So, you looking?

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Not long ago I bumped into a headhunter at a cocktail party, a woman I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.  Her second sentence (second!), after, “How are you?” was, “So, are you looking for a job?”

Wow.

The easy questions in fundraising are around tactics, as in, “when is the right time to make an ask?”  There’s nothing wrong with “three-meeting before making an ask” and other rules of thumb, but questions like this one essentially miss the point.

(By the way, my take on this particular rule of thumb is that it is better to ask sooner than you’d like and better to and ask for more than you feel comfortable asking for.  This is primarily about getting through our own fears about asking – we usually take too long – and about recognizing that we are giving the person across the table an opportunity to do something important, and we should help them do something big, not small.)

No matter what approach you take, you’re never going to get out of the starting blocks until you’ve done the internal, personal work of getting out of that space where you see the person across from you as a transaction, as simple dollar signs.  No matter how you dress up your language, if you see your “prospect” as a means to and end then she’ll feel that way.  Whereas if you treat her as a person with whom you are building a real and substantive relationship, you can (counter-intuitively) talk comfortably, early on and directly about money.

It starts with you and how you see the world.  Are you building something, or just taking?

Rediscovery

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Celebrated Ghanian poet Kofi Awoonor, aged 78, was one of the 59 people killed in the Al Shabab terrorist attack at the Westgate shopping center in Nairobi, Kenya.  More than 100 people were injured in the attacks.

My colleague Wei Wei Hsing shared Awoonor’s poem Rediscovery.

Rediscovery (1964)

When our tears are dry on the shore

and the fishermen carry their nets home

and the seagulls return to bird island

and the laughter of the children recedes at night

there shall still linger the communion we forged

the feast of oneness whose ritual we partook of

There shall still be the eternal gateman

who will close the cemetery doors

and send the late mourners away

It cannot be the music we heard that night

that still lingers in the chambers of memory

It is the new chorus of our forgotten comrades

and the halleluyahs of our second selves

The poem can be found in A New Book of African Verse.

Better than nothing?

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

After not being let into Yankee Stadium with a bike helmet three weeks ago, and having to abandon my bike helmet outside of the stadium (it was stolen), I wrote to Mayor Bloomberg’s office extolling the virtues of Citibike and suggesting that, as bikes get more popular in New York City, the Mayor’s Office should consider looking at rules to allow bike helmets in major city establishments (museums, stadiums, libraries, etc.).

I just got a reply:

From: Customer_Service-KG, <Customer_Service_KB@dot.nyc.gov>
Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:23 PM
Subject: 13-9288 re: General Information/bike helmet

Dear Mr. Dichter:

Your email message to Mayor Bloomberg of September 4, 2013 concerning the Yankees’ refusal to allow you to bring your bike helmet into Yankee Stadium was referred to the Department of Transportation.

DOT encourages all cyclists to wear helmets. Commuter cycling increased 262% in New York City from 2000 to 2010. With more bikes on the road, smart cycling is even more crucial to making New York City’s streets safer for everyone using them.

However, we have no control over policies established by Yankee Stadium in prohibiting certain items that the Yankees consider security risks. If you wish to contact the Yankees to discuss this issue you can use the contact form on the Yankees web site at https://secure.mlb.com/help/email.jsp?c_id=nyy&primarySubject=Other&secondarySubject=None&dest=fanfeedback@yankees.mlb.com.

Thank you for your concern in this matter.

Customer Service Division

New York City Department of Transportation

So I get that it’s a big bureaucracy and someone has written a rule that says that replying to all the letters that come in is a good thing. Let’s quickly agree, in hindsight, that this letter is worse than nothing, and let’s use this as an opportunity to remember that every time anyone in our organization speaks they speak for the whole organization, whether we like it or not. This means that our most important people are the ones who talk to our customers, and it’s high time we train and empower them to use their brains.

