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

12 Tips for Not Sucking as a Panel Moderator

A while ago I wrote “Tips for Not Sucking when You’re on a Panel,” which went viral. (Among us nonprofit bloggers “going viral” means that at least 12 people have read your post). Of course, a panel can have awesome panelists, but if the moderator sucks, then the panel will also likely suck, resulting in disappointed audience members who are now in a bad mood though they can’t pinpoint why. It will also result in panelists who will immediately go to happy hour to drink and talk about what a horrible human being the panel moderator is for wasting their time and expertise.

Moderating a panel, however, is not like making meth, which I’ve learned in Breaking Bad is actually very complicated and precise. If you are asked to moderate a panel, or if you know someone who will be moderating one, just follow the simple steps below, and you are guaranteed to not suck. There are 12 tips, which may be hard to remember, so I’ve made them into an acronym: TPLFIDPPVCEC

1. First and foremost, Think of the audience. Yes, the unlearned, unwashed masses huddled silently in front of the refined and much better dressed panelists. Seriously, the whole point of the panel is to impart something useful to this lowly group of people. Panelists are just instruments toward that objective. You wouldn’t have a panel if you had no audience, right? You are there to serve the audience first, the panelists second. Always keep that in mind.

2. Prepare. Nothing is as annoying as a disorganized panel, except maybe toenail fungus or children singing in the background of rap songs. Communicate with your panelists so they know the objective of the panel. Read up on their work so that you are knowledgeable when you brainstorm your questions. Give them a few sample questions you may ask. Send reminders as the date approaches, and ask panelists to arrive 30 minutes early. Tell them it’s so that they can meet one another, but it’s actually just a good strategy to minimize lateness.

3. Limit your panelists to 4 or 5 people. I was once on a panel with NINE other people. By the time everyone finished their introduction, we had 15 minutes left. It was on a Sunday, too, so there were approximately 18 people in the audience. Fortunately, everyone left inspired, and by that, I mean bitter and angry.

4. Frame the conversation. In your short welcome speech—and make sure it’s short—repeat the objective of the panel. Why is this topic important? What is the problem? What do we want everyone in the audience to leave with? Framing will help everyone stay focused, especially your panelists, some of whom probably didn’t prepare at all and only signed up to be on a panel to avoid real work.

Also, use this framing time to establish some ground rules, including asking panelists to keep their responses to-the-point, and that you apologize in advance but you will cut them off if their answers are too long. It keeps panelists on guard, and it reassures the audience that you are on their side.

5. Introduce the speakers. You wanted them to introduce themselves? Are you insane? Someone should slap you right now for even thinking of such a thing. Giving panelists time to talk about themselves is tantamount to panel suicide, and I don’t use the term “tantamount” lightly. I’ve seen a panelist go on for 15 minutes about her background, and the moderator did nothing about it. If you introduce people, you can both make the panelists feel important (“Aw, he learned about my work and memorized a fun fact so he could introduce me…”) as well as control the time. If you insist on having panelists introduce themselves, fine, but say something like, “Please introduce yourself in one minute or less. I mean it, one minute.” Then glare at each of them and draw a finger across your neck to ensure they get the message.

6. Ditch the PowerPoint. As a panelist I never use PowerPoint. One, because I’m lazy, but two, because people don’t really want to look at PP slides, because everyone is generally bad at PowerPoint, adding way too much text and having too many slides. And when you have four or five people, each using a PP presentation, the logistics are annoying, and even if logistically everything goes smoothly, people will always go over time limit, limiting time for discussion, and the audience will be snoozing away. There are exceptions, but overall, a simple one-page summary handout will more effectively accomplish almost anything a PowerPoint can do and won’t make your audience members wish for the Mayan Apocalypse to have taken place.

7. Pay Attention. Some moderators feel like they are just there to kick-off the conversation and let the panelists take over until the Q&A section. No, that’s very lazy. As a moderator, your job is to moderate, thus, you are called a moderator…so therefore you should moderate. However, you can’t do that if you are not paying attention. Sit next to the panelists, or maybe in the corner formation (described here in “Feng Shui for Nonprofits, the Seven Basic Meeting Formations”). Have a notebook with you and write down things as panelists talk that you want to clarify or ask follow-up questions to, which we’ll talk about below.

8. Provoke reactions and discussion. You have a bunch of (hopefully) brilliant experts with a (hopefully) diverse set of viewpoints. It is a boring waste of time and opportunity if they don’t interact with one another. Panelists tend to be too polite (unless they read my Tips for not sucking as panelists, in which case they should be getting into fist-fights with one another), so you must force them to interact. You can do this tactfully by summarizing and asking for counter-opinions, e.g., “John: Susan said that parental engagement is THE key factor in student achievement. You had mentioned earlier that you were a terrible student.  I think Susan may have insulted your mother. How do you respond to that?”

9. Varietize. Too many moderators have the “assembly line” format, where they ask a question, then panelists go down the line answering. Usually by the time the third person speaks, half of the audience has tuned out. By the time the fifth person speaks, 75% of them have entered some sort of trance-like state where they are daydreaming about inventing a time machine to go back in time and prevent their parents from meeting so that they wouldn’t be born and thus would not have to attend this panel.

Assembly line is fine once a while, especially if your questions are good, but don’t keep using it. Call on different people for different questions. Ask panelists to rank or prioritize things and defend their positions. Point out potential disagreements. You must be on your toes to do all of that, but the audience and panelists will get a lot more out of it.

10. Cut off long-winded speakers. A major, in fact probably most important, job of the moderator is to intervene when panelists are off track or rambling. If you followed Tip #4 and framed the conversation right, it will help people to not be offended. Now it’s just a matter of politely jumping in with things like, “I’m sorry for cutting you off, John, but I’d like to get the other panelists’ viewpoints before we move to the next questions” or “John, it seems like you have a lot of valuable insight on this topic, but we have several questions left and I want to make sure we get your perspective on those questions too” or “John, excuse me…John? Hey, John…listen…can you…I’m sorry for…John, just shut up! Shut up, John!” It’s uncomfortable to have to do that, but remember, you are thinking of the audience first, panelists second.

