Category Archives: not-for-profit

Duh!

Here’s a big “DUH!” for you, not intuitive, maybe, but once you hear it you’ll make that exaggeratedly stupid face and say “duh!”, if you’re inclined to such things.

If you have a website to promote your business idea, and it contains links to the product you are selling, visitors must not be able to easily see that only a dozen, rather than many thousands, have visited the links.  YouTube, for example, with its counters, is good for promoting an idea if 75,000 people, or better still, 7,500,000 people, have viewed it.  It is the kiss of death if the counter reads 14, or 106.

“Loser…” the visitor can’t help but think, perhaps also “poor bastard.”

The internet is a popularity contest.  High school has nothing on the internet in that regard.  The numbers don’t lie.  If the thing is good but nobody cares, the number reads 6, maybe 28.  If the LOL cat is funny, or the baby animal irresistible, the number quickly reaches 99,000,000.

Like everything else– or like many things, anyway–  there is a way to fix it.  A workaround, like a dozen I’ve already employed in the creation of my gerry-rigged empire.  No need to show potential customers how few people actually watch the amazing and original animation small groups of strangers are creating.   I’ll get on it tomorrow, it should take no more than a few hours to fix.  Plain foolishness is the only reason to let a prospective customer see at a glance that your most popular, most amazing piece of work has been viewed less than 200 times.

Live and learn, baby.

“Duh!”

 

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Thoughts on the uptown A

Gratefulness –
most valuable
where it seems
least possible.
 
The simple math-
addition of all the 
justifcations needed
to explain an otherwise
inexplicable life,
a life as malaise,
misdirection,
drinking invisible Kool-Aid
feeling wise and profound
while others bucked
seeming desperate–
when the ledger is tallied
I would be a fool 
to regret
a single wrong turn
 
clutching to myself
unimpeachable good character
even if
at the moment
gratefulness is not something
I can wrap myself in.

Stuck to Care

My father had a crusty, lovable, gravel voiced first cousin named Eli.   On one of many visits with him toward the end of his life, more than twenty years ago now, he tried to straighten me out with a memorable rap.  He delivered it in his dramatic fashion, standing, as I was, looking up into my face, spitting slightly.

“You know, you worry too much about other people.  You should worry more about yourself, Bub.  There are three rules you need to get into your head.  First: comes me.   Then:  comes me!  And third: comes ME!!!  After that you can worry about other people.  Who are you to worry about someone else?  Let them worry about themselves.  You take care of yourself.”

Excellent advice I have always only marginally abided by, even as I often think of that very smart airline advice to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the child or panicking old person next to you.  I don’t know why I am so often brooding on things that are, after all, statistics.  No less an authority than Josef Stalin famously said “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men– a statistic.”  As the genius William Steig had the fox say in response to the pretty little pig’s desperate question about why he was going to eat her, “why are you asking me?  I didn’t make the world.”  

It is beyond dispute that I didn’t make the world, why do I feel so debilitatingly responsible to do something about reducing its misery?  I am grateful for every advantage I have, but also inordinately troubled by the odds against most people, the invisible ones, the children of the invisible ones.  This is an alligator of a rhetorical question I am wrestling with, in a world where the majority of people do whatever good they can while trying to have a good life, while feathering their own nests as nicely as they can.  In a culture where the tide I am trying to swim against is a tirelessly promoted, never pausing, super lucrative torrent?  What hope can a lone fish have, swimming against such a tide, and why the struggle, pececito?

A little voice pipes up in response: the tide, however terrible or inexorable, ends in death for everyone, even for those who accumulate a million times more than they can ever use.   Whether you grow up in a slum in Pakistan where children die in massive numbers daily of diarrhea because deadly infections rage where there is no sewer system and many hundreds of thousands must nonetheless defecate in a limited space, or in a comfortable home somewhere where you can crap into a nice clean toilet in a room with a heated floor, your life ends when it is time for it to end, if not before.