What baffles me with this particular letter is, if they’re going to write this sort of response, why didn’t they just take it all the way? Something like:

From: Customer_Service-KG, <Customer_Service_KB@dot.nyc.gov>
Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:23 PM
Subject: 13-9288 re: General Information/bike helmet

Dear Mr. Dichter,

Thank you for riding bikes. You wrote to Mayor Bloomberg about your bike-riding and helmet-using, and we at the New York City Department of Transportation are responsible for transportation. Bike-riding therefore falls under our jurisdiction.

We, like you, love bikes, and we are glad that you are riding a bike. You’re not the only one. More people are riding bikes than ever before – lots more! As you can imagine, the more bikers there are, the more chance there is that a bike runs into a bike, or into a car, or even into a person. Sometimes, even, people on bikes just crash for no good reason. It’s terrible when that happens, so it’s good to wear a bike helmet. We are glad that you are wearing a bike helmet and we hope you will continue to do so.

As you can imagine, no matter how much we love biking, and regardless of the fact that biking falls under our jurisdiction at the Department of Transportation, it’s not baseball and it never will be. We’re actually surprised that you don’t know this. Baseball is played in stadiums, and the Yankees in particular play in Yankee Stadium. That stadium is owned by the Yankees, and they make the rules for Yankee Stadium. These rules include the kinds of items, including bike helmets, that can and cannot be brought into Yankee Stadium. They are also responsible for anything that has to do with security, or baseball, in Yankee Stadium. In fact, every single thing that goes at Yankee Stadium is their responsibility, not ours, and they make the rules. So it’s best to talk to them about this issue or about any other issue that concerns doing things in Yankee Stadium, bringing things into Yankee Stadium, or the Yankees. We hope that’s clear to you now.

The good news is that the Yankees have a website, and we even looked it up for you by using Google. The website address is https://secure.mlb.com/help/email.jsp?c_id=nyy&primarySubject=Other&secondarySubject=None&dest=fanfeedback@yankees.mlb.com.

(If that website address is wrong, however, please do not contact us, or the Yankees. In that case you should contact Google. Unfortunately we don’t know how to get in touch with them.)

We wish you the best of luck in contacting the Yankees, and we encourage you to purchase a new bike helmet since bike use is up and bike safety is important to us at the Department of Transportation! However, just to be clear, what you do at Yankee Stadium is your own damn business.

If you have any additional questions involving bikes or anything else involving transportation of any kind in New York City, feel free to contact us.

Thank you for your concern in this matter.

Customer Service Division

New York City Department of Transportation

Joking aside, getting this sort of correspondence right isn’t difficult.

For example, on Friday I had trouble getting a bike out of a dock at Citibike and was worried that my key was blocked for some reason. Here’s the reply I got from NYC Bike Share (which runs Citibike):

Thank you for contacting NYC Bike Share we have reviewed your account and od onto show any open trips or your key being deactivated. Please try your key again at a different station and on multiple bikes, any bike with a steady red light before inserting your key is out of service. If it still does not work for you such as not getting any lights, or never getting the green light please contact us and we will replace your key.

For additional comments or inquiries, please respond to this email. Please sign up for our e-mail list and visit our website regularly for updates.

Regards,

April

Customer Service

I received this email three hours after I emailed them (three hours!), and I was so happy with the response that I wrote back:

thanks I really appreciate this note – I’ll try again on Monday when I’m back in the city.

Sasha

Get this, they’re not stopping there – they replied to that note too!

Dear Sasha,

Thank you for conatcting NYC Bike Share.

We will be awating your call to let us know weather or not your key is working so that we can have a new key sent out to you if need be.

Regards,

Chris E.

So here’s the big question for the folks at the DoT: do I care that April has a typo in her email and Chris E. didn’t spell “contacting” “awaiting” or “whether” right? Of course not. What I care about is a timely and substantive response that sounds like it was written by a human being, and if anything the fact that there are errors means each note isn’t going through four reviews before being sent out. The extra note saying “we’re awaiting your call”…can you imagine such a sentence feeling real in the DoT note? Not only did they not write that, they couldn’t have because I would have never believed that they want to hear from me ever again, nor would I ever want to write to them again.