11. Engage the audience. If you watch talk shows, notice how skillful they are at engaging the audience. Audience members are asked to participate in everything. On The Doctors, they pull audience members up to feel fake mucus in an enlarged sinus. I think that’s what I saw once. Talk shows know that without the audience, there is no show. Depending on how big your audience is, you may want to do things like ask people to briefly introduce themselves, do a quick ice breaker (I’ll write later on icebreakers that don’t suck), have small-group discussions, raise their hands for various questions, come up to feel fake snot, etc. Then leave plenty of time for Q&A, since an engaged audience will have more questions.

12. Conclude with practical take-aways/advice. Do not ask your panelists to go down the line summarizing what they just said, or to conclude with some final words of wisdom or something. Chances are, the panelists will waffle something incoherent. Best to end with something like “What is something concrete the audience members can do today to blah blah” or “what are three practical pieces of advice you have for our audience for blah blah” or “In one word, what do you think will solve the problem of blah blah.” Don’t actually say “blah blah.” Replace it with the relevant topic. (Although, blahness is a really big problem in the world)

Get those 12 tips down and you should be a pretty decent panel moderator. Just remember TPLFIDPPVCEC. Leave additional tips in the comment, and please forward this list on to your panel moderating friends.

PS: Bonus tip: Reconsider giving panelists mugs as a thank-you (I have eight from panels). We don’t expect any gifts, but if you are going to give a small token of thanks, here are some acceptable items: Movie tickets, gift cards to local coffee shops, or bars of dark chocolate (at least 65% cocoa). Mugs are fine, but maybe fill them with whiskey first.

Community Engagement 101: Why Most Summits Suck

Hi everyone. I just came back from Port Orchard for a friend’s wedding. A day-trip with 3-month-old infant is grueling. It was like writing a grant. A cute, drooly, moody grant who spit up all over my suit. I’m exhausted. That is to say, I don’t know how this post is going to turn out. This may not be my finest post, but I am committed to getting a new post published every Monday. Like I’ve been telling the baby, “Consistent adequacy is always better than inconsistent excellence.” And also: “Please don’t throw up on Daddy.”

***

A few months ago, I received a request from a staff at the City of Seattle’s Department of Critical Services (DCS)*. “Vu,” said the staff, “can you gather a whole bunch of Vietnamese people so that the Director of the Department of Critical Services can come and listen to their concerns? We’ve already pulled together mini-summits with three other ethnic groups: Spanish, Somalis, and Canadians.” (Kidding about the Canadians).

Sigh. Despite my best efforts, this seems to happen a lot in Seattle: “Let’s get a bunch of ethnic people together and listen to them. I bet they’re just standing around; they’ll love to come to a meeting and be listened to, especially if we have hummus and baby carrots.” It is very well-intentioned, and usually ineffective in the long-run. Sometimes it is just insulting, especially when the hummus is all chunky and grainy and not smooth, like high-quality hummus should be.

Summits, conferences, and other gatherings, when used right, can be powerful tools for community engagement. Kind of like a blender. You get a blender and make some awesome margaritas, and people are like “this is the best party ever.” (This may be the worst analogy ever). These gatherings can connect people around a common cause, equip them with skills and resources, and energize everyone to take action. They also look cool: “Ooh, look, 500 people attended! Snap a picture for our annual report! (Make sure you capture the diversity).”

But lately summits have become the default shortcut for everything:

• We need to demonstrate to funders that we are doing stuff. Let’s have a summit!
• We need to kick-off our collective impact initiative. Let’s have a summit!
• Our strategic plan needs input from communities of color. Let’s have a bunch of mini summits!
• We need a cool picture for our new brochures. Let’s have a summit!
• We need to spread awareness of a critical issue. Let’s have a giant summit and get a national speaker to keynote!

I and a bunch of other people in the field are sick of summit-like meetings, especially as tools for engaging communities of color. It’s like taking a blender and trying to make an entire meal with it, blending the salad, blending the entrees, blending the dessert (I’m not giving up on this blender analogy).

Here’s why most summits suck as a tool for engagement:

1. They give a false sense of stuff actually getting done. Sweet, we placed sticky notes and stickers on easel papers and drew visions of an ideal community. Yay! We did stuff! (Hey, we got people to vote using sticky dots on easel paper and write their ideas on sticky notes! Yay! We did stuff!)
2. They give a false sense of hope and then usually lead to nothing, especially the community input gathering sessions. Time and time again, we ethnic nonprofit staff rally our communities to various listening sessions. Time and time again, little if any of our community members’ suggestions are ever implemented.
3. There is usually very little follow-through with relationship building. Summits are enticing because you can kill 50 to 500 or more birds with one stone. After that, though, 90% of the generated energy tapers off because there are usually no funds allocated for staff with the language and cultural skills to continue to develop the relationships.
4. Funds to organize summits are inequitably distributed: I’ve seen so many summits that pay consultants and event coordinators, and allocate nothing to ethnic organizations to do outreach work. So what happens? The paid consultants and/or event coordinators start calling us up to ask us to do outreach for free. It’s very annoying. We got stuff to do, like, you know, running programs and stuff.
5. The worst part of many summits, though, is that they supplant actual effective community engagement practices. They make people think “Yay, we engaged the communities of color, since they came to our gathering!” Then they might not bother with the one-on-one meetings. One-on-one relationships are the basic building blocks of community organizing and engagement. Absolutely nothing can replace it, and it is totally time-consuming.

