intended to give me the inspiring idea that I wasn’t the only one with a lot of work ahead of me, was forwarded to me, I noted, (not without a bitter aftertaste), at the exact epicenter of the meeting, when this tired director was reading her friend’s email and forwarding it to me from her Blackberry.

You can see dynamic speakers at TED talks speaking eloquently of the need for a program exactly like the one I am running on a small scale, in one school, with ten kids.   They talk about the need to allow children to experiment, follow their imaginations, create, problem-solve and collaborate.  The model of schools in our grim, divided, fearful, murderous society is a holdover from factory days when industrialists needed millions of literate High School graduates who could follow instructions, repeat those instructions in unison, if prompted.  

No Child Left Behind, a program with a stirring slogan/name with unintended irony as great as the old Arbeit Macht Frei sign worked in metal atop the gates of an infamous death factory, is a remnant of this factory school mentality.  (OK, this comparison might be unfair, there is no evidence the Nazis didn’t intend the irony of their slogan, they were famous, after all, for practical jokes with a big punchline.  I should also give the designers of No Child Left Behind the same presumption of irony.)  

Like all visionary programs to deal with longstanding problems, the basics of No Child Left Behind (since rebranded as Race to the Top) were clear and simple.   You give standardized tests that measure how every student compares to every other student, you do this often, focusing the children’s attention on the importance of these tests and how to do as well as possible on the tests.  If a kid fails, force them to learn the stuff the second time around, the third time.  If the teacher fails, fire that teacher.  If the school fails, close the school and let a private outfit run it better.  Clean and easy to monitor, just hand out boxes of number two pencils and fire up a bunch of computers to do the scoring and tabulating.

If you watch the TED talks of Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Sugata Mitra and others you will wonder how, in actual practice, we carry out the ideal of having public education where children, motivated by their imaginations, reach for things considered impossible in a society that values things only in terms of its market sale value.  Externalities like the world’s largest prison population, no decent jobs for most graduates, a dispirited electorate who don’t even bother voting for the corrupt politicians that represent our democracy, well, these are just things to get over, eh?

Here’s another thought to keep in your head at the same time:

Every positive vision of the future began as a dream in somebody’s head, spread because it was a good idea that flowered in other people’s imaginations.   Every organization promoting such ideas began with one or two people.  What luck it must be to have a second person!  But the fact remains, we are set here briefly between two dates, one that we celebrate every accelerating year and one we do not know, unless we are sitting on Death Row, our last appeal denied, date set.  Better, I am thinking to myself alone, and for a clear reason, to be a small light someone might some day read by than another hissing passerby, rushing headlong in the darkness.

All to say, I’m making my way through the rest of Reiman’s book.  He’s a smart guy, no matter how stupid some of his examples and quotes are (e.g., Henry Kissinger as the ultimate win-win guy), and I need all the help and inspiration I can get at the moment.

Letter to Walter (draft 2.2)

Dear Walter:

I’ve been reading your books since my mother recommended Devil in A Blue Dress to me a few decades back.  I admire the story-telling as much as the running themes of the power of imagination to change the world and the gentleness that is at the core of even your most hardened protagonists.  

Reading Twelve Steps to Political Revelation not long ago I was struck by the section calling for changes in how education needs to work to ensure a more creative, critically thinking, multi-lingual populace.  I agree that the generations coming up now are the last, best agents for the change needed to avert the looming disasters we face as a planet.  You gave a great example at the Moth recently, those two young gay strangers on Christopher Street retooling the ugly word “nigger” into a shorthand for their brotherhood.

Cheekums baboon

In the wake of Cheney and Bush I thought up my best bet for helping to bring about the kind of change we need to see.  I’ve started a not-for-profit student-run animation workshop, called wehearyou.net, to listen to young children’s concerns and help them show the creativity that is so often ignored in our testing-obsessed prison-prep factory schools.  

My hope is to have young kids produce works that will shame the more liberal of the Job Creator types (currently chafing at a theoretical 0.03% stock transaction tax) enough to fund what I envision as a grassroots movement to change the landscape of urban education, starting in the worst public schools I can find in NYC.  I worked in one in Harlem for several years, so I’m intimately familiar with the challenges kids in those schools are up against.