Keep it human, every time, or don’t bother writing back.

(end of rant)

Impact Investing – From the Margins to the Mainstream

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

[Note: this post originally appeared on the Acumen blog]

Today, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is releasing a new report titled, From the Margins to the Mainstream: Assessment of the Impact Investment Sector and Opportunities to Engage Mainstream Investors.  The report aims, in the author’s words, to “provide an initial assessment of the sector and identify the factors constraining the acceleration of capital into the field of impact investing.”WEF Impact Investing Report

The report serves as a field guide for anyone looking to allocate capital into impact investing, targeting in particular the mainstream providers of capital (e.g. pension funds) that are, by and large, sitting on the sidelines.

Unlike some of the previous comprehensive reports on impact investing, the WEF report avoids the temptation of contributing to the hype around impact investing.  Rather, the authors, Michael Drexler and Abigail Noble, working in collaboration with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, provide a clear-eyed assessment of the state of the market today, collecting and clearly presenting much of the available aggregate data for the sector and also speaking directly to those who are managing mainstream institutional capital to understand how they view impact investing and what it would take for them to deploy capital into the space.

Clarifying Definitions

This report will serve as a powerful jumping-off point for the next stage of conversations within impact investing, and also, I hope, will accomplish the not-so-small goals of putting behind us the definitional questions of “what do we mean by impact investing” and “is impact investing an asset class?”

Let’s start with the definition of impact investing.  The WEF working group on impact investing, of which I was a member, started by wrestling with this core definitional question, and, as usual, the group was split between debate on the substance of the definition and fatigue that we still, as a sector, are stuck returning to first principles.  Indeed, between the GIIN, ANDE, leading practitioners like Pierre Omidyar and Matt Bannick, JP Morgan Social Finance, and the G8 Social Investing Forum we still don’t have an agreed-upon definition of impact investing.  Hopefully, with this report, those days are behind us.

The report defines impact investing, simply, as “an investment approach that intentionally seeks to create both financial return and positive social or environmental impact that is actively measured.”  The notable words in this definition are “intentionally” and “actively measured” – for how can we be impact investors if we do not intend to create impact, and how can we know if we have created impact if we do not actively measure what we have accomplished in both financial and social terms?  What unites impact investors is a shared purpose (“intention”) in creating social impact, and all the diversity of investment theses, sector focus, and expected risk / return profile should not obscure this fact.  And, as a sector we must set minimum standards around social impact measurement, and continue to drive the practice of assessing the social impact, in order to demonstrate to ourselves and to the world where and how we are making a difference.

The WEF report also quickly and elegantly dismisses the notion that impact investing is or should be an asset class, stating that impact investing “is a criterion by which investments are made across asset classes. An asset class is traditionally defined as securities or investments that behave similarly under varying market conditions and that are governed by a similar set of rules and regulations. Under this definition, it is clear that impact investing is an investment approach across asset classes, or a lens through which investment decisions are made, and not a stand-alone asset class.”  Hopefully this succinct statement, and the supporting arguments in the report, will put this question to bed once and for all.

The Perspective of Mainstream Investors

To date, according to the WEF report (sourcing 2012 data from GIIN and JP Morgan), the largest providers of capital into impact investing to date are Family Offices/High Net Worth Individuals and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) – which is surprising since together Family Offices and DFIs hold just 2.5% of all global assets.  The goal of the WEF report is to demystify impact investing for the holders of the other 97.5% of global assets, and the authors started by talking to these holders of capital to see what they think of impact investing today.  The results of these conversations are quite sobering.  For example, in surveying representatives of US-based pension funds the authors discovered that:

[The WEF] survey results indicate that US-based pension funds are generally unfamiliar and confused by the term “impact investing.” Almost all (81%) of the respondents have heard of the term before, but most feel that it is another term for responsible or sustainable investing (36%) or that it is a noble way to lose money (32%). Only 9% felt that impact investing is a viable investment approach. As such, only 6% of respondents are currently making impact investments today.