Anyway, I told the staff at the Department of Critical Services bluntly that I didn’t have time to rally a bunch of VFA clients for his boss to listen to, and that I didn’t think these types of meetings would be effective anyway, consider how annoyed our community members are with the lack of follow-through from previous gatherings. What would be effective, he asked. Well:

• Meet with community leaders one-on-one, on their own turf. Go yourself, don’t send your assistant. It’s a respectful thing to do, and the relationship building will pay dividends. Stop it with this “I’ll come down from the mountain once a while so that the people may rejoice in my presence” business. That’s not what you mean, but that’s what it feels like when the only time the community sees you is when you’re pushing some project.
• When you meet with people, ask them to refer you to other people, and meet with those people one-on-one. It’s time-consuming, meeting with individuals, getting coffee, listening to them tell their life stories, finding out about their hopes and dreams and their worries about their kids, etc., but you cannot engage anyone until they feel like you know and understand them and vice-versa.
• Be where people are. There are tons of places people are already gathered: Senior programs, churches, temples, youth groups, etc. Go down there, meet the coordinators, go multiple times, build the relationships. Attend organizations’ events.
• Budget for outreach staff who can do on-the-ground relationship building year-long, and not just during summit time, along with funding  for translations, interpretations, childcare, food, and transportation for community members when you have events.
• Budget for funding for ethnic nonprofits to collaborate with you to do your work. If you value the outreach work these CBOs do, build it into the budget.
• Do your research to ensure you’re not repeating something that another organization has done and published a report on. It’s frustrating to have to answer the same questions over and over again.
• If you are going to have a summit, do all the above, and also commit your team ahead of time to actually accept and follow-through on whatever action steps are decided at the summit, if that’s the will of the community, even if you may not like them. So often the only things that get implemented are whatever aligns with the summit organizers’ preconceived agenda. Well, that’s just stupid and tokenizing and a waste of people’s time. If you’re going to get community members’ input, trust and act on their recommendations.
• Funders: Fund on-going, on-the-ground relationship-building work, and fund communities-of-color-led nonprofits to do it.

Gatherings are enticing, since you can reach more people in a shorter amount of time. When it works, it can be awesome, like a Vitamix blender, which can make delicious hummus and can puree a digital camera. Lately, it’s been sucking, a lazy and superficial way of engaging communities of color. So many of the community members I interact with are so skeptical of any more “coffee chat with so-and-so important person” or “summit to discuss our concerns about the education system” that they’d just laugh in my face if I ask them to come to one more thing. I don’t want them to laugh in my face. I get plenty of that from my family for being in this line of work.

(*This is a pseudonym. There is no Department of Critical Services at the City of Seattle)

For more on community engagement, check out “Being a Nonprofit with Balls” parts 1, 2, and 3, which launched this blog and gave it its title.

Nonprofit’s ultimate outcome: Bringing unicorns back to our world

The concept of “outcomes” has been well-beaten into all of us nonprofit folks. So much so, in fact, that I start to apply this concept to all sorts of non-work stuff. For example, watching Game of Thrones. Outcomes: reduced stress, increased knowledge of pop culture and thus increased social status.

Outcomes and metrics are great and necessary, but I am wondering if we are starting to take them too far. Every once in a while, we in the field do the infamous “so that” exercise. We start with an activity, let’s say tutoring kids, and we think about the effects: We tutor kids so that they can get better grades in school…so that they can move up a grade…so that they can graduate from high school…so that they can get into college…so that they can graduate from college…so that they can get a good job. Therefore, tutoring kids helps them get a good job. Sweet!

But at what point in the “so that” chain is it OK to stop and say, that’s a good outcome to fund? At what point does it become ridiculous? In recent years, it feels like we nonprofits have been pushed to expand this chain, because the further up the chain we go, the stronger and more compelling the outcomes seem to be, and the easier it is for funders and donors to rationalize funding programs. But sometimes it makes no sense. Because of the funding dynamics, we often have wacky conversations like this:

Funder (on a program visit): So how many hot meals does XYZ Organization serve each week?

ED: In a typical week, we provide about 900 meals to low-income seniors

Funder: That’s wonderful. What are the outcomes of your program?

ED: Well…uh…the seniors come in hungry, and they leave full

Funder: Yeah, but what does that do in terms of impact? Can you elaborate?

ED (remembering the “so that” exercise): Oh, yes, of course. When low-income seniors have access to nutritious food, their health improves, which means they function better. Healthy, well-functioning seniors lead to stronger communities. It also reduces accidents, which every year cost the state millions of dollars in emergency services.

Funder: Excellent! What evaluation instruments do you—

ED: But that’s not all! Those millions of dollars that would have been wasted on emergency services can now be invested in education, infrastructure, and economic development. Those investments will lead to a stronger state, which leads to a stronger United States, which will allow us to be better guardians of the globe, which may lead to world peace. And world peace means that the unicorns may return. The ultimate outcome of our hot-meal program is for the self-exiled unicorns to return to our world!

All right, that last part is something that we might think when in this situation, but would never say out loud to funders or donors, who wield the power of life and death over programs. We learn to say the right words because we know how vital these services are, but on the inside, we’re screaming “People not being hungry is a great outcome already! Gawwwwwww!!”

A couple of years ago, I helped start the World Dance Party, which is just a giant multi-cultural/multi-generational potluck party where people learn eight different dances in mini 20-minutes lessons, and everyone dances. That’s it. No lectures, no fundraising. It is free and attracts 200 to 400 people of all ages and backgrounds. The outcomes of WDP include getting neighbors to get to know one another and to feel connected to their community. I sometimes get blank stares when I tell people this, though, as if they’re expecting something sexier, like that these World Dance Parties, through getting neighbors to know one another better, reduce gun violence by 25%.

Funders’ push for “more compelling outcomes” goes too far sometimes, forcing us nonprofits to claim to be responsible for outcomes that make no sense for our programs. After-school arts or sports programs, for example, should not have to be directly responsible for and judged on increasing graduation rates, or getting kids into college. They increase kids’ confidence and love of learning and teamwork and a host of other skills. Those are absolutely wonderful outcomes by themselves and should be funded.

If we think about it, everything we do in this field has one ultimate goal: to increase happiness. All of us are happier when everyone’s basic needs are met, when we all live in safe and strong and supportive communities, when we all continue to learn and grow and reach our potential and contribute back.

