Category Archives: not-for-profit

The Bossy Type

There is a personality type whose fondest wish is to be in charge and able to punish and fire people who oppose their will.  The thrill they extract from being the decider is somewhat alien to me, but there are literally millions of this type walking around the earth.   They are bosses, leaders, experts of every stripe, many of them more or less complete assholes.  I have never had much sympathy for the “my way or the highway” type, but recent events give me, if not sympathy, a bit of understanding.

I have a little program I’m running.  I don’t say “little” to disparage it or minimize its potential importance.  It is a great program that should have about six to eight people working on it by now– it could really be a bright, hot new pilot light on this rusty but essential stove outgassing here in the stinking global kitchen.  It is little because I am the only person working on it, trying to do the jobs of a half-dozen dedicated people by myself.  The program is currently exactly as big as I am, which is big enough, especially if you factor in imagination, talent and persistence, but for purposes of a program, quite little.

I recently spent great effort planning and attempting to hold a productive meeting to raise funds so I can hire some bright experts help to move the program forward.  I’m told the meeting went well.  After all, I managed to hold my tongue for the most part when the carping began, when I was called a hypocrite for calling the organization wehearyou.net yet not being willing to listen to an avalanche of criticism from well-intentioned people doing me a favor, supporters whose help comes largely in the form of opinionated criticism, frank and unvarnished, and, thoughtful or not, strictly for my own good.  

The results of the meeting I spent hours working on could have been revealed to me in an email from the people who deigned to attend: your website sucks and has to be redone before you can think of mounting a crowd funding campaign.  Of course, I had virtually no replies to any of the emails I sent any of the attendees, before or after the meeting, so I guess it was worth the $100 I spent to buy everyone dinner to get that great insight.

I pay a couple of people to help and they spend as much time looking at their smart phones and drawing their own pictures as helping do what I pay them to do, namely working with the children.  I thank them as I hand them their checks, smiling, and thinking as I do “you stupid, fucking useless bastard.” This thought applies as much to myself as employer as to them, since I have not figured out how to extract what the program and I need from the mercenaries I’ve managed to recruit.  Or how to recruit people who are willing to work as devotedly as I do.

And so I get the first inkling into why someone would be a prick boss as I ponder this:

The young man misspells the name I sign to every email and writes:

I’m applying for another social media position and they are asking for people who can vouch for my social media skills. Would it be alright if I listed you?
 
Thanks,
I decide, for the time being, to apply the tonic that has done so much for me: silence.  No need to rush to reply to this guy.  I’ve paid him about $500 for what appears to have been a total of about six hours of work.  His rate was $15 an hour, and I suppose he figured, since I didn’t press him to do any of the things I asked of him that he didn’t do, since I’d be in the lurch if he walked and I had to conduct the Monday workshop by myself, since I seemed easy going, that it was better to get $90/hr. than $15 and made adjustments accordingly.   The first week he was on the job there was a huge spike in social media, 500% increase as his friends checked out the various sites.   The next four weeks the spike was less impressive, 0%.  After paying him for weeks I told him truthfully that the corporate coffers were almost empty and I could no longer pay him for “social media”.  
Yesterday I paid him to help at the original workshop so I could interview kids one on one for a promo I need to make very soon.  Yesterday was actually my last chance to do this in time for the timeline I’m desperately aiming for.  He was 5% better than useless and I was unable to interview anyone, since I was the only one of three adults in the room actively helping the kids throughout the workshop, then cleaning up alone at the end.  No sound bites for the promo.  I suppose I could write:  
Think carefully about what I could say about your social media skills and work ethic.  After an impressive increase the first week, the arrow went straight down to zero every week after that. Tasks I asked you to do were never done, or were done sloppily and uselessly.  Your checks from me were always on time, and you were quick to ask the one time I delayed by a day to pay you, yet you don’t take a moment to spell my name right when asking me for a favor.  A favor, moreover, revealing the almost imponderably large size of your testicles.  
 
So I say this both as a fellow human being and a prick boss: think carefully about how my honest appraisal of your work might help your chances of finding more employment.

How To Crush An Idealist

There are many ways, but this one is elegant in its simplicity.  It may be more fun to find one niggling detail, (detail unimportant, in fact, the pettier the better), grip it tightly in bulldog jaws and keep pulling at the idealist, but I think this one is better.  Less is more.  

Do nothing, say nothing.  No matter what the idealist says or accomplishes, remain quiet.