How will you spend your limited time here?  If you have the chance to, and seemingly little choice in the matter, does it not make sense to push to the limits of your strength to do something you believe in?  The trick is finding the actual limits of your strength and not surrendering to that hopeless feeling you learned as a young child as soon as things become alarmingly difficult.  When the challenge becomes too daunting it is not unnatural to begin flinching.  If you would change the world, it will not do to flinch.  Or, if you must stop to flinch, Earthling, shake it off and get yourself moving again.

The children of the poor are born largely doomed.  Thus it has always been.  Billionaire monopolists like Bill Gates, once ruthless crushers of any initiative they could not profit from (like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller before him), turn philanthropist and spend huge sums promoting good ideas for improving the lot of the poor.  Why not put them in private school?  Worked for Bill Gates, did it not?  Just because the children of the slums might be shot by rivals for drug selling turf on their way home, or for any reason, or none, just because they may go to bed hungry and wake up in a ghetto, frightened, and facing a society that no longer has any profitable use for their labor, those things are no reason for their parents not to be able to use a voucher to get them into a private school, a charter school, if you will, outside of the public system.  That such a scheme removes the children of the most motivated parents from public schools while diverting resources from public education is no obstacle to its promoters.  Many promoters of this scheme have become rich and famous, while sometimes doing wonderful things for a small number of poor children, even as they arguably ensure the failure of one of the cornerstones of a functioning democracy: a good public education system.

A certain number of the educable few, raked from the rubble in the manner first described by Thomas Jefferson, will excel in these private schools and pass the standardized tests that virtually everyone in their local public school will fail. The most outstanding graduates will attend good schools and ascend to the middle and upper classes.  One in ten million will get their own TV show.  On that show they will say “only in America, baby!” to wild applause and they will mean it very sincerely.  

Most of the rest: massive standardized test failure rate, dropping out of school, death by gunshot, drug arrest, drug addiction, juvenile incarceration, teen pregnancy, a hard life in a dangerous neighborhood at best.  “At-risk” if you know what I’m saying. “Collateral damage,” yo.  If you can say it in a nice way, in a way that tastefully hints at the full horror instead of making it sound so horrible, why not?  Why dwell on a thousand kids from American slums stripped naked every day and thrown into solitary confinement at ‘joovies’ all over the country for getting into fights?  If they didn’t want to be incarcerated why did they violate the law?  And who is Amnesty International to say that solitary confinement of more than 15 hours qualifies as torture?  They’ve clearly never tried dealing with these feral fifteen year-olds.

I met many of these “at risk”  “collateral damage” kids at eight and nine years old: as bright and full of life as you and me.  Met them at an age when they had not yet been totally crushed by the odds they were up against.  I myself was soon crushed by the impossibility of helping more than one or two of them, of having no ability to meaningfully intercede on their behalf in the institutional meat-grinder where I met them.  Fast forward twenty years, dreamed up a creative plan to showcase their potentials, the moving parts of it seem to work.  Poised on a high, windy cliff, about to test the flying machine.  Why worry now?

Certainly no reason to waste energy fretting over why I am stuck to care.

 

employee handbook

Why they play annoying, aggressive, repetitive music while you’re on hold to talk to a human at a large corporation, ten minutes into this latest wait, finally makes sense to me.  If annoying and aggressive enough, many of the callers will give up and go to the website where a human will not have to be paid to deal with a customer.  Logical, really, and good for the bottom line, if also frustrating for the customer.

In the old days the customer was always right– nowadays we are presumed to be powerless assholes, thanked for continuing to hold and told by cheerful robots that our business is very, very important to them.

As I continue to hold I am thinking about compiling a short employee handbook, perhaps an employee e-book.  This handbook would be illustrated by children’s drawings, cut-outs and claymation– if an e-book it could be animated.  Colors, flavors and sounds of creative play could be incorporated as we describe the philosophy of the organization: a place for children to make and share discoveries, creative and technical, supported by adults who listen carefully and encouragingly to their ideas.  It would outline and explain the three rules the adult must impart:  have fun, work together, be quiet and listen when asked to listen.