But increasing society’s happiness is too fluffy an outcome, so we usually stop the “so that” chain at things like reducing crimes and saving taxpayers millions. The insidious effect of this sort of thinking is that we lessen the intrinsic values of human lives. Sheltering our homeless so that they are not battered by the elements for even a single night, that is itself intrinsically worth doing, because we don’t want our fellow community members to suffer. Building confidence and creativity in kids through teaching them photography or beat-boxing or poetry, that is itself intrinsically worth doing, because all kids should have opportunities to grow and explore their world. Having fun World Dance Parties so that people can feel connected to their neighbors and to their community, that is itself intrinsically worth doing because everyone deserves to feel a sense of belonging.

Sure, the above activities and other stuff we do in the field will lessen crimes, save society money, etc., but those effects should be considered awesome bonuses. They should not be the main reason why we do the things we do. We should do our work with the belief that every individual life has an intrinsic value independent of its value to society.

Only when we all truly believe that, will the unicorns come back to our world.

When Wombats Go Wild: Cultural Competency at the Mezzo and Macro Levels

Last week I delivered my keynote speech in front of 300 or 400 people at the Northwest Development Officers Association (NDOA)’s spring conference. I think it went pretty well, except that my light jokes at the expense of hipsters may have offended some people. A young man came up to me after the speech and said, “Maybe next time, you might want to refrain from making fun of some people. I mean, I’m not a hipster, but if there were any in the audience, they may not have liked to be made fun of.”

Look, nonprofit work is plenty serious and very stressful, and if we can’t make gentle fun of hipsters and their asymmetrical hair, skinny jeans, and ridiculous glasses at a conference for fundraisers, then there is no hope for humanity.

Anyway, the speech was about cultural competency and community engagement. It was 35 minutes long and I swear only about 3 minutes total were spent ribbing on hipsters and their Pabst Blue Ribbon and weird, weather-inappropriate scarves. (29 seconds were spent making fun of “gluten-free” people who don’t have Celiac disease).

Since the speech was so long, I thought I would summarize the main point. Basically, “cultural competency” is a term we throw around a lot in the field, usually with metaphors like “Cultural Competency is not a destination, it’s a journey” and “Culture is like the engine of a car: You don’t see it, but it is integral to and greatly influences the car” and “In many cultures, staff are expected to make the Executive Director lemonade on demand, so get to it!”

What I’ve been seeing is that the discussion of cultural competency usually stays at the micro level, the differentiated interactions between individuals: Take off your shoes when you enter an Asian person’s house; hugging is not big in some cultures, so don’t hug everyone you meet; it’s not “Chinese New Year” it’s “Lunar New Year” since many Asian countries celebrate it besides China; label food, especially when you serve pork; just because a person doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t mean they’re trying to be disrespectful; etc.

With so many cultures in existence, it is impossible to understand and be fluent in all of them. When we mean well, but because of our gap in knowledge we screw up, I call that being a cultural competency wombat, because wombats are cute and cuddly and they probably don’t mean any harm. I have been the recipient of wombat interactions, and I have been a wombat on numerous occasions. All of us are wombats from time to time, and it is OK, as long as we learn and don’t make the same mistakes.

But cultural competency extends beyond the micro level. At these higher levels—organizational, systemic—where our inherent wombattiness can cause some serious damage. Or at least, be extremely annoying.

When Wombats Go Wild, Mezzo Level

When you have some color in your background, you’re a person of color. This is easy to understand. In the same vein, when an organization is led by communities of color and serves communities of color, it’s basically an organization of color. And when a school is 95% kids of color (and we have several in Southeast Seattle), it’s basically a school of color. We have to understand that it’s no longer just an issue of people of color, but whole organizations and schools and neighborhoods of color, and the challenges faced by an individual of color is replicated at these higher levels too, and cultural competency must extend to these levels.

One challenge, for example, is that organizations of color become that one kid in the class that has to teach everyone about his culture. Or that Spanish speaking kid that has to help other kids with their Spanish homework.

Seattle has a strong emphasis on inclusion. We LOVE getting input from everyone on everything, and we know it is essential to get the communities of color’s input (even if we do absolutely nothing with it). Which is why my organization, the Vietnamese Friendship Association (VFA), gets hit up for everything. Each week we get at least two or three requests to recruit our Vietnamese clients for some focus groups—on education, safety, transportation, sewage overflow, you name it—usually without a single thought that we may require funds to do the work.

Inclusion is commendable, but if it doesn’t come with resources, it becomes a burden on organizations of color. I was on a committee that was in charge of allocating a bunch of money. We were reviewing a list of requirements to put in the RFP. Among the requirements were “Applicants must get input from communities and families of color.” That sounds great. But what happens, at least in Seattle, is that mainstream organizations cannot reach the communities of color. So then they contact organizations like VFA and Horn of Africa and Filipino Community of Seattle and East African Community Services to get help. These sort of well-intentioned “inclusiveness” opens the floodgate. It’s like if you’re a teacher and you’re teaching a lesson on Latin American countries and you said, “Pick a Latin American country and write a report. But before you turn in your report, check in with your classmate Pedro to make sure it’s accurate.” So now all the kids descend on Pedro. It’s not that Pedro does not want to help, but he has his own challenges and his own report to write.

The funding for “inclusiveness” is usually never equitable. In fact, most of the time, it’s never even a consideration. Two weeks ago someone called me to ask us to help recruit Vietnamese clients for a focus group. They hired an outreach staff, but she had no luck getting people to sign up for the focus group, so they called me. I said, “So…basically, you got some money to hire a staff, but that didn’t work, so now you’re asking my organization to do this for you for free?”

Some requests are as ridiculous as some hipsters’ hair. One time a mainstream organization contacted me asking for help. “Can you spread the word about this community event?” the rep asked, “Also can you look these documents over to make sure they’re translated correctly into Vietnamese? It’s due in two days, so if you can get back to me by tomorrow, that would be great.” (I sent her a link to a translation company). We nonprofits of color do not have magical unicorn outreach power. Engagement of communities of color takes five times as much effort, since we’re dealing with language, transportation, socioeconomic, and other barriers. Even for VFA’s own workshops and community meetings, it takes calling our clients multiple times before they show up. Most don’t have emails and Google calendar. They have to be reminded a week ahead, three days ahead, one day ahead, the day of, and then relationship building follow-up the week after. This sort of work, if it is valued, must be funded. Just like people of color face challenges, nonprofits of color face challenges. Schools of color, neighborhoods of color face challenges. Often, it’s in the form of “Well, we can’t fund them because they don’t have much capacity. But we still want them to be involved. That will make them feel good to be asked to be involved.”

