Creepy, twisted, low-down:”all Elizabeth wanted was to be a mother, a baby of her own” which justifies cutting out the baby of a woman who at one point was going to abort her fetus, and hiding her dead body in a car which is destroyed in a junk yard – a nobody, who doesn’t deserve recognition or love. Just a plot in the story of helping a psychologically unstable woman achieve motherhood – the identity for which she has always aspired. A creepy doctor of a “women’s health center,” a confused love-scenario between CSI charachters and a little Mazy Star music keeps the abortion part of the seedy underworld of bad, secretive people who sell babies, act out of spite, and tell lies. The woman who might have had the abortion is dead and her parents who kicked her out of the house for being young and pregnant, find themselves the parents of her young baby, the heroes who were really, the cowardly ones, unable to take a stand for their own child.
Archive for November, 2008
Abortion on TV: CSI NY
Posted in I did, I think, tagged Abortion, TV on November 27, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Late to Love
Posted in I believe, tagged Love on November 27, 2008| Leave a Comment »
I know I am so behind the curve on this one, but I’ve watched it 5 times in 24-hours. It makes me happy. Maybe its the Whitney. As my co-worker, funny Chrissy who has never lost her basket said: I want a Lion.
Tuesday Night
Posted in I did, tagged Food on November 26, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Dinner: Teriyaki Chicken, Coconut Rice, Sauteed Red Onions, Fresh Cilantro, Fresh Avocado and a Squeeze of Lime.
Entertainment: Lucy the rottweiller, trained to kill.
The Future of Money-Raising
Posted in I think, tagged Fundraising, Non-Profit, Social Media, Technology on November 25, 2008| Leave a Comment »
http://www.nten.org/blog/2008/11/20/how-will-your-nonprofit-raise-money-in-2012
How Will Your Nonprofit Raise Money in 2012?
Peter Deitz, Social Actions
With the global financial crisis at its peak and a recession looming, many nonprofit managers are probably asking themselves, “How will my nonprofit raise money next year?” I suspect fewer fundraisers are asking themselves, “How will my nonprofit raise the money it needs four years from now?”
The second question is the more important of the two, and the more difficult to answer.
Current best practices will serve nonprofits just fine in 2009. Between email solicitation, direct mail, major donors, and grant-writing, the vast majority of nonprofits will weather the economic hard times. But a shifting communications environment and changing donor demographics could render those best practices ineffective at best, and obsolete at worst, as early as 2012.
Raising money in 2012 will require creativity and foresight. Micro-philanthropy — that ambiguous term that refers to all things socially networked, small-scale, and charitable — will have matured.
Donors of all ages will be looking for meaningful points of engagement with your organization. They’ll want to set the programmatic agenda, select the beneficiaries and target areas, communicate the organization’s message, and, in real-time, evaluate feedback as it comes in.
Notice something strange about those tasks? None of them involve passive check-writing on behalf of your organization. In 2012, individuals will come to your organization with the expectation of being full partners in your work, not just dollar wells to be tapped when cash is needed. Donations will be a consequence of meaningful engagement, not a measurement of it.
Over the next four years, innovative organizations will use technology to transfer to individuals the reins on everything from program work and evaluation to fundraising and communications. Raising money in a micro-philanthropic environment will come naturally to these groups.
The economy may be hopping four years from now. For organizations that stick to a more traditional managerial and communications structure between now and then, however, raising money is going to be tougher in 2012 than in the darkest days of 2009.
So how should your organization prepare for the changes that are afoot?
Get accustomed to using social media to communicate with all of your potential donors.
There’s an unfortunate consensus emerging in the nonprofit sector that social media is only helpful for communicating with young people. Nonprofits are spicing up their social media communications strategy with language and informalities that may turn-off older supporters and major donors. This is a flawed assumption. The fact is that program officers at foundations, boomers, and prospective employees are all turning to social networks to get a sense of your organization.
In this medium, openness, responsiveness, and inquisitiveness serve your cause well. Simplistic appeals targeted at teens and college students don’t. Therefore, when crafting your social media communications strategy, focus on the qualities you want to be associated with and not the target audience you want to reach.
Experiment with online contests, both creating them and participating in them.
