"Let’s stop aiming our work at ending something bad, and let’s start aiming that work at building something good. Let’s aim at building an incredible place to live - an amazing community, an amazing world."
- Hildy Gottilieb
Whew! This week has gone by so fast with grant proposal deadlines, funder meetings, annual event planning, and staff discussions. Change is happening in every aspect of my work, and it's quite a challenge to manage it all. Today is an example of the many Fridays I find myself bogged down with nonprofit work, my eyes glazed over with frustration with the sector that I know and love. Fortunately, I know I'm not the only one. So, I decided that each Friday will be the day I'll try to internally purge myself of all the things that are freaking me out about the nonprofit world, and publicly try to reflect on four good resources to help my thinking and learning about changing these things. Let's call it my version of "nonprofitherapy", or the Friday Four. So here goes my Friday Four for this week:
- Hildy Gottilieb inspires from the Creating the Future Blog in her post yesterday, Are You Ending or Beginning?, suggesting that nonprofits should stop trying to end problems and instead focus on building something good.
Wow - this turns ideas like "ending poverty" on its head. What if we were all focused on things like "creating prosperity" instead? Like Katya Andresen says, nonprofits need not be all gloom and doom... - A blog post over at We Have Always Done it That Way (don't you just love the name?) bucks against the resource-driven mindset of nonprofits by linking to a Sloan Management Review article.
What's that you say? We don't have to automatically increase our budget every year? There may be different and cheaper and better ways to do things? Hmmm, now can we just brand that on nonprofit leaders' foreheads with hot fireplace pokers? - Penelope Trunk at the Brazen Careerist lends a golden book excerpt, Methods for Controlling the Hours You Work.
These all apply to nonprofit professionals who feel we are overworked. And we are. But, that doesn't mean we can't begin to take control of the madness and only do what really matters. Write a $50,000 grant proposal? Yes. Agree to man tables at a six-hour event on a Saturday to appear nice and do-goody? Eh, not so much. - Finally, Michele Martin over at the Bamboo Project Blog gives me hope that I can map the two projects I'm working on using wikis in 5 Uses for a Wiki at Work. We want to implement a new work-from-home policy as well as streamline the new hire process. I've been tooling with PB Wiki and Wikispaces. And naturally, I'm interested using wikis for both of these:
- As an Operations Guide or Policy and Procedure manual that can be easily and quickly updated with updated versions available to all staff. No more outdated binders on your desk. And with tagging, they are more easily searched. (Check out this article on wiki tagging to get an idea of how this can help)
- As Fact Sheets or FAQs--useful for both staff and customers.