The question, of course, is whether these U.S.-based pension fund managers are missing something or if, instead, we are in the early days of impact investing and it is appropriate for mainstream capital to, by and large, be sitting on the sidelines.

One telling piece of data from the report is that of the 242 impact investing funds assessed in April 2013, 62% of these funds had less than a three year track record, indicating that it is very early days in this market.  Furthermore, much of the capital in the market today, especially capital outside of microfinance funds, is deployed in long-term, illiquid investments, so it should not be surprising that mainstream investors are taking a wait-and-see attitude since financial returns for most fund managers are largely unrealized.  On the flip side, these data reinforce that, for those who are willing to take on risk and be first movers in this space, there are tremendous opportunities.

Recommendations

The WEF report ends with a series of recommendations around what it will take to accelerate the growth of the impact investing ecosystem and, in turn, bring more mainstream capital into the space.  These recommendations – three each for impact investment funds, impact enterprises, philanthropists and foundations, governments, and intermediaries – are the most actionable part of the report for those of us in the sector, and they should be taken seriously.   The recommendations that strike me as the most important are:

  1. For impact investing funds: be clear and transparent about financial returns and standardize impact reporting.   In this next phase of development of our sector, we have an urgent need for segmentation, and this will not be possible without real data.  It is up to all impact investors to build the systems to collect data on financial and social performance, and take the steps to share it, so that the world can develop a much better understanding of actual rather than targeted performance.
  2. For impact enterprises: proactively measure and report on social and environmental impact.  It is up to the sector as a whole to standardize measurement practices and to bring the costs of measurement down, and up to leading impact enterprises – especially those first movers who have reached scale – to show what is possible in terms of measuring and sharing social and environmental impact data.  We need these success stories to show us the way.
  3. For philanthropists and foundations: Help lower risk by providing grants to early-stage enterprises and anchor investments to impact investment products and funds.  Given how much capital is still sitting on the sidelines, as well as the fact that philanthropists and foundations have been the first movers in this space, we need continued deployment of risk capital (grants and subordinated capital) – to companies and to funds – from those who understand the space best.
  4. For governments: Help de-risk the ecosystem through innovative financing mechanisms.  Whether through guarantees (like the New York Acquisition Fund), subordinated positions in funds, or other mechanisms (e.g. Social Impact Bonds or Development Impact Bonds), governments can use their capital to accelerate the growth of the sector and attract mainstream capital.  Impact investing is creating public goods and governments should be comfortable using public monies to accelerate the growth of this ecosystem – including by luring in mainstream financial players.
  5. For intermediaries: aggregate data on impact investing and publish the findings.  This is the clear corollary to the first recommendation.  Our sector urgently needs real, available, public data on financial and social performance across different investment strategies, sectors, stage of investment and geography, in order to better discern the realities on the ground.

This WEF report is comprehensive, clear, and actionable, providing a tremendous opportunity for all actors in the space to accelerate the development of the impact investing ecosystem.  It is exciting to see how far we have come, as well as to have a better sense of the next building blocks we will need to put in place to continue to grow and deepen the impact of our sector.

You’re repeating yourself

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Why yes, that’s on purpose.

Did you know that children often need to be exposed to new foods 10-15 times before they’re happy to eat them?

Same thing with ideas and action, it turns out.

“Leadership”

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

A few weeks ago I was speaking to a friend and advisor and he asked me, “what’s your definition of leadership?”

I thought about it, and then thought about it a little more, and a little more… until I realized that I didn’t have a definition. Not a good one, a real one, something that was more than words and that really means something to me.

So I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and I came up with, “giving those around you the desire and the belief that they can accomplish great things.”

