The inequitable distribution of hope

Photo by Valeria Koulikova

This weekend the kids at our Saturday English School (SES) program had turkey for the very first time. We told them it was chicken…really large chicken. They had just arrived to the US this year, this was their very first Thanksgiving celebration, and turkey is a weird meat that they were not going to touch. After they eat the turkey and like it, we then say, “Ha ha, you just ate turkey and you liked it!” That’s how VFA rolls, following the motto for the SES program: “Curiosity, Perseverance, Deception.”

Over 120 kids showed up, middle and high-schoolers from all over the world. The program, done in partnership with Seattle World School (SWS) serves over 15 languages. I stood near the door and scanned the room, inspired by the students, some of whom take two buses to get to our program each week.

Whatever crappiness I feel for whatever reason is put into perspective whenever I visit our programs and talk to our kids. Half of them don’t speak much English at all, all of them are low-income, and few have any support from their families at home, since their parents work two or three jobs to try to make ends meet or have little knowledge of the school system. Sadly, we know from current statistics that half of these new arrival students will not graduate from high school. We work with the school and other nonprofits to try to stem the tide, but there will always be kids whose futures remain uncertain.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the distribution of hope and morale in our society. The schools with the highest percentage of low-income kids and kids of color also have the fewest resources, I know this. Their PTSAs are not as active or as well-connected; they can’t raise hundreds of thousands of dollars that could equip their schools with enrichment programs and fieldtrips and new computers. The inequitable distribution of resources is easy to understand, though it is still an uphill battle to change things.

But the kids and families also face more subtle inequities. The gap in hope is not something we talk about often. It is intangible, but it is there. A simple example is homework. We don’t think much about homework; homework is a good thing. But I remember what it was like to be a kid who just arrived to the US, who didn’t speak much English. Every day for a long time I would dread doing homework. Not because I wasn’t a good student, but because I had no one at home I could turn to for help. Mom and Dad worked all day and came home late, and even so their English was nonexistent. With homework, kids who have supportive and watchful parents will get them done and feel a measure of pride. For kids who don’t, it can lead to frustrated erasers burning holes in the paper, followed by the guilt and shame of failure and bad grades.

Another example is the enrichment programs like art and sports. For many kids, these are things they are good at. Even if your family is poor or you can’t speak much English, you can still be a good artist or singer or soccer player. I remember the first few years after we arrived to the US. By fourth grade, my English was still pretty crappy and I didn’t talk much at all. But I loved art because I was great at it. My stained-glass snowflake, made out of black construction paper and tissue paper, was a masterpiece of geometric genius. When the world was crazy, and it often was, drawing something and doing a good job at it brought some semblance of sanity and balance and self-worth.

We know these enrichment programs are great for kids’ morale and motivation for learning. These programs are not frivolous. They keep students wanting to come to school. Especially for kids who face so many barriers, they are critical for giving them a sense of hope. But the lack of resources at poorer schools means that they have fewer of these programs.

Seattle World School, with whom my organization partners for many of our programs, understands the importance of imparting hope to kids. They know many students can’t get homework help at home, so there are after-school programs and Saturday morning programs. They know the importance of enrichment programs like art and photography, so those programs are prioritized; at SWS, the students are amazing artists and photographers. This is an amazing school.

And now the school is under attack. Actually, every couple of years it is under attack. This school keeps getting moved around all over the city, since parents don’t speak enough English or have the same resources to write blog posts and emails to advocate for their school to remain in a stable central location. The school board and various superintendents keep promising to find a permanent home for the school, raising our communities’ hopes, and every couple of years, this promise gets broken. Our new superintendent agreed to settle it permanently at a school called TT Minor, and now some school board members are trying to move it again, claiming the school is needed for other population of students. Of course there will always be some other population of students, great ones, whose parents are much better equipped to be advocates.

I called one of the school board members who were supporting the idea of moving the school down to Southeast Seattle, a terrible idea, since recent-arrival students come from all over the city, so the school has to be in a central location. She agreed to support our wishes for the school to remain at TT minor. Now, disappointingly, we find out that she turned around 180 degrees again, co-sponsoring a proposal to move the school down to Southeast Seattle.

I was staring at the 120 students eating their first Thanksgiving meal, thinking about how much they go through every day and how next year we have no clue where the school is going to be. I was getting more and more pissed off at how crappy and horrible and unfair things are, how in Seattle the loudest voices always win, and how hard it is for our families to be as loud when most don’t speak any English or know how to type, so they can’t email board members or show up at school board meetings to testify. And because of that, their kids keep getting deprioritized and screwed over, in resources, in hope, in morale.