Online contests like the Knight News Challenge, The Case Foundation’s America’s Giving Challenge, and the AmEx Cardmember Project can be resource draining to participate in, especially for a time- and cash-strapped nonprofit. Nevertheless, participating in some (surely not all) of these contests will provide your staff members a focused opportunity to use social media to communicate with supporters. As a result, your nonprofit will get a sense of how many of your supporters are following you online, and to what extent you can count on them to act on your behalf.
Another approach to the online contest phenomenon is to run your own. Platforms like Genius Rocket and NetSquared provide nonprofits an opportunity to crowd-source a communications or technological need. Figure out what your need is, set a bounty on it as a deliverable, and then witness how the Internet responds. You’ll probably be pleased with the outcome.
Participating and running challenges encourages openness, responsiveness, and inquisitiveness online. These are important traits to develop, and will make fundraising easier as micro-philanthropy matures.
Make hiring decisions based on social media know-how and not just resume smarts.
When it comes to preparing for the shifting communications environment and donor demographics, your employees are your biggest asset. Most job seekers still list their desktop computing skills in their resumes instead of their social media know-how. When interviewing for any position at your organization, make sure to ask about the applicant’s familiarity with social media. Training employees down the road can be expensive and ineffective. You are better off hiring people who are at home online than trying to make them that way after they’ve been hired.
Note: Age is not a good indicator of social media know-how. Ask questions, and you’ll be surprised who’s on top of the technological changes and who’s not.
Empower your interns.
If your organization has interns, make sure to tap them for ideas on how to use social media to create meaningful points of engagement with your organization. Too often, interns are given menial tasks like photo-copying and filling out Excel documents. And yet, they are the ones who have volunteered to spend time with your organization (read: “they care”). They also have an outsider’s perspective on how your organization is represented online. Make the most of their time with you by asking them for ideas on how to better represent your organization online. Their ideas could very well lay the foundation for an effective micro-philanthropy campaign.
Get an iPhone.
The future of interacting with your organization is mobile as well as online. Get an iPhone or portable data-device in order to start experiencing the possibilities. If your nonprofit’s managers are not using portable devices to communicate with staff and supporters, they’re not going to understand the potential for mobile technology to change the what and how of your organization’s work. Get them started now, so that in 2012, you’re not beginning at square one to develop a mobile fundraising strategy.
Four years ago, web 2.0 was barely on the radar of nonprofits. Today, it’s becoming standard practice to communicate with supporters using tools like Flickr, MySpace , Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. If four years of social media can transform the way U.S. presidents get elected and people connect with causes, imagine the changes that another four years of social media will produce.
My advice to the nonprofit technology community: let’s start preparing now by thinking as creatively as possible
Abortion In Books: Christine Falls
Posted in I did, tagged Abortion, Books on November 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »
A Novel by Benjamin Black, pen name for John Banville, also wrote The Sea.
Page 174:
“Oh, all the brassers know Dolly Moran,” he said. Quirke nodded. Brassers were whores, he assumed, but how? Brass nails, rhyming with tails, or was it something to do with screw? Barney’s slang seem all of his own making. “She was the one they went to when they were in trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Up the pole – you know.”
“And she’d fix it for them? Herself?”
“They say she was a dab hand with the knitting needle. Didn’t charge either, apparently. Did it for the glory.”
…later, with the nuns who take care of the girls, in trouble…
“I’m sure I don’t know. The girls who come to us have…they have already…given birth.”
“And what would have become of the babies they would have left behind them when they were sent here?”
“They would have gone to the orphanage, of course. Or often they…These girls, Mr. Quirke,” she said coldly, they find themselves in trouble, with no one to help. Often the families reject them. They are sent to us.”
“Yes,” he said drily, “and I’m sure you are a great comfort to them.”
…
“We do our best,” she said, “in the circumstances. It’s all any of us can do.”
Leading as Organizing
Posted in I am, I believe, I did, tagged Exhale, Leadership, Organizing on November 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
I remember when I first started asking foundations to grant Exhale. I applied under “organizing & advocacy.” Exhale was an organization founded by women who had had abortions to address an unmet need that our community of women faced – the lack of non-judgmental emotional care services for women. The way I saw it, a group of us got together, organized around a common need, organized a service to address it (we were all volunteer at the time) and began advocating with health care providers and services to refer to Exhale as an improved response to their clients.