His definition, he told me the other day, was simpler still: “winning over the hearts and minds of those you’re leading. ”

Hearts and minds. Minds and hearts. Both.

Yeah, that’s right.

Less ubiquity, please

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

My office is in the Google building so I’ve gotten to see lots of Google Glass beta testers riding up and down the elevators.  My bet is that Google Glass will be a product flop, but that it will be a bit like the space program – the product itself won’t sell much or be relevant to most people, but the underlying technology will probably have a huge impact on our lives.

This may be old fogey-ish of me but I don’t believe that it is just a generational question that keeps me from embracing the notion of ever-present, ever-available access to the web and email and apps with the tilt of my eyes.  Yes, I could imagine that at some not-so-distant date all glasses will come with a camera option (the head is a nice, steady way to take pictures) but I don’t buy the argument we need Google Glass because with it we at least won’t look down at our smartphones when we’re at a restaurant or in a large group.  What matters isn’t where our eyes go, what matters is where our attention lies.

And I suspect that over time we will have to re-teach our children the skill of sustained attention, the skill of having an empty moment and not doing anything with it, the skill of intense conversation and real listening.  Did you know that the average teen sends 3,000 texts a month?

In today’s world we all are continually experimenting with the lines between connection / productivity / responsiveness and distraction / rudeness.  Two colleagues of mine suggested the following four rules for managing incoming email and handheld devices, which I liked:

  1. Turn off desktop alerts of new emails coming in (the little box that pops up)  (in Outlook: File > Options > Mail > Message Arrival > Uncheck “Display a Desktop Alert”)
  2. No reading email before breakfast
  3. No reading email while in transit
  4. No phone or email in the bedroom

My own scorecard is as follows:

  1. I turned of desktop alerts for new emails about a month ago and I love it.
  2. I almost never read email before breakfast and when I do it’s a sign that I’m under a crazy deadline or stressed for some other reason.
  3. Hmmm.  I made a rule a couple of years ago not to look at my phone while in elevators, and I’ve stuck to that (it had become a reflex), but I spend enough time in transit that I don’t know that I can commit to this one.
  4. I do have my phone in the bedroom but I can honestly say it’s 95% as a time-piece and alarm

 

In reality these four rules are a really low bar.  Increasingly I think we will all be playing with the limits and rules that work for us, and everyone’s line will be different.  What makes me nervous is when I get reflexive about checking.  That sort of unconscious behavior feels unproductive.

 

I remember a year ago I was on a family vacation and my wife told me how proud she was of me, because one day on vacation I’d let my iPhone battery die.  That should not be seen as a major accomplishment.

When Can Impact Investing Create Real Impact?

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Paul Brest and Kelly Born recently published a fascinating article in Stanford Social Innovation Review called “When Can Impact Investing Create Real Impact?”   In additional to this article being very much worth the read as a major contribution to the theoretical underpinnings of impact investing, SSIR took the step of framing the piece as “Up for Debate” and they asked a number of leading thinkers in the space to share their perspectives on the article.

The combination of the original article and the responses serves as one of the most up-to-date, unvarnished perspectives on where impact investing is today, what different leading players see as the strengths and fault lines within the space, and where people come out on the core questions of what is (and is not) investing for impact, how social impact and financial returns are either complementary or in tension, and the role of measurement (assessing impact) in creating long-term change.

For those of you who are in impact investing or want to understand the space, I highly recommend the full suite of responses by Audrey Choi (Morgan Stanley), Nancy Pfund (DBL Investors), Amit Bouri (GIIN), Beth Richardson (B Lab), Brian Trelstad (Bridges), Mike McCreless and Catherine Gill (Root Capital), Matt Bannick and Paula Goldman (Omidyar), Sterling Speirn (Kellogg Foundation),  Nick O’Donohoe (Big Society Capital), Antony Bugg-Levine (Nonprofit Finance Fund), John Goldstein (Imprint Capital), Harold Rosen (Grassroots Business Fund), David Wood (Hauser Center), Alvaro Rodriguez and Michael Chu (IGNIA),

My own take on the article was this:

Paul Brest and Kelly Born’s article brings a welcome analytical framing to the emerging field of impact investing. The sector has been growing exponentially, with a large number of new funds being raised and increasingly mainstream visibility. In June 2013, UK prime minister David Cameron kicked off a G8 session in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, on impact investing.