This week, the school board will be voting on this terrible proposal to move Seattle World School down to Southeast Seattle, and thus breaking yet another promise to our struggling students. We’ll keep advocating for the school and its students and families, like we have been doing for years. But it seems so hopeless…

“Mr. Vu,” said one of the students, snapping me out of my bitter reflections. Hanh was one of the students in our after-school program who could barely speak any English and was two or three grades behind when she arrived a few years ago. She graduated from the program and came back to help other kids. “I passed the test. I became US citizen.” She pulled out her original naturalization certificate, along with four photocopies, to show me. “The ceremony was last week.”

“What!” I said, “You should have told me! I would have been there for your ceremony.”

“I thought you…maybe are busy or something. You busy all the time.”

“I would have made time,” I said, “Anyway, I’m proud of you.” I was very proud of her, more confident that she would land among the 50% of the kids who will graduate from high school and have a decent chance to succeed. She flashed a grin full of shiny braces and headed off to get some food.

Hope is not the Pollyanna “everything will be OK” sort of sentiment, but some sense that one’s actions may lead to something good, that it’s not all in vain, that someone is looking out for you, that adults can keep their promises sometimes, that there is some sort of justice in the world, even if it comes rarely. Hope is what keeps great kids like Hanh going. Hope is one of the most critical things we nonprofits bring to our communities, and when it is not equitably distributed, we must help to bring balance.

Related post: Reflections for Thanksgiving

The gluten-freeing of community engagement

All right, everyone, we need to talk about the gluten-free bandwagon. “Oooh, I can’t have any bread. I’m gluten-free. I’ve cut out gluten for three weeks, and I feel so much better.” Scoff. I love gluten. Gluten is awesome. I eat it with every meal and finish off with gluten ice cream or a seitan pudding. If you’re gluten-free and you’re not actually diagnosed with gluten intolerance by a doctor, you’re kind of annoying. I still like you, but you’re kind of annoying.

Of course, gluten-free people are high-strung, so this post may not make me many new friends. “How DARE you dismiss gluten sensitivity. I’ll have you know that I suffered from blah blah all my life and then I became gluten-free  and within a week the rash disappeared. In fact, not only that but my long-lost dog came back blah blah. My uncle had one leg amputated, and after a year of giving up wheat products, his leg grew back and he was able to save a bus full of children from going over a cliff, blah blah.”

Only 1% of the population has the serious and possibly life-threatening Celiac disease, and yet approximately 90% of people I know are now gluten-free. We can’t escape them. They’re everywhere. We pro-gluten people have started forming guerilla resistance groups, hiding in the shadows, munching on our wheat breads and pastas.

Community engagement, lately, has become like this gluten-free bandwagon. Everyone is doing it, for everything, big and small, and the term itself has been thrown around with abandon. Seattle is known for trying to be inclusive, and you can’t turn the corner without someone trying to engage you in something. (“Psst, hey buddy, you wanna come to a summit…?”) And in Seattle, the engagement takes on special characteristics, being organic and artisanal, done in small batches.

It’s admirable that everyone wants to be inclusive and get community involvement and input for everything, but like the gluten-free craze, it’s gotten annoying. When the term “community engagement” is so liberally used, real community engagement gets lost in the mix. Getting eight people to come to a focus group, that’s not necessarily community engagement. Having simultaneous interpretation at a large gathering, that’s not necessarily community engagement. Having two or three people of color on your board or steering committee, that’s not necessarily community engagement.

For me, the engagement continuum has two ends: tokenizing and ownership.

At the tokenizing end are things like gathering community input without any intention to actually incorporate it into the final plan. This happens a lot, and it is irritating. I was once at an input session on education funding priorities (“Psst, hey buddy, wanna come to an input session on education funding priorities…?”). Dozens of community members showed up, brainstormed on easel papers, and voted on their top priorities using dots. They highlighted the need for more funding to go to helping immigrant and refugee parents so they can better support their kids academically, among other strategies. Everyone was excited. Sadly, the final plan was going to be approved the next day. There was no way any of the input would have shaped the plan. Dozens of people wasted their time, their hopes raised in vain. I looked at the plan and it listed the input session as evidence that the community had been engaged. This sort of tokenizing happens over and over again.