At this level, funders should try to distribute funds equitably, and try to contract directly with organizations of color if that is what the work entails. Mainstream organizations, if you need help with outreach, build sufficient funds into your project budget to compensate nonprofits of color for their time and expertise.

When Wombats Go Wild, Macro Level

At the systems level, that’s when we see how critical cultural competency is. For the past couple of years, I have been chairing the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC), a collaboration of nonprofits of color, schools, families, and community members working together to improve schools in SE Seattle, the most diverse quadrant of the City. 8% of SE Seattle is White, compared to 43% district-wide. 72% of the students are free and reduced lunch, compared to 43% also. 22% are English Language Learners, compared to 10%. We have awesome restaurants down here, and also the most struggling schools. Seattle Public Schools grade their schools from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest in performance. In SE Seattle, with some of the most amazing educators, only a single school is graded above a level 3. That would be Mercer Middle School, Level 5. Over 50% of kids of color will fail to graduate from high school.

It’s been like this for decades. And the lack of cultural competency at this level is pretty glaring. For example, I was attending a meeting on SE Seattle a while ago, and we talked about these issues, and a school board member was there. Everyone was upset by the disparities in SE Seattle. The school board member stood up, the sun dappled on her hair, and a hush fell over the room (I’m trying make this story more interesting, since this blog post is pretty long). “These numbers are unacceptable,” she said, “I need all you guys to send in letters and emails and bring your community members to show up at board meetings, because without an army behind me, there’s nothing I can do. Parents at other schools organize and send 50 emails, and they get what they want, so we have to do the same.” People murmured their agreement, vowing to rally the troops.

That was totally wombat, because the intention was good, and at first it makes sense. A man stood up, his face gaunt with time and planning too many annual dinners, his back hunched from too many meetings. “We can try to do that,” he said, “because our parents must make their voices known. At the same time, many of our parents don’t speak much English. Some have never touched a computer, much less know how to send an email. They work several jobs, so they might not be able to join meetings. How fair is this system then? While we build the capacity of our families, we MUST also change this system.” This system that exists, where the loudest voices win, is culturally incompetent and has been perpetuating inequity in education and other areas for decades.

We see this lack of cultural competency play out again and again at the macro level. The Families and Education Levy, for example, is supposed to help schools like the ones in SE Seattle. But the grant application is ridiculously complicated and burdensome, which is fine if every school had the same resources to write it. But the schools that have the least capacity to write these grants are the ones that most need the grants, as usually they’re the ones with the most kids of color and low-income kids. I was helping a school with this grant. This school has 97% kids of color. The principal and I locked ourselves in her office for several days to write this thing, and by the time we were done, the narrative was 28 pages long. It was the most ridiculous grant I had ever written, and it was like giving birth. (I know all about the pains of giving birth now that I have witnessed it first-hand). Another school, with even more needs, did not apply.

Cultural competency is extremely critical, especially when the injustices that we are trying to address usually disproportionately affect communities of color. The concept has been tossed around a lot and beaten into all of us, but usually only at the micro level. What we have at all levels are often well-meaning people who are trying to help, but all of us naturally impose our own perspectives on to things and people. If VFA has time to recruit people for their workshops, why can’t they recruit the same people for my focus group? If I can access social media, other people should be able to. If I can write a 28-page grant, why can’t these school principals? If some parents can write emails and testify at school board meetings and write op-eds, why can’t other parents? These wombat assumptions are annoying, but at the higher levels, they can be deadly, silently perpetuating the cycle of inequity while all of us are talking about whether it is culturally appropriate to shake hands with some clients or not, or whether we should take off our shoes.

Feng Shui for Nonprofits, Part 2: The 7 Basic Meeting Formations

When I was growing up, my mother always told me to study hard. “Study hard,” she said, “so that you can work in an office one day and go to meetings and push paper, and not have to do manual labor like me and your dad.” Then she would add: “And eat some food. You look like a pale exhausted monkey and are the second least attractive member of our extended family.” (Thank God for cousin Nghi and her one twitching eye).

Anyway, Mom got her wish, because I do work in an office and I go to a lot of meetings, and sometimes those meetings are even useful. Our field does a lot of meetings, and yet we don’t stop to think much about them. Today, we’ll talk a little about the layout of the room and how it impacts the dynamics between participants. We barely notice, but simple things like where tables and chairs are placed and where the meeting participants are sitting in relation to one another makes a huge difference in power dynamics, and thus, the outcomes of the meeting.

First, let’s talk about large meetings with multiple people. The results of the meeting can be determined before anyone even walks into the room by how the tables and chairs are arranged.

The Power Formation. The front of the room is the seat of power, and people in the front are perceived to be more powerful than everyone else. This is why we naturally place politicians, panel speakers, and other experts and authority figures in the front of the room. This can be tricky, though, because sometimes you do not want them to be perceived as more powerful than you. One time, I was attending a community meeting designed to hold some higher-ups in Seattle Public Schools accountable for the inequity among our schools. This meeting was organized by the community. I entered the room and saw 8 seats in the front, facing the audience of 15. While the intent was to place the officials in the “hot seat,” the reality was that they now seemed like authority figures towering over the rest of us.  By the end of the meeting, they got us to promise that we’ll work harder to close the achievement gap.

The Circle Formation. Having everyone sit in a circle (or square) conveys a sense of democracy and community. It is also is the appropriate diffuser of power, forcing authority figures to recognize unconsciously that they are just like everyone else, the toiling, unwashed masses. This is what we should have done instead of the Power Formation in the situation above. Plus, the Circle Formation is the most efficient formation for snack distribution.