The foundations told us no. We weren’t “organizers” the way they defined it. Basically, unless we got the name and number of every woman that called us and organized a lobby day in Sacrmaento where these women advocated for a policy goal – like abortion rights – we weren’t organizing or advocating. Really.
I believed them for awhile. I lost myself, that idea of myself – as an organizer and advocate – for awhile, and tried to be what they wanted – a professional, someone who spoke health care jargon and was building an instition, a leader and an idea that could be bent and folded into the mold of the status-quo (they were leaders after all, right?) – but I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t working within my strengths. I wasn’t excited and challenged by my vision. I wasn’t organizing anymore. I had become a manager. Uh oh.
When I read things from advocates about the non-profit industrial complex and how the revolution will never be funded, or even the conservative-critics of the liberal movements and how they are creating a social-service government, and I look around the feminist and reproductive health movement (a movement once defined by bucking the trends and being daring) and see degree after degree of professional affiliation and a public health professional approach to our vast and untamed lives, I feel like we are trapping ourselves in a system of our own creation.
Degrees aren’t bad (I have one!), but they don’t make you smart or bold or give you good ideas. Social services aren’t bad (I run one) but the last thing we want is government creating more obstacles for people to take care of themselves and their families, creating a culture of co-dependence. Public health is important (tame the diseases please) but can it really address the scope of human sexuality?
I started to organize again. I remembered my vision. I remembered what was fun about the early days of founding Exhale and started doing that again. Meeting new people and offering them the chance to participate in the creation of something new and special. I stopped trying to make it nice and easy for everyone else and claimed the parts of this that were risky and unknown. Instead of nice professionals wanting a steady paycheck, I surrounded myself with believers, people wanting to do what it took, people in for the challenge and up for the adventure, smart people, experienced people, people who were professionals in other parts of their lives but who find a chance to let their spirit and their dreams fly with Exhale.
Some days I laugh b/c while I know the “right” way to run an organization – I’ve read the books, taken the classes, even taught some of them, and actually tried it – the way Exhale has found success is when we stopped doing it right. When we did it the organizing and advocacy way. We’ve never followed money but now we specifically focus on people – we find people, champions, people that get it and build relationships. We don’t even think about money (not totally true, we run a well-oiled financial machine, but money isn’t in our eyes when we talk to donors). That’s it. Everyone of us – board members, staff, volunteers, donors, allies – we are a recruitment machine, every day looking for the kind of people we need to help us grow and thrive and offer them the opportunity to join us. We don’t need lots and lots of people, just the ones that truly believe and take it on.
The money really does come. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told the board and the staff when the cash is looking low: “I don’t know where the money will come from, but I know that if we follow our hearts and the relationships we have, we stay focused on our vision and keep doing our work, it will come.”
It always does.
I’m known for being a good fundraiser. Today, I’m proud to say that it’s because I’m a good organizer.
Professionalism of Reform: A Conservative View
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Philanthropy on November 20, 2008| 2 Comments »
Chronicle of Philanthropy – Opinion
November 13, 2008
The Failure of Conservative Philanthropy?
Last week’s election results have prompted some experts to declare that America is witnessing the greatest liberal resurgence since the Great Society. So can we now stop fretting about the threat of a handful of conservative foundations’ permanently reshaping the political landscape in their own image?
Though that fear seems laughably overstated given the victories scored by the Democrats, for more than two decades it generated a minor industry in publications with attention-grabbing titles like “Justice For Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain” (published in 1993 by the Alliance for Justice), “Who Is Downsizing the American Dream?” (Democratic Policy Committee, 1996), and “Axis of Ideology” (National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2004).
Authors of those reports maintained that a tight cadre of ideologically committed donors, supporting an array of think tanks, publications, and advocacy organizations, had systematically dismantled the welfare state and quietly but irrevocably shifted the American public-policy agenda to the right.
The fact, though, is that whatever successes American conservatism enjoyed since the 1960s owe very little to the conniving of wealthy donors, and a great deal to fratricidal impulses within liberalism, some of them fueled by the largest American foundations.
At the peak of liberalism’s last moment of triumph — President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, in the early 60s — America saw an unprecedented outpouring of social and economic change. But unlike social-change movements of the past, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, this one was driven not by mass political mobilization but rather by elites trained in professions like social welfare, law, urban planning, sociology, psychology, and public policy.
