Hamburger Helper as a sign of work-life imbalance

I have been busy with work lately, not sleep under my desk busy, but busy enough where I don't have a lot of spare time to think about what to eat at home. It is not like when I have lots of spare time I am a wonderful chef who makes home cooked meals for the neighborhood but I can get a protein, vegetable, and a starch on the table pretty consistently. For the first three weeks of my new job my husband has been handling almost all of the home duties and when it comes to food that means we had eaten a wide variety of fast food for three weeks straight. I was starting to feel like the guy from Supersize Me, so I finally ventured to the grocery store. I have found that when I have a large number of decisions to make at work, facing the infinite number of possibilities at the grocery store makes my head feel like it is going to explode. Instead of picking fresh food that would require me to figure out what to do with it I gravitated towards the dangerous middle aisles, where there are pictures of completed meals on the box and numbered directions on how to make it happen. At 9pm on a Tuesday night at a grocery store, numbered directions start looking pretty attractive. The next night when I cooked my "1-2-3" meal I noticed that it had a very unappetizing grey color and it had a nice chemical aftertaste. That's when I remembered that work-life balance isn't an option, it's a necessity.

I have no false illusions that I will be running a board meeting, speaking at a conference, and then cooking a three course meal for dinner but I can do a better job of using the same strategic planning that I use to decide what I need to accomplish for the week at work, at home. I can set broad goals about the sort of food I would like my family to eat and how we spend our time together. I can also celebrate those successes at home the same way I celebrate those successes at work with staff. The hard thing about being a parent or a partner is that you don't get performance reviews to tell you that you are doing a good job. You need to figure out what let's you know you are doing a good job, is it well adjusted kids, a happy partner who says nice things about you to their friends, or a family without scurvy? Then enjoy those successes.

The Mistakes We Make

A couple of the case studies we’ve read for my philanthropy class come from the book Great Philanthropic Mistakes by Martin Morse Wooster. So far I’ve read chapters discussing the Carnegie Corporation’s involvement in creating public television and the massive blind investment the Rockefeller Foundation made in standardizing medical education. Wooster also tackles the Annenberg Foundation’s role in school reform (we’re reading that chapter next week) and the MacArthur Foundation's Fellows Program. I’m intrigued enough that I may have to go ahead and buy the book for my own collection!

These readings got me to thinking about foundation mistakes--failed programs that sounded fantastic at the start but, through either environmental circumstance (such as PBS’s competition with the new cable channels) or non-acceptance from the target community (like prominent medical schools dismissing the proposed standardization). Only recently in my 6 years of foundation work have I seen public acknowledgement of foundation mistakes. The first was a Grantcraft publication called When Projects Flounder. The second was a discussion this year at my foundation about learning from failed programs. There have been others here and there, but they seem few and far between.

Why have foundations been so hush-hush about failed programs? With all the emphasis foundations put on grantees talking to each other at our annual convenings about lessons learned, you’d think those of us who work in foundations would be more willing to also trade stories of the grantees that didn’t quite meet our expectations. When I work on developing new funding programs, I would love to not only talk to the foundations who succeeded in a similar initiative but also those who failed miserably. Then, just like my grantees who exchange such stories with each other, I can learn from the mistakes that were made.

Fairy Godmentors and other urban legends

I was at a great meeting of African American women last week who have been brought together to help a local foundation develop a policy strategy for the African American community here in the Twin Cities. We are a varied group of women, both Minnesota natives and recent transplants, younger and older, from the nonprofit, corporate, and business sectors. Each of the participants in well connected in the community and leads their institution. Minnesota is a diverse place but in a spread out, you are often the only one from your community in most meetings type of way. As I have been developing my network of support in my new role at Headwaters, I have found that it is difficult, if not impossible to find women of color in leadership roles in philanthropy. It would be great if I could find another young African American woman running a community foundation that is passionate about social justice so we could compare notes and bond over our similar challenges (if you know that woman let me know). What is more realistic and what I have done for most of my career is to find a varied network of support. I have a variety of roles in this new position: fundraiser, manager, strategic planner, chief networker, spokesperson, and administrator. I have found a lot of amazing women and men with experiences in each of these roles and have relied on them to give me good advice and lots of encouragement as I chart new paths and try new ideas out. For me, there has never been just one great mentor. My mentors are in lots of different fields and have a variety of experiences. Most wouldn't call themselves my mentor if you asked them but they have always been available when I have needed help.

My advice to you is to not wait around for your fairy godmentor either, there are lots of great people already in your network who would be willing to fill that role if you only asked.

Fighting injustice through our work

This morning I was thinking about why it is so important for me to be doing social justice work at this point in time. Every day when I read the news it seems like it gets worse and worse, the economy is collapsing and injustice is at every turn. There is this sort of dread that I have where I don’t want to go to CNN.com but feel like I have to. It reminds me a little of the game operation. I have a four year old son that has just learned the joys of that game. There is sort of hesitation because you want to pull out the funny bone or the spare rib but you are afraid of the consequences (that horrible noise and blinking nose). I also feel that way when I think about fighting injustice. Will my blog posting about racism in the nonprofit sector or a grant that we have made to increase Latino voting bring negative attention to the issue and actually make it harder to fight those injustices because people mobilize against it? So sometimes I feel like with traditional grantmaking you take a pass on those riskier grants when your hands are too shaky and you feel like you might set off the buzzer , what I have found with Headwaters is that our grantees do what my son does, they shut off the game, turn the whole board upside down and shake out what they need. Social justice is about changing the rules of the game when they are unfair.