Many email newsletters we receive start with “Dear [NAME],” - and “NAME” is magically replaced with your name. Just today, I received an email with the subject line “made me think of you, Emily (offer info inside)”. Now this was very insulting to me. The person (but mostly their automation) who sent this email to me clearly did not think of me. Maybe they had some thought of the collective “me” because they thought about everyone on their email list as a general whole. But I felt that they...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Dear friend, On Friday I’m hosting the first of what I hope to be many conversations for those of us in the social profit (new name for the non-profit) world, dealing with the deep, contradictory, messy, important topics that we face daily in our work. This week’s call is called Venting About Time and Urgency in Social Profit Work. I got into social profit work thinking that before too long, the organization I was working for would solve the issue we were addressing - closing the education...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, I have a large tattoo on my chest that reads “Take Risk Of Mortality” and I’d like to tell you the story of this tattoo. Originally I was struck by a line I read in a New Yorker article about Van Gogh over 10 years ago. I’m not going to pull it up on the internet to get the exact quotes - I’ll give you my undoubtedly imperfect memory about it. The article was about the passion of Van Gogh for making art and how this impacted his mind and life. The last line of the article was...
3 months ago • 5 min read
In technology work, two different methods are often pitted against each other - the “waterfall” method and the “agile” method. Waterfall represents releasing a whole bunch of water at once - meaning we put a ton of work into a product or solution or thing before end users get access and start using in the real world. Agile represents ongoing, iterative releases and improvements - meaning we put out something good enough at the beginning and let users play with it, using feedback and new...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Now friend, if you know me then I hope you think of me as a typically happy, optimistic, dreaming, lover-not-fighter. I was enamored at first with the concept of Giving Tuesday - what a wonderful response to the consumeristic marketing of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. As someone who works with a lot of social profit organizations (the new re-branding term for “non-profits”), I receive a ton of newsletters and texts from amazing organizations doing amazing things - and today they are...
5 months ago • 3 min read
On a bit of a whim but also on a kind of dream, I bought a new domain name this past week: slowtechmovement.com. I’ve been considering the concept of Time a lot lately. The language we have around Time is so interesting. We save, spend, and buy time, commoditizing it. We lose, waste, and gain time, measuring and judging it. We stretch time, anthropomorphizing it. We always have the same amount of time available to us, and yet we search for more of it. For people doing social justice work or...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Over the past year I’ve heard some really interesting takes on imposter syndrome. I deeply appreciated the passion with which Reshma Saujani (Founder of Girls Who Code) spoke at Smith College about imposter syndrome being “a tool” and a “strategy” - an external force that is used to hold people (women, specifically) down by convincing them there is something wrong with them. Saujani also touched on an important concept with one line about how institutions were not built for her, noting that...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Apparently November 17th-23rd is National Apprentice Week in the United States. How did we get to this place in our weird history as a country that we have a day, a week, a month for every little thing? OK sure, Black History and Pride aren’t little things, they are big things. But they are now in the same category as Apprenticeship? I don’t know, this seems a little suspect to me. It feels a little too influenced by the Greeting Card Industrial Complex. I love going to a good Pride parade,...
5 months ago • 4 min read
Earning trust takes time. It takes so much time and so much consistency. There are ways that this trust-earning can get sped up - usually through some extreme circumstances that force people to get down deep and dirty together, to overcome an impossible situation, or to be put through intense experiences together. I love a good conversation about how to ethically and responsibly put people through experiences like this on purpose. But there isn’t always a need to speed up the trust building...
5 months ago • 1 min read