Good community engagement, like good leadership or good teaching, ends with the people who are being engaged feeling like this is their project, their movement, and that their efforts are leading to something substantive. This process is relationship-centered and is time-consuming, messy, nebulous, and resource-intensive. It requires organizers to commit to being in the boat for a long time, or to have someone who has been in the boat for a long time, because real community engagement requires trust and mutual respect, and you cannot build trust and mutual respect through a one-time stand-alone focus group or a kumbaya summit.

Community engagement lately has become the icing on the cake, the final, unessential, and sickeningly sweet component whose only purpose is to make the cake look pretty. Dude, authentic community engagement needs to be the cake! What does that mean? I’ve riffed on this subject before–(“Psst, hey buddy, you wanna complain about community engagement again?”)–but it bears repeating often.

First, engage people at the onset of any project, not at the end. Second, the people most impacted by whatever you’re trying to address should be leading or at least deeply at the core of the efforts, so if you’re not moving in this direction, something is fundamentally wrong. Third, fund people and organization equitably; stop just paying the organizers who will invariably go out to “engage” the community, which is basically just asking people to do stuff for free; we’re sick of it, especially when there is a whiff of tokenizing. Fourth, understand that community engagement takes time, so plan and budget for the long haul.

Also, maybe not everything needs community engagement. One time, I was asked to rally the communities of color around sewage overflow. Look, it’s really great that we have engineers and other professionals taking care of the sewage problem. Functioning sewers are an important part of any society, a part that we all take for granted. But the very busy community members I talked to did not really want to attend meetings and vote with dots on this issue. They just wanted the experts to do the studies and make the decisions, since they have little knowledge of this subject.

All right, I think I’ve offended enough people for one day, and the hordes of gluten-free people are probably filing their rice crackers into sharp points to stab me with. For some reason, I’ve been feeling irritable, and it shows in this post. I’ve also been sluggish and lethargic. It’s probably because I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in eight months. Or…maybe I should give up gluten for a while and see how I feel.

Related post: Community Engagement 101: Why Most Summits Suck

How to charm your program officer and have the best site visit ever!

There are few things in the nonprofit world as exciting and nerve-wracking as the site visit, the final step before getting a piece of that sweet, sweet funding. It is kind of like a date, a date where if you fail to impress, you may have to lay off staff and possibly not be able to help hundreds of clients who need the services, leaving you to weep alone in your office bathroom, consoling yourself with an entire bar of Trader Joe’s Pound Plus dark chocolate with almonds.

Program officers are special people. Smart and good-looking—in fact, scientifically 27% better looking than civilians—they can be intimidating. However, despite their great complexion and impeccable sense of style, they are also human. So if you are fortunate enough to get a site visit, there are things you can do to increase your chance of it being a successful one. Just follow these tips below:

1. Leading up to the day, make sure to remind your staff that there is a site visit. Everyone should act naturally, but it doesn’t hurt to have one or two staff unexpectedly say something like, “It’s nice to meet you. I would stay to chat, but I am helping one of our kids with her college essay. Shucks, I love this job.”
2. Refresh your knowledge of the foundation by exploring its website, focusing specifically on its investment priorities/jargon. This will allow you to say impressive things like: “I understand that one of your strategic priorities is shifting the paradigm to enhance collective impact efforts focused on the sustainability of thriving place-based urban-agrarian developments. This is why our Unicycle for Guns program is such a great fit. In addition to reducing violence through allowing youth to trade guns in for unicycles, we have also started organizing both gun control advocates and the acrobatics community to work together to change policies at the state level.” See how impressive that sounds?
3. Refresh your knowledge of your narrative and budget. After such a long time, you may forget all the details, which may be very embarrassing, since your program officer’s job is to thoroughly go through your application line by line and budget item by budget item and get clarification during the site visit. They will be extremely specific with their questions, such as “On page six, paragraph three of your narrative, you state that you will be providing workshops in the evenings four days per week, but on line 29A of the budget, there is only funding for a part-time staff to do three days per week. Also, looking at your staff bios on your website, I know that Jorge, the staff in charge of this project, will be taking night courses to earn his MSW while simultaneously planning his wedding. Who will be in charge of these workshops in the evening then, and what will you do when Mercury is in retrograde in November?”
4. If the site visit the requires the presence of a board member, meet beforehand to refresh your board member on the program and how it aligns with your organization’s mission, values, and strategic plan. Depending on your board member, you may also have to do a refresher on your organization’s mission, values, and strategic plan.
5. If the site visit is at a program, tell the clients ahead of time to expect some people, so that they don’t freak out. You want everyone to act natural, so consider whether or not you should tell clients that a funder is visiting. Also consider whether it is a good idea to have one or more clients walk by casually and say things like, “I don’t know where my life would be if it weren’t for this program. Shucks, I love this program and the organization that runs it.”
6. On the day of, dress appropriately, depending on the size of the grant. The bigger the grant, the more professional you and your staff should look. Grants under $5,000 you can pretty much do what I do and just roll out of bed and pop a peppermint into your mouth. $5,000 to $25,000 smart casual is best. $25,000 to $75,000 business casual. $75,000 to $150,000 semi-formal. $150,000 to $1million, business attire. Anything over $1million: coat, tails, top hat, cane.
7. Have a pad of paper and a pen ready, and jot down notes once every few minutes. It’s good to remember all the stuff your program officer tells you, but even if you don’t need to take notes, pretending to do so will make it seem like you’re engaged. It is also good to have a copy of your grant application printed out. If you forgot to have your grant application printed out, just gather whatever random but official-looking papers into a stack and keep it in front of you.
8. Your program officer unconsciously senses the power dynamics, so they will try to make you comfortable with light-hearted chatter and jokes. Make sure your laughter is appropriately hearty, but not too prolonged or strained.
9. Have an agenda prepared. The program officer usually already has their agenda set, but it is good for you to have something down also. It makes you look competent and invested when you can open strong during the introduction, like “I know you have a list of things to go over, but if we have time, I also want to touch base on these items I jot down while thoroughly reviewing the Foundation’s funding priorities. These items include evaluation, sustainability, and how our mentorship program aims to be carbon neutral by 2020.”
10. Be calm and don’t try to BS. Program officers are trained to sense fear and deception. You should know your program and organization well, but there will be moments where you do not know the answer to something. If that happens, it is best to say something like “I’m sorry, but I do not know how many of our clients are actually gluten intolerant due to Celiac Disease and how many are just jumping on the bandwagon. I’ll double-check and get back to you.”
11. Be transparent yet optimistic and solution-focused about your challenges. Your program officer will point out major weaknesses in your program and organization. Admit to those weaknesses and discuss what you will be doing to address it: “Yes, a major challenge for our organization is that we were founded as a doomsday cult. It will take many years for us to move past this image. However, the board and staff have created a communication plan around this issue, and we all strongly believe that we can move forward while providing high-quality non-doomsday services to our clients.”
12. Watch your body language. I’ll elaborate later about body language in nonprofit work. For now, just remember try to mimic what your program officer does. Mimicking of body language, when done right, makes you a lot more relatable and approachable. Do it subtly, though, or you’ll creep people out. For instance, if your program officer crosses his legs, wait ten seconds, then cross your legs also. If they lean forward, wait ten seconds, then lean forward. If they cough hysterically, wait ten seconds, then cough hysterically.
13. At the end of the meeting, you will be given a chance to ask questions. You will not impress if you don’t have any questions to ask, so think of a few in advance. Here are some examples of good, relevant questions to ask: “So what about our program in particular that interests the Foundation?” “Do you see your strategic priorities changing in the next few years?” “What are the next steps? When can we expect a decision from the Foundation?” Refrain from asking non-relevant questions like “So, I’m developing a musical about nonprofit work, would the Foundation be interested in funding that as well?” or “Are you single?”
14. Send a short and sweet thank-you email. It may be helpful to reiterate in a sentence or two about how your program is so awesome and how it aligns with the foundation’s strategies, but don’t go overboard. In a paragraph, express your thanks for the program officer’s visit, apologize for any mishaps that occurred—”my apologies for the terrible compost smell that lingered over our conversation”—continue on any inside jokes that developed during the site visit—”next time, we’ll definitely have weasels as a line item in our budget!”—confirm any action items that you will be taking, along with concrete deadlines—”we’ll revise the budget and get it to you by 5pm Friday”—and express some hopeful vulnerability—”We’ll keep our fingers crossed until we hear from the Foundation.”

There you go, just follow the above tips and you should have a swell site visit. Please add other tips you can think of in the comment section, and forward this to all your friends and relatives.

Related post: Site Visits, Uncomfortable, Yet Terrifying