The irony is that despite the increased attention and funding for impact investing, there is still considerable debate about what actually constitutes an impact investment. Indeed, some of the most aggressive claims about the size of the impact-investing market—generally agreed to be a few billion dollars today, and predicted by some to grow to anywhere between a few hundred billion and $1 trillion by 2020—hinge on loose definitions. For example, much of the predicted hundreds of billions in impact investing comes from the microfinance sector, capital that effectively has been rebranded “impact investment.” And a considerable amount of private capital that was already being invested in developing countries seems increasingly to be called impact investments.

This lack of clarity about what impact investing is and isn’t makes it harder for investors to understand the landscape, harder for funds to raise money, and harder for entrepreneurs to navigate a sea of new investors describing themselves in similar ways but behaving very differently in terms of return expectations, risk appetites, and long-term objectives.

Brest and Born’s article bravely takes on many of these core definitional issues, and it is meticulous in defining the types of impact an investor could have: enterprise (the product or service makes a difference), investment (provision of capital that would otherwise not be available or be more costly), and nonmonetary (supporting the ecosystem) impacts.

Nonmonetary impacts are the clearest and least controversial—providing technical assistance, building the enabling environment or the ecosystem, even bringing in more mainstream capital. Most of these activities are familiar forms of enterprise support (though grossly underdeveloped within impact investing). Investment impact, in Brest and Born’s view, hinges on the concept of additionality—to be an impact investor, one must be making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. For example, one can be an impact investor seeking high rates of financial return if one is exploiting frictions in the market (such as small deal size or misperception of trade-offs between risk and returns) that keep others from deploying capital. Appropriately, return expectations alone tell you little about who is in and who is out.

In effect, this definition narrows the field of impact investing. By asserting that an investor in a highly developed subsector of the market—where people compete for deals and capital flows freely—is not an impact investor seems to imply, for example, that much of the capital going in to microfinance today is not impact investment. This is an interesting assertion (nothing happened that wouldn’t have otherwise) but it also feels like analytical parsing: it is true that an investor is not having impact if she is doing something that would happen anyway, but that tells you little about whether the investment has created enterprise impact, which seems like a more important question.

This brings us to the central question of enterprise impact. Ultimately, what we care about is whether, how, and why impact investments improve peoples’ lives. Yet unfortunately, besides a broad framing, the article does not dig deep into enterprise impact outside of the wholly accurate, if nearly clinical, observation that “the absence of data and analysis makes it difficult for impact investors to assess the social impact of the enterprises they invest in.”

As such, the article reflects the current state of dialogue in impact investing, which I hope marks the closing of the first chapter of sector-formation and the start of the second. Nearly all of the discussion in impact investing currently is focused on the capital-formation end of the value chain: Who is an impact investor? What are returns? And yet the things that matter the most happen at the other end of the value chain, at the level of customers and the enterprises that serve them.

We must continue to push further and faster in our work to analyze how people’s lives are or are not improving as a result of our work. This begins with the simple expectation that one cannot be an impact investor if one cannot articulate the impact one aims to have and assess whether or not that impact occurred. The IRIS taxonomy and the GIIRS ratings system serve as strong foundations for these efforts, but they are just a starting point. We need to continue to push for better, more cost-effective forms of data collection—including integrating technology into our measurement efforts—to learn more about who customers are, what their needs are, how those needs are or are not being met, and, at a minimum, what outcomes occurred.