This way the idealist is left to wonder if anybody is home, and the sneaking feeling that nobody’s home will crush that sucker faster than a steamroller flattening the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

They Had A Vision

I dragged myself to the workshop in a state of exhaustion this afternoon, half blind with fatigue for reasons too tedious to detail.  I arrived first, five minutes before the session was supposed to start.  Tim got there a few minutes later.  Luckily, the kids didn’t arrive until five minutes after they were scheduled to arrive.  It was an odd day, slight underwater feeling, everybody sort of floating around jellyfish-like.  I don’t think more than 20 frames were shot all session, the usual number is two or three hundred frames.

I called two kids over, gave them headphones and the three of us began making a soundtrack. I couldn’t get the wonderful new Audiobus interface to work, but I gave them a taste of the cool sounds and after a few minutes of futility, apologized for not having had time to learn it well enough before the session.  I shut it down and switched to garageband, which I know well, and which neither of these kids had used.

Within moments Lily was moving her hands purposefully on the touch-screen.  They recorded an adorable track of childish bickering, but neither of them liked it much.  I deleted it as they watched and they did it again, less contentious and still adorable.  They still didn’t like it.   I told them to leave it, we could mute it.  Lily dragged a drum loop they chose into the track.  I told them to listen to the beat and play along.  I urged them to play only a bit, since they could always add more on the next track, and it was impossible to subtract if they otherwise liked the track.   They pulled up another mic and began pounding the table in time with the drums.   They played a piano together.  I took my headphones off and walked over to see what the animators were up to, after muting the piano at their request.

When I got back I saw they’d deleted their adorable vocal track, along with the piano.  I was dismayed, and told them so.   They were too busy to pay much attention to my dismay, another girl was with them now, drumming on the table.  I put a pair of headphones on her and walked away to start cleaning up, as Lily’s twin brother laughed, headphones on, pounding the table.

As we were leaving I said to Tim, “that’s what happens when you let the inmates have complete control of the asylum, you get no input into the output.”   Tim commented that kids always find their own voices weird and distasteful when they first hear them played back, and that’s probably why they’d wiped out the adorable tracks.

I walked a good way with the heavy pack on my back, and a duffel bag hanging at the end of my arm.  I was actually too tired to stop walking, and as the temperature began to drop I paused to pull my hood over my head.  I sat on a bench.  I ate a slice of pizza and took Excedrin.  I eventually got on the subway and listened to Bill Moyers when I was not nodding out, and when I was.

Made it up to my apartment, took my clothes off and got under the covers.  Charging the iPad I decided to listen to the track, see what they’d wound up with.  I’ll be damned, they had a vision.  They weren’t going for adorable, it was the percussion they were after.   Two tracks of poly-rhythmic table banging, along with the drum track.  They had an idea they were going for.  I was impressed.  They hadn’t opted for any of the fancy gimmicks they’d tried in garageband, they were going for the real thing.   Playing the only instrument they had, the table, they jammed, creating a convincing jungle of percussion.

Writing is as easy as crapping to some people

And when I say writing is as easy as crapping to some people, I’m not talking about people who don’t move their bowels once or twice every day.

Guy writes:

And my apology to anyone who may have felt slighted or stepped on by me as I attempted to chair an open and productive meeting.  

I’d intended to mention the changes in myself (in addition to the changes in the group and in certain kids that we discussed) that I attribute to developing, and working in, the program:

increased patience, decreased temper
increased ability to focus and listen 
sense of purpose and accomplishment
regular recharge of the creative batteries from the kids
general satisfaction and more gratefulness
increased confidence
 
I think these are all real benefits.  I predict that many of them will be shared by anybody working in the program.   They will only increase when an actual living wage is attached to the work.

His biggest supporter, not buying any of this pie in the sky rhetoric, responds:

So…I’m not sure why you get defensive when the people who are your biggest supporters share ideas.   It’s kind of ironic when your motto is “We hear you” and then hold up a sign that is not supportive of expression.
 
I am in this primarily because of our friendship and desire to be a part of something that brings you joy and open hearted devotion.   Secondarily, my desire to be a part of something that inspires children’s creativity…… Not on my list at all…..is living up to anyone’s expectations….and certainly no desire to burn out or to be burned.
                  He spends the next day or two, instead of focusing on several important things he needs to do, figuring out how to reply to his biggest supporter’s peevishness without expressing how much her approach once again scorches his ass.  He thinks about the expression-crushing sign he held up “there are 1,000 reasons the thing won’t work, all we need is the one reason that it will” and shakes his head.    After all, sitting at a meeting criticizing all attempts that are not hitting the mark is valuable to everyone but an overbearing asshole, no?
As I said above, writing is as easy as crapping to some people.  That said, some people do not find it that easy to move their bowels.
That said, somebody who does not know the first thing about business:  financing, pricing, branding, advertising, marketing, accounting, leveraging, partnering, brokering, managing, staffing, HR, IT, etc., has no business dreaming big fucking dreams about helping kids in misery he has never even met.  It makes no difference that his program works– it only really works if it attracts investors and succeeds.
Better to help himself, I say.  Learn to get up at dawn and work 15 hours a day like everybody else who has a dream worth dreaming.
And try crapping less, my writerly friend.  Words are only worth something when you sell them in America.

