I am finishing up my job at the community foundation this week and for everyone that has been emailing me to congratulate me/find out when my job is open so they can apply, the foundation will be posting my position or something similar in about two months as they figure out what addition would be best for the program department. You can look for the job posting here. I'm starting my new job at Headwaters on Tuesday, so it has been a little crazy lately. I'd like to thank all of your for your kind works, support, and great advice as I move to this next phase in my career.
Hiring a Wife
I'll away at an ABFE convening, so I am posting some of my most requested blog postings. This post is at the top of my mind right now as I take on my new position at the Headwaters Foundation for Justice.
Hiring a Wife- originally posted April 2008
I got some eye opening advice last year when I asked a friend about work-life balance. She said that the only way that she had seen a woman with children succeed at the top levels of an organization, without a stay-at-home husband, was when women hired a wife. I had never heard of hiring a wife (outside of the occasional mail-order bride news story) so I was confused. What she meant was hiring someone who handles the worry and responsibility of managing your home.
Initially I got pretty ticked off. How unfair is it that men just go off to work and don't worry about keeping their home life running smoothly? Is this just another case of the rich getting richer because they can afford to hire the help that allows them to achieve more at work?
Then I realized that I was relieved to find out that there weren't these magical women out there effortlessly hosting a dinner party for 15, after successfully managing a difficult merger at work. Penelope Trunk is a blogger that I admire that seems to be a woman balancing it all, she recently wrote about having to hire a house manager for $50,000 a year in addition to her nanny, cleaning service, and assistant at work. I don't have an extra $50,000 laying around so I have been using the following strategies for the last year or so to spread the wifely duties around:
- Negotiate up front with my husband about who does what. I spent many years of my marriage assuming that my husband understood that a laundry basket next to the stairs meant that he should bring the basket downstairs and start the laundry. I have tried to stop assuming he is a mind reader and actually ask when I want something done.
- Teach my children to be responsible for themselves. There is a great book called Parenting with Love and Logic that says only one person can really worry about a problem. If I spend my time worrying if my daughter has started working on her school assignment, she doesn't worry about it at all because she knows I have it covered and will nag her at the appropriate time. Letting her be responsible for her own stuff is great practice for the rest of her life and relieves me of a ton of stress.
- Buy Time. My husband and I own a dry cleaning and laundry delivery business, despite this fact, we were still arguing about who would do the weekly laundry. We finally decided that it made sense to drop off our own laundry and have it cleaned and folded so that we got that extra time in the day to have fun as a family. There are grocery delivery services, meal assembly stores, and a ton of people that offer housecleaning and yard care on Craigslist. Figure out what things make financial and mental health sense to outsource. I just signed up with a new service Ask Sunday. They handle making appointments, calling around for the best prices, and any other task that can be completed on the phone or online. In the first month of using the service I got through a ton of things on my to do list that had been there for months.
- Be efficient with your professional work. I have a great but time consuming job at a foundation, write this blog twice a week, and just started a professional development guide business for Gen X and Y. If I spent my days gossiping about American Idol and sending email forwards I would never get anything done. I try to strategize at the beginning of each day to figure out what the most important thing is that I have to complete and then I do that thing right away. I am also working hard on my delegation skills.
So I don't have a hired wife yet but I think I have some pretty good work arounds until Mary Poppins comes into our lives.
If you have tried to outsource part of your life I would love to hear how it is going for you.
The Generational Divide at Work
*Image courtesy of Flickr
This week I will be posting some of the most requested New Voices of Philanthropy posts while I am at an ABFE convening. This post pretty much sums up my reason for starting this blog.
The Great Generational Divide or the Cross-Generational Solution to Work Satisfaction?- Originally posted June 2007
I have been in what some people would call a “generational rock and a hard place” for the last few months. I am a young person in the foundation field and one of my passions is helping young people learn how to advance in the philanthropic sector but one of my professional duties at the foundation is managing a project on older adult civic engagement. A big piece of this project is figuring out how to keep baby boomers in my community engaged as they begin to retire or change careers. Talk about competing priorities. On one hand I know how important it is to keep baby boomers engaged, on the other hand I am hearing from young people on a daily basis that they can’t advance because baby boomers won’t leave the philanthropic sector and make room for young people to advance. I have finally realized that this isn’t an “either, or” proposition. Baby boomers at foundations and in the nonprofit sector as a whole have great expertise that they contribute to the field but they have created positions for themselves where they work 80 hours a week and refuse to take vacation (or sick days for that matter), with the idea that “this whole place would fall apart without me”. Young people want more responsibility but would also like to have a life outside of their job. There are lots of explanations for why this is but one of the most probable that I have heard is that Gen X was raised as latchkey kids and saw the family sacrifices that their parents had to make to slowly climb the career ladder. They also saw their parents lose their pensions in mass layoff and Enron scandals, so they know that the old paradigm of work hard for the same company for 40 years and retire is no longer realistic.