The “professionalization of reform,” as he described it, had long been promoted by the Ford Foundation and other major American philanthropies. They sought to shift political decisions away from bickering, partisan citizens into the hands of experts, who would plan social change according to the objective, coherent conclusions of empirical social science.
Once this was accomplished, the growth of the social-service state would no longer be subject to the whims of the electorate, but more or less set on automatic pilot. A growing professional class, assuming its rightful place within administrative bureaucracies, the courts, foundations, and nonprofit organizations, would quietly but steadily push for greater scope and public financing for their programs — not, they would insist, in response to liberal ideological zeal, but rather as the indisputable prerogative of expertise.
The problem, as sociologist Nathan Glazer noted, is that “professionals, concentrating exclusively on their area of reform, may become more and more remote from public opinion, and indeed from common sense,” ending up “at a point that seems perfectly logical and necessary to them — but which seems perfectly outrageous to almost everyone else.”
So it was with the Great Society. Some of its largest legislative programs — Medicare, Head Start, civil-rights legislation, aid to elementary education — were and remain popular.
Other programs often associated with it — busing, affirmative action, a ban on prayer in schools, constraints on law enforcement, the growth in welfare rolls — provoked bitter internecine warfare among Democrats, in part because they seemed to slip in without voter consent via obscure judicial and administrative mandates.
Millions of Democrats in the South and in the blue-collar, white-ethnic North came to regard professionalized “reformers” as arrogant, overbearing, intrusive social engineers, undermining the social and educational arrangements they had made for their own neighborhoods and communities.
They would be joined later by like-minded evangelicals, galvanized into political action by bureaucratic and judicial efforts to strip their schools of tax exemptions, legalize abortion, exile Ten Commandments plaques from public places, and institute gay marriage. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, these voting blocs undergirded conservative political strength.
It was this major electoral shift, not a crafty intellectual infrastructure, that elevated conservatism to political power. Indeed, when the shift began, most of today’s conservative think tanks and foundations had not yet even appeared on the scene. Those that existed were small, underfinanced, and easily dismissed as transparent pro-business fronts.
But a more effective conservative philanthropy emerged soon thereafter, also in reaction against the Great Society. Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, James Q. Wilson, as well as Mr. Moynihan, Mr. Glazer, and other theretofore liberal intellectuals also came to have grave reservations about the era’s utopian schemes for social change, and their corrosive effects on everyday civic institutions like family, neighborhood, and voluntary association.
These “neoconservatives” brought with them the insider expertise and authority to challenge professionalism on its own ground. They founded lively new journals of opinion, bolstered fledgling conservative think tanks, and became influential advisers for the John M. Olin, Bradley, and Scaife Foundations. Although themselves experts, they considered it their duty, in Mr. Kristol’s words, “to show the American people that they are right and the intellectuals are wrong.”
But even with these new intellectual endeavors coupled with conservative electoral success, “reform professionalism” continued to develop and advance its agenda below the political radar, working through government bureaucracies, the courts, the media, the universities, the social services, nonprofit organizations, and foundations.
As a result, as Ramesh Ponuru, a journalist at National Review noted recently, the last four supposedly conservative decades nonetheless “saw the birth of the environmental movement and a proliferation of regulations inspired by it; the implementation of affirmative-action policies throughout government, the academy, and business; a marked liberalization of attitudes toward homosexuality; a dramatic liberalization of abortion law; the enactment of strict new regulations on smoking and car safety; the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act; and a large increase in the percentage of Americans whose health insurance is paid for by the federal government.”
In the face of this, conservative foundations mounted an ambitious effort to build enclaves within otherwise progressive institutions and professions, where dissident academics, lawyers, philan-thropists, and other professionals could commiserate over the unshaken progressive domination of their fields, and develop policies that might serve conservative ends while meeting the demands of professional respectability. But such efforts never had much hope of changing the essential ideological complexion of the professions within which they are embedded.
And so today, as a progressive contingent larger than any since the Great Society rolls into Washington, it will find already securely in place a vast and powerful array of allies within the federal bureaucracy, the news media, nonprofit groups, and foundations.
Their files are bulging with plans to expand the social-service state — plans that had to rely for decades on surreptitious administrative and judicial approaches, but that can now proceed full throttle behind President Obama and his solid Congressional majorities.