Sekhnet’s edit

She had a good idea, which others have also mentioned to me over the last year.  Keep a log of cool things the kids do, one or two a week.  Keep people interested in the unfolding story of a remarkable project.   Here’s her edit of a recent post:

At the end of a hectic animation session I assembled the wild little animators around me on the carpet to do the soundtrack.  A wonderful multi-track looper app was open on the iPad, a five-way headphone splitter plugged in.   Four kids and I put on the headphones.

I had them listen to the beat, which Amza had tapped in to set the tempo for the metronome.  My only instruction:  do something along with the beat when I point at you.  I realized quickly it was best to give each a track of their own, to be able to fade things in and out and get rid of any noise, while preserving anything that might be great on its own track.  It also kept the rest of them quiet and allowed the one making the track to hear him or herself think.  It is crucial to be able to hear yourself when making music with others.

“When I point to you, say how old you are” and I pointed to Amza who rapped out, “I am eight eight eight eight”, and then to Natalie who sang “I am Te-ehn!” and around the circle it went, Kazu, who deadpanned “I am ten” then Auden, “I am eight eight eight eight” and so forth.  Amza then sang a ditty right out of the history of Afghanistan, where his mother is from.  Natalie sang a wild and melodic loop that sounded like “Magical Purpose” sung three times, but which I realized, after 1,000 listenings during overdubs, was probably “Magical Puppies.”  Headphones were rotated to kids who didn’t have a chance to record.  The others all kicked in manic parts, I said goodbye, and they were off. 

When I got home and began mixing it down I was struck by the variety, the creativity, the fact that they were all singing in the same key, and none of them did anything that conflicted with the beat.  I was amazed. It was rocking.

Mike Gets It

One of the after school programs where we do the workshop provides a helper, a counselor, a guy we’ll call Mike (since that’s his name).  Mike came in the first time with a drill sergeant demeanor, herding the kids, telling them sternly to stay in their seats and be quiet.

This was not really the vibe we need in the workshop, the first rule is move around to where you’re comfortable, keep moving if you like.  The second is to talk about what you’re planning to do.  

There was a minor clash that first time, the second time was a little easier.  By the third session Mike felt no need to discipline the kids, since they were all busy and involved with what they were doing.  Last week I pointed something out to Mike.

“Damn…” he said, and I nodded.  Four kids were animating at the animation stand by themselves, two moving the things on the animation stand, two photographing.  

“And in the full two-hour workshop another couple of kids would be at the computer editing and working on the soundtrack while the other kids were animating,” I pointed out.   He was impressed.

This week Mike was animating.  Sitting by ten year-old Jacob, the two of them enthralled by a Muybridge sequence I’d shown them,  Mike said “I’ll help you,” and was soon diligently working on a sequence of a running man.

By the end of the session Mike was as giddy as many of the kids sometimes get after a session of animation.

“Lily,” I called out to the girl who was trying to get her book back from Mike, who was holding it just out of her reach, “leave Mike alone.”

And Mike, rather than barking at the kids to stay in their seats, threw his head back and laughed.

It’s not about the interest rate comfortable people pay

It’s one thing to nonchalantly pay your 3.85% mortgage on something that you live in, a comfortable home that appreciates in value, is an asset you can eventually sell to recoup your investment, if not also a profit.

It’s another thing entirely to pay mortgage interest four times what the banks are paying, on a house you will never live in, a house full of vermin and every kind of expensive vexation, a house of plague you avoid.  And the repayment amount exceeds your combined income for a decade.

But I’m not here to whine about interest rates on unwisely taken student loans.  There is more important business, like getting you to reading this again, with focus and attention.  To imbibe its truth, and to taste the truth of it, and to think on it a moment.

WENDELL BERRY:  But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers.

The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you.

You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me.

And this can’t be hurried.  This is the dreadful situation that young people are in.

I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience.