“Have fun” sounds simple for kids unleashed in a room full of art supplies, but it incorporates another key aspect: you can’t have fun if people are bothering or excluding you.  Which leads to rule two: work together, and its unspoken side rule– if you don’t want to work with someone, don’t bother them.   Without rule three it all falls apart– there are times when kids get out of control and have to simply be quiet and listen for a moment.  Sometimes a particularly out of control kid needs to be made an example of, given an immediate time out until the next time.

I will be asked: what are your credentials for writing an employee handbook?  Fortunately for me, that is not a question I will have to answer.

This world is a place of zooming competition where either we leverage, revamp, brand, rebrand and strategically partner or, my friends, we disappear, unable to compete with outfits who can do all these things, who never stop doing these things.  Outfits to whom a $20,000,000 federal grant is nothing more than a good start.  I spoke to a woman from an organization that got a $20,000,000 federal grant recently, and she was not snoozing as she generously gave me more than a half hour of her busy day.  Sympathetic sounding, and making a series of helpful-sounding suggestions, as well as a small promise she hasn’t yet kept a week later, I’m sure she wondered by the end how someone as ignorant of the language of marketing and sales could think total candor and frankness might be called for in a business conversation.  She’d thought she was getting a call from a man representing an innovative organization hers could partner with.

Turns out the guy was drowning, desperate, working alone from the Book Depository window, madly thinking, out of the blue, of an illustrated employee handbook he might one day write and finally turning dispiritedly away from a menu of distasteful and so far futile tasks he’d set himself for the day.  But not before he reminded callers that their business is very, very important to him and that he appreciated their patience as they continue to hold.

 

What You Will Be Asked to Do 

If you are patient, they will ask you to be even more patient.  Generous?  They will always demand more generosity, they can never have enough of that in this greedy world.  If you have a sense of humor, make us laugh.  You’re a clever guy, why won’t you make us laugh?  

Nine year-old today came into the last animation workshop toward the end, crying.  I asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t say.  I gave her a sheet of photos of herself, face exploding into mischievousness.  “This will cheer you up,” I told her, going through the box of supplies I was trying to divide between two heavy duffel bags to take out of the classroom and carry back to my crowded apartment.

“I know what I want to say,” she said a moment later.   She meant she wanted me to shoot a little video of her.  I was happy to oblige.

“What I like best about….” she said, then searched for the word, flustered.

“Take two,” I said, and she tried it again.  Same thing.

“Take three,” I said and she said “what I like best about…” there was another long pause then she said “stop motion” and I nodded and said “animation.”  

“Animation,” she said.

“Take four,” I said.  And she recorded her bit.  I shook her hand and thanked her, told her it was a pleasure working with her.

And it was, even under the worst circumstances so far for the endangered animation workshop.  A good group of kids, a poorly run after-school program.   The kids are given the choice of doing their homework, or animation.  Right after animation they can go outside into the springtime to run around, if they are done with their homework.  Today three kids animated while the other seven did their homework.

I’ve been paying an assistant to run the workshop.  I pay him the full fee I was paid at the last place.  He is a nice guy who has little experience teaching.  He runs a watered down version of the workshop, he edits fairly good versions of the kids’ animations, though he doesn’t take the time I often did to massage a few frames into an interesting animation nobody watches.  I realize now that there is a training component needed, and trainee rates while candidates get up to speed, but a deal’s a deal, and so I grossly overpaid this guy while I attended every session and actually ran the workshop, for no pay.

My invoice for the ten sessions was never paid.  I got a kind of apology when I first raised this with the controller back in March.  He told me the invoice had never been forwarded to him.  He asked me to send him the invoice and assured me he’d pay it by the end of the month.  He did not.  On my follow up call in April he apologized, described a hectic move to a new office and asked me to re-send the invoice and said he’d pay it on receipt.  Again, no check.  On my third follow up, after he didn’t return my call, he took out the cane and the hat and did the old soft shoe.