The danger for President Obama is that he may follow in Lyndon Johnson’s path, and permit his “professionalized reformers” to push their schemes, as Mr. Glazer argues they inevitably tend to do, well beyond the bounds of common sense. They would then once again come across as overbearing, arrogant, and abusive of the values and institutions of everyday Americans, prompting the inevitable reaction from “Joe the Plumber.”
Meanwhile, conservative foundations and think tanks will be on the alert for a resurgence of utopian overreach by the professional classes, and will once again be prepared to tell the American people that they are right and the intellectuals are wrong.
But somehow, they will have to come to grips with the problem that bedeviled them over the past four decades, namely, their at-best tenuous foothold within the policy professions. As long as progressivism remains embedded in the DNA of social-policy expertise, it will always be able to move its agenda quietly but steadily, no matter who controls the presidency or the Congress.
The solution may not appear until another wave of disillusionment with the arrogance of social engineering sweeps over a segment of the new generation of professionals, just as it did with the neoconservatives during the Great Society. The best that conservative foundations may be able to do is to keep a lookout for and direct support toward these dissidents, even while they are still only beginning their journey away from progressivism, and bear little resemblance to today’s conservatives.
This will be a long, twilight struggle, requiring immense patience, perseverance, ideological flexibility, and far-sightedness — characteristics that even critics once freely ascribed to conservative foundations.
There are no big ideas, no quick fixes that can solve conservatism’s problem, inasmuch as it arises from the vanishingly small minority position held by the right within the professions that shape American public policy. We will soon see if conservative foundations still have what it takes for that kind of effort.
William A. Schambra is director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, in Washington.
Time for an Abortion Truce?
Posted in I think, tagged Abortion, Culture War, Peace on November 19, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Looking Ahead: Abortion
Supporters of legal abortion were elated by last week’s election. Pro-choice forces gained 17 seats in the House and five in the Senate – plus, of course, the White House.
What will they do with their new clout?
First up: Press President-elect Barack Obama to reverse a policy of withholding U.S. family-planning grants from any international group that provides abortions, or even counsels women about that option. “We’d like to see that overturned on his first day in office,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Mr. Obama’s transition team has already indicated he shares that priority.
Liberals also expect Mr. Obama to stop federal funding of abstinence-only education and to boost subsidies for poor women’s reproductive health care, including contraception and gynecological exams.
That agenda, if enacted, would likely send more federal funds flowing to Planned Parenthood. Along with being the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood teaches sex ed to teenagers across the country and offers women subsidized health care through a network of nearly 900 clinics.
The prospect of Planned Parenthood getting more taxpayer dollars – at a time when the organization is reporting record revenue – has anti-abortion activists up in arms.
But pro-life strategists are unsure how to translate that anger into an effective political movement. (See today’s story: Abortion Foes’ Dilemma: Confront or Cooperate?) They’ve never been able to rally voters to their side in great numbers; 16 of 21 anti-abortion ballot measures on state ballots since the 1980s have failed, including three last week. Abortion opponents were most disheartened by their loss in South Dakota, a conservative state where they tried and failed for the second time in two years to pass a broad abortion ban in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.
Surveying those defeats, several leading abortion opponents said their message was clearly not resonating with the American public.
“We are going to have to go back to some very deep Biblical thinking about where we go from here,” said the Rev. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, hopes the new playbook will include financing and promoting independent movies, music, even YouTube videos that build what she calls a “culture of life.” Other strategists call for a shift in focus away from political organizing and toward evangelism in the hopes of sparking a conservative Christian revival across the land.
Whatever their approaches, after eight years of advances, abortion foes now will be playing defense. And some analysts expect public support for their crusades to weaken still further. As Jean Schroedel, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University, put it: “Americans are just tired of fighting over abortion.”
Readers: Are you tired of the abortion wars? Do you think we as a society are ready to call a truce — and on what terms? What do you expect from Mr. Obama in this arena? And what policies would you like the new administration to consider? — Stephanie Simon
Permalink | Trackback URL: http://blogs.wsj.com/frontlines/2008/11/11/looking-ahead-abortion/trackback/
Dinner!
Posted in I did, tagged Food, Wine on November 19, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Turkey patties with blue cheese (!) and green salad, with my favorite homemade dressing: Lime & Mint Vinaigrette
. With a glass (or two, or three) of red wine. Yummo!
AspenBaker's Blog 