And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/

On Picking the Right Side

Many years ago my old friend’s father, a practical and even in some ways heroic man, caught me in a vestibule we were both passing through and told me something I will never forget.  He congratulated me on my (misguided in hindsight) decision to become a lawyer.   He told me he thought it was terrific that I was finally going to use my intelligence to its fullest.  He encouraged me, telling me I’d be a great lawyer.  Then he cautioned me with words that will live as long as I do:  “One thing; don’t be a poor lawyer.  Don’t let your ideals stand in the way of making a good living.” 

My friend later described the kind of lawyers his father had in mind.  These were sour-faced men in worn sports jackets, men who drank in the morning on their way to the dingiest agencies and hearing rooms in the world, doing the work that respectable lawyers would not touch.  These were the kind of lawyer I indeed became, standing in the cracked shoes of the underdog, except that I never drank much, especially when making my way to these dungeon-like rooms where bureaucracies ground life into bad-smelling dust.

My father encouraged me to go to law school, even gave me most of my living expenses while I was reading an endless stream of cases, researching and writing a huge, unwieldy tome on the betrayal of 1877 and the ninety year sleep of the Civil War Amendments that I’d hoped to publish in the scholarly journal I was editor of.  The law school tuition, however, was up to me, and so I took a loan and incurred the kind of debt I had avoided all my life.  This is the kind of endless debt that crushes perhaps millions of young graduates, though I was forty when I graduated law school.  

Had I not become a poor lawyer it would not have been very crushing to me.  The amount I borrowed seemed manageable (before the interest on the long repayment plan kicked in) and the plan was to dispose of the debt in a few years.   That plan didn’t work out.  I am not crushed by the debt for my law school loan, but I’m angry every time I think about how I locked in the historic low 3.85% interest on the loan and watched the interest my bank pays go from 3% to 2.85% to 2.70% and all the way down below 1% now.  This happened while the greediest and least ethical among us dragged the economy into the toilet bowl for their own obscenely large profits.  In the years since, they and the rest of the richest 1% made 95% of the economic gains in the years that followed. (FN1)  In terms of paying the mortgage on a house full of snakes and scorpions that I will never live in, I am better off than many.  

That being said, the outrage of the interest government loans to college students being several times what banks pay in interest burns me every time I think about.   The government, who owns the debts, could easily cut the rate in half, or tie it to the rate banks pay, or to the prime rate, or the rate of inflation.  But nobody is going to do much about it, either; when you screw a class of powerless people there’s rarely any kind of accounting that needs to be made.

I am now self-employed, CEO of a phantom non-profit whose goal is to get into the worst schools in NYC and demonstrate how much creativity and expression there is in the doomed children in those schools.  To shine a light on the true capabilities and aspirations of these children of the poor.  

Most businesses, I understand now, get seed money for operating expenses before they begin.  It is kind of a basic business principle, even in the world of charity:  you figure out how to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the kid next to you into his mask.  Most businesses also sell a product much more tangible, and easier to put a price on, than the one I am selling.   No matter how much I understand, value and cherish the product.

When picking sides, and I will try to remember this in my next life, there is a side that wins and another side that loses.  “Slaughter sides!”, as the kids protest when all the best players wind up on one team and the uncoordinated and slow moving kids are on the other.   The best player on the team that’s about to be slaughtered usually calls out “slaughter sides!” and a few of his teammates join in, as the team about to do the slaughtering shrugs it off and walks to the other side of the field, smiling good-naturedly.  Then the game begins, if we can call slaughter a game.

And of course, slaughter is a game, as old as life itself.  If you align yourself with the team who is about to be mashed, you’d better have your philosophy in order.  Rationales are one thing, and we tell ourselves many stories, some completely absurd, to justify our actions and get through the day.  But a nourishing philosophy based on deeply held values must be called upon to sustain you if you play for the team that is fated to be destroyed.  A constant challenge, but one must do it when playing for the losers.  The only alternative is despair.

FN1:

ROBERT REICH: Yes. Since the film, actually we put the film together, there are new results that came out just within the last week or so show that in the year 2012 inequality reached a new peak in the United States. The previous peak, we thought was the peak, that is 2007 actually has been superseded by this new peak of inequality, concentrated income in 2012 that almost all the gains of economic growth have been going to a very small number of people at the very top.

BILL MOYERS: The figures are so startling, I had to shake my head in disbelief when I first saw them, showing that in the first three years of the recovery from the recession brought on by the financial collapse in 2008, the top one percent of Americans took home 95 percent of the income gains. Ninety-five percent?

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-inequality-for-all/

What am I trying to do?

I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.