“You know how it is, Eliot,” he told me, beginning to dance like a young Buddy Ebsen. 

“Niggers get paid last, sir, if at all,” was one thing I might have said to him, though we don’t use that kind of language anymore.  My point would have been, if you are meek and lack the power to make anyone listen to you, shut the fuck up and take what you get, if anything.

There is every indication that this small after-school program that hired us for the ten sessions is going out of business after the death, at 34, of the woman who created and ran it.  When this happens my program will be stiffed for the fee for services we provided under the worst of circumstances so far.

Today I get back on the horse and pretend the program is flourishing, though the taste in my mouth is not of something delicious.  I will try to persuade myself and a woman at a large after-school nonprofit, recipient of a $20,000,000 federal grant (if and when she returns my call), that wehearyou.net is a vibrant and innovative program her outfit would do well to partner with.  She would be able to put the program in a dozen public schools in very short order, if we come to terms.  

I’ve got to hope the almost eight hours of sleep I got last night will be the tonic I need.  Maybe there is no tonic powerful enough to pull of the confident sales job I will need to do, feeling as deflated as I do at the moment.

Be of good cheer, though.  However hard you may think you have it, literally everybody else has it harder.  Be assured, whenever your leg gets cut off, the paper cuts of those around you will be held up as reminders that your crying is of no use.

Crying is of no use.  Think of Mel Brooks’ definition of tragedy and comedy.  Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.  Funny, isn’t it?

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today, if my mother was alive, she’d be 86 and in her 27th year of endometrial cancer.   That’s just bookkeeping, mere facts, a logical and stupid way to begin.

One year we flew to Florida on May 20th, Sekhnet and I, and rented a car at the airport.   We drove to my parents’ gated retirement community and somehow gained entrance without having the gate call the residents to verify that we were not smiling predators posing as children and coming to kill and rob the condo owners.

We arrived and parked at the far end of their parking lot, out of sight of their windows.   I dialed my parents as we walked up to the apartment and Sekhnet and I wished a hearty happy birthday and expressed our regrets that we couldn’t be there to celebrate in person.  Then we rang the doorbell.

“Goddamn it,” my mother said, with her ready Bronx attitude of frustration at an interruption, “somebody’s at the door….”

When she opened it we were standing there, phone in hand.

Her mouth popped wide open in the most comical expression of surprise you can imagine.   Although her mouth was open wide enough to swallow a small dog, she had a wry Bill Maherish smile around the edges of it, and in her eyes.  She looked for a moment like one of those nutcrackers in the shape of a person with the impossibly open lower jaw.   I can see that expression now, so can Sekhnet.

My mother began to laugh “you rats!” she said, hugging and kissing us.    My father appeared behind her, making humorous, sardonic remarks.   Ginger, a small poodle shaped like a football, began clicking her claws on the hard wood floor by the door.

All of them now long gone;  my father nine years, Ginger the same, my mother will be gone four years tomorrow.

I pause today to think of how proud my parents would be, even if terribly concerned about my long-term survival, to see the progress of my program, and my determination.   They would not be any more excited about the actual animation than anyone else is, but I think they would understand that their son, long struggling against a world of darkness, brutality and ignorance, has found a way to bring the things he values most into the lives of children who get very little chance to ever experience these things.   I think my mother would be proud, and excited for the possibilities immediately before me, now that I have proved the success of this program with perhaps 100 kids in four or five different settings.  

Even if she didn’t have much faith in my prospects for the future, she would listen willing to be convinced that I have already done much of the hard work to produce something amazing.   “Elie, you’re not curing cancer, but this is pretty good,” she might agree, when I was done persuading her of the great value of what I am doing and how much satisfaction it brings me, in the midst of the fearfulness of this wholly invented, marvelous and scarily shaky vehicle I am dragging around with me.

Happy birthday, Mom.