The U Formation. Arranging tables in a U shape conveys a sense of regalness. The person placed at the head of the table cannot have a diametric opposite, meaning this person has ultimate power. This formation best used when there is a very special guest of honor present, such as the Queen or an Iron Chef, in which case, break out the fine linens and hire some butlers. Otherwise, this formation is pretty stupid and should be avoided at all times.

The Small Groups Formation. Having people sit in small groups fosters both teamwork and competitiveness. It reminds people of high school, when they had to sit in small groups and do projects together, occasionally teasing that one lanky vegan kid who with the bad haircut because his dad always cut his hair. Well, oh yeah, David? Look who’s a nonprofit executive director now while all you got is a “JD”?! What is that anyway, some sort of degree you made up?!

Sorry, I got distracted. This formation is a great way to get people to know one another, especially if you throw in a competitive game or two. It is also an effective diffuser of power. When you have multiple authority figures, scatter them across different groups. When more than one is present, their power combined is not additive, but exponential, along with how annoying they are, being all chummy with one another and saying stuff like, “Yes, let’s get lunch soon” and “Vu, why isn’t the draft of next fiscal year’s budget done? The board must approve it at the next meeting.”

Many of our meetings are one-on-one. For those meetings, it is important to analyze with whom you are meeting and for what purpose. Then determine the appropriate formation to take:

The Adversarial Formation (aka The Interrogation Formation). Sitting directly across a table from someone sends the message that you want to be formal. We use this position when we are playing competitive board games, like Chess. This is a good position when you want to keep your distance or seem imposing. Sometimes it becomes the Interrogation Formation, where a panel of people sits across the table from one person, usually to glare at them while asking interview questions and looking cryptic. Generally I avoid sitting directly across a table from anyone in a one-on-one meeting, as it is unconsciously intimidating. It is useful though when you’re dealing with unsolicited visitors, people you’re meeting for the first time, staff who want to meet with you to complain about their health insurance not kicking in even though it’s been eight months or some other ridiculous reason. Or you are just trying to hide a fifth of whiskey. The bigger the table, the more formality is conveyed. If the table is small, though, such as at cafes, the effects are greatly minimized.

The Intimate Formation. Sitting on the same side of the table as someone sends the message “We’re on the same team” and is really creepy. Unless you know someone well, never ever sit on the same side as they are sitting. It’s like giving an awkward hug, but for an hour, or however long the meeting lasts. Exceptions can be made if you need to look at some documents together, or if for some reason the two of you are on the porch with a cold beer each, sharing war stories or something.

The Corner Formation. Sitting across from someone in such a way that there is one corner of the table between the two of you is a great middle ground between the intimidating Adversarial Formation and the creepy Intimate Formation. I like to use this position as the default when I am meeting with people one-on-one. It makes me seem approachable, but there is still a buffer between me and the other person, allowing them to feel a sense of security. This is a great formation to use when interviewing people for jobs, as it allows them to feel relaxed in a formal setting. It’s also great to use when you have to give bad news or feedback.

Those are the 7 main meeting formations. Learn them well and you’ll be able to greatly affect the outcomes of any meeting. But there are other formations, for more advanced meeting goers. For example the Flanking Formation, where two people from the same organization will flank someone from a different organization, causing disorientation and intimidation. Then there’s the Wagon Wheel Formation, the Intervention Formation, the Fish Bowl Formation (aka the Thunder Dome Formation), and the Lemmings Formation.

But we’ll discuss those later in a future post. We’ll also discuss the different snacks and how they affect power dynamics. Hint: Hummus is an effective tool when deployed strategically.

Cultural compentency wombats: My keynote speech at the NDOA conference on June 7th

Hi everyone. Sorry I’ve been absent for two weeks. I am going to try to consistently publish each Monday morning from now on, rain or shine. With such a schedule, the quality of the posts may be lacking, but at least they’ll be consistent. Like someone once said: “Consistent adequacy always trumps inconsistent excellence,” a motto that I want to pass down to my son in one of those idyllic father-son moments. With the setting sun painting the skies crimson and amber in front of us as we sit on our porch, the last remnants of summer fading to the mournful song of the cicadas, I’d turn to him and say, “Son, excellence is hard to achieve, and consistent excellence next to impossible. Aim for reliable mediocrity…”

With so many profound life lessons to share, I am glad the Northwest Development Officers Association (NDOA) invited me to be their keynote speaker on June 7^th at their Spring conference. This decision to invite me just proves that NDOA is run by highly-intelligent, innovative, and good-looking people. Public speaking is scary, though, and I want to be very honest and say that I am freaking out more than a little and have thought once or twice about running off into the wilderness, far far away from civilization…like maybe Federal Way, Washington.

Still, it is a great honor, and a great chance to avoid my staff for several hours, so I will work hard to ensure that I don’t suck at my speech in front of three or four hundred development professionals.

So, what am I going to talk about? Cultural competency, community engagement, and wombats. I have been writing about these topics for several years now, including a post called “Are You a Cultural Competency Wombat? Take this Quiz to Find Out.” Of course, this was a while ago, so only 7 or 8 people actually read that post (and only because I threatened to cut their health insurance), so I am going to just repost an excerpt here:

“Are You a Cultural Competency Wombat? Take this Quiz to Find Out.”

The term “cultural competency” has been thrown around a lot. For instance: “We must be more culturally competent in our outreach efforts in order to synergistically shift the paradigm for collective impact.” And also: “Stop being so culturally incompetent! In many cultures, staff are expected to make the Executive Director a mango lemonade while he naps!”

We all agree that Cultural Competency is a good thing, but do any of us really understand what it is? I mean, sure, there are tons of research papers and books and stuff on the subject, but who actually reads them when we all have so much work to do and Season 3 of Downton Abbey just started? [Note, this post was written in February, when references to Downton Abbey were still relevant and very cool].

Cultural Competency is complex, and we can delve deep into it for hours. But for this post, I just want to spend a few minutes discussing cultural competency and how it manifests in the basic logistics of community engagement. Let’s begin by checking to see how culturally competent you currently are.

Question 1: You are leading a committee to talk about community safety and you want to ensure participation from residents of color. Where should you have the meeting? A. At my office downtown; it’ll make it easy for everyone, since downtown is a central location. B. At the local bar, since it’s an informal place where people can be free to express their opinions. C. Maybe a library, or a community center, some place with easy parking.