What if a new way of working was created that still kept baby boomers engaged but allowed them to reduce the number of hours that they work so that they could keep health benefits and stay involved in a career that they love? What if this same new way of work allowed Gen X the flexibility to spend time with their families or take on a second job (to pay down the massive student loan debt that so many have)? If we started thinking of the program officer position (of any other foundation or nonprofit staff member for that matter) as a collection of tasks that can be completed by one or many people depending on the time available for each worker. How much more effective would a foundation be if instead of one program officer, they now had three sharing that same 80 hour a week position? The foundation would now have 3 times as many connections in the community, 3 diverse perspectives on how to solve social problems, and 3 great ambassadors for the foundation’s work.
What refinements (or significant changes) do you think are needed to create a foundation workplace that is supportive for multiple generations?
Advice to New Foundation Staff
In the coming week I'll be at an Association of Black Foundation Executives convening. After I return, I hope to have new posts about their work encouraging foundations to support special initiatives for black men and boys. While I'm gone I'll be posting some of the most requested posts of this blog. As a side note, this post is the one that has gotten me in the most trouble since I began writing this blog. For some reason foundation staff don't like to be told that their opinion of themselves might be a little bit inflated. Oh well.
Advice to New Foundation Staff- Originally posted April 2007
I have just completed my first year as a program officer at a community foundation. Being a new Foundation staff member is really uncharted territory. There isn’t a handbook that tells you how to be an effective program officer and everyone seems to approach his or her position from a different perspective. I’ve made it my personal mission to try to demystify the foundation field for new foundation staff, prospective foundation staff, grant seekers, and most importantly for myself. In that vein, I have developed 6 pieces of advice for those new to the field that I hope makes your entrance into the foundation field a little less hazy.
- Don’t believe the hype- Positions at foundations are few and far between. There was probably a very talented applicant pool for your position and you must be very intelligent and knowledgeable about the nonprofit sector since you were chosen for your position. With that said I can pretty much guarantee that you are not as smart, funny, or as handsome (or pretty) as nonprofit and foundation staff alike may have you believe. Your program ideas are not suddenly brilliant, you are just sharing these ideas with a captive audience. False flattery is an unfortunate by-product of being in a position where you can make decisions about large amounts of money. You can handle this newfound access to wealth with grace and wisdom or you can act like a lottery winner. Please choose wisely.
- Treat grantees with the respect and reverence that they deserve- You get to spend your days with grantees and possible grantees that are the best and brightest of the nonprofit sector. They would make a lot more money if they used their immense talents working in the for profit sector but they are so passionate about the mission of their organizations that they choose to work for. Count yourself among the lucky few that get to spend most of your workday with passionate, idealistic people.
- Expand your professional network- The best ideas come from having a diverse professional network of people that have different opinions and experiences than you do. Join an affinity group of a different racial group, program area, or geographic interest to learn new approaches to issues that you face in your position.
- Get some support- This may be a circle of friends that you can bounce ideas off of, an affinity group like Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, which is designed to provide support and guidance to people new to the field of philanthropy, or a kickball team, where you can burn off some of the stress of your position. Figure out what kind of support would work the best for you and seek it out. If you can’t find that network of support, create your own.
- Never stop learning- The nonprofits that you interact with depend on your access to best practices in the field to improve their own work. Thoroughly read the reports from previous grantees. Are there lessons learned that might be applicable to other organizations that you are working with? Then share that information, within the limits of confidentiality. Scrupulously read about areas that your foundation makes grants in. Read about cities or states with similar demographics as your foundation’s geographic area. Are there any best practices from other locations that might be useful for the work that your foundation or grantees are doing?
- Extend your hand to those that are interested in the field- When you were thinking about entering the field of philanthropy you either had a wonderful mentor that guided you through the process or you wish that you had. Be that mentor to someone else. There are many students and professionals that just need a few minutes of your time to figure out if the foundation field is a good fit for them. Be open to informational interviews, speaking at sessions about the work of program officers, or being a mentor informally or through a program at your alma mater. You may have also noticed that since you have entered the field you now know about position opening that you never would have heard about when you weren’t in the field. Share those opportunities with your network of people that are interested in starting a career in philanthropy.
Now it’s your turn. What advice would you give to new foundation staff?
Games for Justice
I have seen a lot of games lately that are intended to draw attention to social issues. Do you think these games are:
A) a useful tool for drawing attention to critical issues,
B) a shallow attempt to entertain people with tragedy,
C) a huge timewaster but with a social benefit?
Some examples:
Darfur is dying
Free Rice
The Cost of Life