Cheekums1

I invite to you have a look at some of the kids’ work at wehearyou.net, along with my descriptions of the program   I hope the potential of this program, directed and produced by young kids working as teams of creative problem-solvers, lights up your imagination.   I would love to speak to you about the program.   You can send me an email or call me at (… ellipsis added…).   On my dream team of people of vision and action to work and brainstorm with, you’re very high on the list.  

Yours sincerely,
[name withheld at request of ‘author’]

Bullies, Manipulation and Unintended Consequences

We live in a society that produces bullies, as much as large segments of our society hate bullies and try to prevent the spread of abusive behavior.  How does our society produce bullies?  By its values, or lack of same.   Flip the channels, one zero sum game after another where one individual wins everything while all others lose, often humiliated in the process.   Our prisons are overcrowded with largely petty criminals while criminality, on an enormous and destructive scale, proceeds at a record pace for a class that is never held accountable for their third party abuse of the rest of us.  

Those who spent careers working for Enron and got screwed out of their pensions by the greed and malfeasance of Enron’s executives, remember them?  The tip of the iceberg, as it turned out.  Those folks at Enron were merely the vanguard of the millions whose lives and dreams were plundered by the most rapacious among us.

Blah blah blah.  Yes, my grandmother was a leftist, a lifelong trade unionist, she celebrated when the Czar fell and for a while it looked like the People were seizing control of Russia.  She was a girl during the Russian Revolution and can be forgiven for excitedly believing the best, though she wound up bitter in the end.  There is nothing inherently wrong, one could argue, with one person owning 100,000 times more than the next ten million people have.   Our society rewards success, hard work, risk-taking of the right sort, drive, ambition, inherited wealth and social class.  

Anyway, my point is about bullying, and the background is that it’s institutionalized in a competitive society that extols the mythic rugged individual above all else.  Paris Hilton, for example, is one such rugged individual.

I am working with a group of children that has recently changed composition.  Five children from the original workshop now work together with five new participants.  I am focused on improving the program, making soundtracks during our limited time together, improving the quality of the animation, getting kids to buy into the idea of refining their work.   I noticed some tension, the new kids not integrating seamlessly, and set on an idea I thought would help.  I needed a creative and often disruptive kid from the original group to buy into helping others.

I dislike manipulators almost as much as I hate bullies.  It serves me right, in a way, what happened when I decided to deliberately manipulate this kid, though others would suffer for my action.  I saw how important it was to this guy to feel appreciated, so I took him aside, told him how important he is to the workshop, that he’s a natural leader, that he’s the best animator in the group.  I asked for his help.  He was flattered and immediately responded by changing his attitude.  He began to lead the clean-up effort at the end of the sessions and has been a big help.

Last week one of the new kids was lying on his back, the front of his shirt wet, foam all over his chin.   I asked if he was OK and he began laughing, told me he was fine.  I gave him a napkin and he wiped away the drool, then drooled again.  Soon he was lying in the hallway, crying inconsolably.  I couldn’t glean exactly why he was so upset, he wouldn’t say.   It turned out he was a victim of blow-back, the unintended consequence of my manipulative intervention.

The nine year-old I’d taken aside for special attention has, it would be appear, been crowing over the recognition he’d long been craving.  He became, according to three or four different sources, an insufferable prick to his classmates.  Lord of the Flies!   He’d been mocking this kid, who has trouble using a pair of scissors bordering on a kind of phobia.

I must start each session, as I did last term at a certain point, with the reminder that everyone is there to have fun.  And that you can’t have fun if somebody is bothering you or being mean to you.  We are doing animation, something with a lot of moving parts, parts that require looseness, concentration and teamwork.  The workshop doesn’t work unless people are helping each other.   If you can’t help, don’t hurt.    Simple to say, a little hard to do sometimes, but essential.

Unlike in the real world, I have the ability, in this group, to swoop down and gently but firmly intervene.  I can stop a bully in mid-attack, if I see it happening.   The worst bullying often happens behind the scenes, where the deals are made, and merciless rules are set that insure the bully will never be accountable for the pain he causes his victims, karma or no karma.   Playing God in this little group, I will nip this in the bud, as the cliche goes.  Nip it, I say, in the hideous bud.  Watch.