Question 2: You are thinking of having food at this meeting. What should you order? A. Prosciutto finger sandwiches, baked brie and dried pears, crudités and olives, accompanied by a nice pinot noir. B. Grilled pork banh mi’s (Vietnamese sandwiches), spring rolls C. Pita and hummus, chicken skewers, fruit.

Question 3: You want communities of color to be well-represented at this meeting. How should you go about outreaching? A. Send out flyers, emails, and Facebook messages. B. Call up the various ethnic organizations and ask them send out word to their community members. C. Have information translated and placed in ethnic media such as newspapers and radios, send staff to physically visit various places with translated materials.

Scoring: Give yourself 0 points for every A answer, 17 points for every B, and 900 points for every C. If you got 0 to 900 points, you are a cultural competency goblin. If you have 901 to 1816 points, you are a cultural competency wombat. If you have 1817 to 2700 points, you are a cultural competency platypus.

***End of excerpt. Read the rest of the post here.***

Most of us are wombats. Wombats are cuddly and cute in their clumsiness. But in order for us to be effective, to bring about change, to successfully fight for social justice, we must strive to be a cultural competency platypus. I will be talking about experiences I’ve had and observations I’ve made about wombat-like behaviors that I’ve seen, both at the micro and the macro level (we’ll also discuss the mezzo level, which everyone ignores, because “mezzo” just sounds silly). We will brainstorm tips to be more cultural competent, within our own individual work, in partnerships with other organizations, and in systems that have been impacting our field and our clients. We will touch on community engagement, a crucial element of nonprofit work, one that many of us screw up on all the time, and how we can avoid sucking at that (Hint: stop asking ethnic nonprofits to recruit their clients for focus groups without sufficient funding).

We’ll discuss all those issues and others, and if we have time, I want to run by the group my idea for a Broadway show about nonprofit work: “501c3: The Musical!”

I hope to see you at the conference.

Tips for not sucking when you’re on a panel

This week, I was asked to speak on a panel to a bunch of social work students on working with refugee and immigrant clients. Panels are like the lunch buffet of information sharing. It is a group of people with knowledge of a certain topic, asked to speak together with the hope that at least one of them will say something interesting. It is a great idea for our attention-deficient culture, but it is often poorly executed, oftentimes due to the panelists themselves.

Now, the average attention span of an audience member is nine seconds, so it was frustrating when the first panelist took 21 minutes to introduce herself, going into details about her childhood upbringing, her first trip to Disneyland, her favorite color, that one magical night when she tried peroskis for the first time, etc. The second panelist, an otherwise delightful woman, took cue from the first and spent 17 minutes telling her life story. The students, thinking this might actually be a clever real-time demonstration of how to communicate with refugees and immigrants, paid careful attention.

So I thought I would provide the following tips on how to be a dynamic, interesting panel speaker. If you are ever asked to be on a panel, please review these notes below. Many of these tips also work for other speeches, such as wedding toasts and eulogies:

• Tip 1: Prepare. It is important to be ready. Many panelists make the terrible mistake of not preparing for the panel. Several days ahead of time, make sure you prepare yourself by informing your friends through tweeting and updating your Facebook timeline that you will be on a panel. Have a friend come and take an awesome picture of you from the audience.
• Tip 2: Try to go first or last. Being first allows you to set precedence. If your intro is only one minute long, for example, the other panelists will follow. I prefer being last, which allows me to listen carefully to the other panelists’ points and then synthesize, which makes me look extra smart, e.g., “Yes, I agree with Mark’s statement; theretofore, and indeed, a strength-based approach is the best return on ROI.”
• Tip 3: Talk like a human being. Panelists sometimes get this inflated ego, like oooh, I’m on a panel, I’m an expert. Then they try to sound intelligent, using a language that I call “expertese,” which is very annoying. The only time you should try to sound smart is when you’re talking to grad students, in which case, it is not only appropriate for you to use jargon, but also expected of you to make up some terminologies that sound real, for instance, “Post-modern misoxenistic tendencies among the media are challenges newcomers to the country face on an almost morpholateral basis.” It makes the students feel smart. They pay a lot of money for their degree, so it’s nice to boost their ego.
• Tip 4: Tell hilarious jokes that are related to the topic. For example, “A Program Director, a tutor, and a refugee family with two small children walk into a school. The school asks why the long faces? The Program Director says, ‘You don’t have enough culturally appropriate services for immigrant and refugee students and families, so they’re struggling academically.” (I may need to work on my punch line).
• Tip 5: Gage your audience’s reaction and energy. Watch their body language. If they’re yawning or stabbing themselves in the eyes with the corner of their binders, they’re bored out of their wits, and it’s time to ante up on the jokes.
• Tip 6: Use strategic cussing. Mild expletives like “pissed” “damn” and “hell” make people think you’re passionate. Sprinkle them in once a while. For example, “Politicians always think ‘why don’t these refugees and immigrants ever attend a town hall meeting? Don’t they care?’ That pisses me off!” Remember, you’re trying to talk like a human being, and that’s what humans sound like, dammit.
• Tip 7: Tell stories. Audience members love good, relevant stories. Nothing is more effective than stories. Statistics are very helpful (“Over 50% of immigrant and refugee students will not graduate from high-school”), but a good story can humanize the message and help to drive it home. Make sure your story has a point though: “And eating that peroski for the first time was when I realized how difficult yet wonderful it is to be in a new land.”
• Tip 8: Get audience participation. It wakes them up. And why should you do all the work. Try to call on specific people in the audience. If you know their name, that’s great, but if you don’t, it’s appropriate to call them out by their distinguishing features, “The best way to work with refugees and immigrants? I could tell you, but first, what do you think? You, young man with the cold sore, what say you?”
• Tip 9: Get into a fight with other panelists. The whole point of getting people together is so they can bounce off of one another. But panelists tend to be self-contained. That’s just boring. Either agree with someone, elaborate on others’ statements, or else respectfully disagree. At every panel I’m on, I try to get into at least one verbal fisticuff with another panelist. Just try not to make it personal, like “Oh yeah, Ed? Well your FACE has a responsibility to learn English and assimilate.”
• Finally, Tip 10: Wear the appropriate clothing. I always wear glasses and a red button-down shirt. Glasses convey wisdom, and red suggests power. Then, I leave the top two or three buttons of my shirt unbuttoned, conveying a subtle sense of sexiness. Wisdom, power, sexiness. All good panelists project such an aura.

I hope those tips are helpful. Share this with any of your friends who tweet or post on Facebook that they will be on a panel. (Also, check out NWB’s 12 Tips for Not Sucking as a Panel Moderator). If all of us can learn to be better panelists, maybe, just maybe, we can achieve world peace in our children’s lifetime.

Or at least panels wouldn’t be such boring-ass events to sit through.

A different kind of retreat

Hi everyone. I just joined Twitter. I have 9 followers. Is that a lot? I don’t know. If you want to follow, it’s @nonprofitwballs #confused #stilldontunderstandhashtags. On to this week’s post:

Over the weekend the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC) had our retreat. Whenever we have a major event, I tend to freak out, believing that all sorts of things will go wrong. I get night terrors, waking up in cold sweats screaming, “We gave people the wrong address! The zombies are coming!” (I should probably refrain from watching TV when I’m stressed out).

OK, first some background. Southeast Seattle is home to the most diverse zip code in the nation, 98118, which means ridiculously delicious ethnic foods. Unfortunately 98118 is also home to some of the most struggling schools. Seattle Public Schools District grades its schools from 1 to 5, based on absolute scores on tests as well as how fast they’re improving, with 5 being highest in terms of achievement. Of the 20 schools in SE Seattle, only one school is above a level 3, despite some of the most amazing and dedicated educators working here.

SESEC was formed for a couple of reasons. First, education reform in Seattle has been really contentious, with people blaming each other and throwing rocks. Reading comments on any article on education is like peering into the darkest recesses of the human souls. The tension is everywhere. I’ve seen friends literally get into fist fights at the Farmer’s Market, arguing about charter schools. OK, not literally, but there definitely was vigorous head shaking and vague threats of squishing the other person’s organic heirloom tomatoes. SESEC believes instead of fighting about stuff we don’t agree on and threatening to damage prized organic produce, why don’t we work on stuff we can agree to, like parental engagement and extended learning programs.

Another reason we were formed is that while in Washington State we have many efforts to improve schools, communities of color are not well represented. It is alarming and a symptom of a not-quite-effective system when the “achievement and opportunity gap” most impacts kids of color, and yet the communities of color are barely there at these tables that are making major policy recommendations. We communities of color in SE Seattle must be in the front leading and painting a vision where all kids are successful. “All Fives in Five,” we say, our campaign slogan to push for all schools down here to become a Level 5 school within 5 years. And we believe we can get there if we all work together.

A year later, we now have about 50 organizations and schools working in collaboration, one of the most diverse coalitions in the State. That’s why we had to have the retreat, to prioritize our goals and develop an action plan, and why I bolted up in bed screaming, “Pork sandwiches?! Nooooooooo!!” (With so much diversity, having culturally appropriate food is very important).

On the day of, I had gotten up early so that I had extra time to freak out. I was worried that people wouldn’t show up, or they couldn’t find the place, or the babysitters we recruited would flake out and the children in the childcare room would escape and run amok, or that people would find the retreat useless, or that one more of my favorite characters would die on Downton Abbey. I was worried about whether we had enough stickers for when people started voting on the advocacy priorities. Each person gets five and a half star stickers to vote with. What if we didn’t have enough stickers?! People who didn’t have stickers would then have to vote by writing their initials like animals and the retreat would be a failure!!!

38 people showed up representing over 25 different organizations. The attendance was great, but I was still stressed. Our facilitator had her baby on a sling. The baby started making loud baby sounds. At one point, we could hardly hear a guest speaker because some children were curious and left the childcare room and climbed on to their mothers’ lap and started asking questions such as “can we get some stickers?” Arrg, I needed to crack down on the babysitter in the childcare room, I thought. For various activities we broke into groups. “If my five-year-old son is looking for me,” said a mother, “can you let him know I’m in the basement with a group?” How could anyone concentrate with children running around?

Then, as I watched our facilitator, whose baby was now snuggled up asleep in her sling, I realized something. In my worries about having an efficient retreat, I lost sight for a moment of why we were having it in the first place. This is what the community looks like. This is our community. We cannot retreat from our community. It is diverse. It includes children and babies. Most of the people in the room were not professional lobbyists or policy analysts. These are direct service providers and parents and educators, people who gave up six hours of their Saturday after working hard all week to be here.

After I took a breath and calmed myself down, I looked around the room and saw how awesome it was that so many people came, and what a great community we had. At least 60% of the room were people of color from all over the world. One Somali mom, for whom English is not her first language, told us it was her birthday. It was her birthday, and she was here in a church foyer working to improve the education system.

The groups took turns reporting out. The five-year old had found his mother and was happily eating a cookie. His mother started reporting on what her group had discussed. “We believe that every school needs a counselor or case manager, or both,” she said. The little boy, not missing a beat, shouted, “My mom is right!” The room broke into laughter. “We first need to map out which school currently has which resources in this area, and what they need,” she continued.

“My mom is right again!” said the little boy, “that’s two times now that she is right.”

The day was a good learning experience for me. Most times the purpose of a retreat is to withdraw from civilization so that we have time to think. But I have seen this to become the default in social justice work, where in the drive for expediency, we leave behind the people most impacted. They become the “for whom” we do the work, the recipient of our fight for equity. It is an ineffective model. When we do this type of work, it cannot be “for” the community. It must be alongside the community, and the Southeast Seattle community looks like this room. The babies, the little kids, the parents fighting hard to understand the discussion, they are not a detriment to the work. They are our community; they are our strength.

Overall, it was a good retreat. I can relax for a couple of days before starting to freak out about our annual dinner.