Without this type of information we risk creating a Potemkin village, one that looks nice from the outside but crashes to the ground the moment you knock on the door to peek inside.

The Yankees put safety first

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I’m no big baseball fan, but I was excited to go to a friend’s surprise 40th birthday party at Yankee stadium the other night. In addition to wanting to celebrate with a friend, it felt like a very New York thing to do.

I happily rediscovered that Yankee stadium is really easy to get to by public transportation – Google maps told me I could take any of three subway routes or Metro North. I got there from downtown Manhattan in 30 minutes, taking the A train to 145th street and transferring to the B train along with the guy in the Yankee’s jersey who was trading stories with his 9-year-old daughter who was going with him to the game.

I got off at 161st street and I made my way to Gate 4. There was a guy inspecting each bag perfunctorily and asking each person to turn on their cellphone, which I didn’t pay any attention to until he told me I couldn’t bring my bike helmet into the stadium.

My bike helmet? The bike helmet I wear so that I can use the Citibikes that are Mayor Bloomberg’s pride and joy?

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s a security risk….If you like you can talk to my supervisor.”

The supervisor was worse. He talked to me for a minute, then got a call on his cellphone and disappeared. I waited. Five minutes later I went back to the first guy and asked for the supervisor again. When he came back out, my pleas notwithstanding, he told me there was no way the helmet could come in, no way they could hang on to it for 5 minutes while I got my friend’s car keys to put it in her car, no way I could leave it behind one of the many desks in the lobby. What I could do was go to the nearest locker, which apparently was seven blocks away at a bar.

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.

“What you do with your property is not my concern, sir.”

(I beg to differ. I didn’t have a “disposing of or storing my innocuous property” problem until I bumped into you.)

So there I am, outside of Yankee stadium, the clock ticking on the “surprise” moment in the surprise birthday party, with an apparently illicit mostly-foam bike helmet that I have no way to store or dispose of. I wish I’d known at the time that there is no mention whatsoever of bike helmets not being allowed in Yankee Stadium on the Yankee Stadium Security Policies web page (though it says laptops are not permitted, and they are), but I didn’t. So instead I pleaded a bit more, I asked for more explanation, and I’m told that a bike helmet can be used as a weapon, at which point it also didn’t occur to me to say that a beer bottle would be a better weapon, as would a full soda can, both of which I later had access to inside the stadium.

Trapped, powerless, and out of time, I gave in. I walked 20 yards to a nearby lamp post and clipped the helmet on to it, assuming I’d never see the helmet again but secretly hoping that the better angels of human nature would prevail; that something hidden in plain sight would somehow be overlooked; or that the surly supervisor would surreptitiously keep an eye on my helmet for me (it was in his line of sight), as a sort of karmic payback for being so woefully unhelpful and unsympathetic.

Sadly, there was no happy ending. When I got back a couple of hours later the helmet was gone.

The helmet only cost me 30 bucks at Dick’s Sporting Goods, and this is mostly a trivial story – except for how patently absurd the whole thing is, how an incredibly low bar wasn’t crossed by anyone who could have said “hey, this is crazy, go ahead” or “let me help in some small way,” and how it’s so easy to have rules and institutions and just a little bit of power, be abused, even in the smallest of ways.

And, if Citibike is going to become a real part of the fabric of New York City life, perhaps our fine Mayor, as a parting gesture, could mandate a blanket permission for bike helmets to be allowed in buildings, museums, and, yes, stadiums.

Otherwise, pretty soon I’ll get sick of buying new helmets, and will be tempted to flaunt all the rules and sit outside the game with my helmet and a 32 ounce soda, jeering.

Starting

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Jodi found my blog thanks to Seth’s incredibly nice post earlier this week, and she sent me an email in response to Tuesday’s post that ended with:

The biggest thing you’ve inspired is the project I’m starting today: Be rejected by 100 people in the next 7 days.  I will be pitching potential donors (for 5 full ride nursing school scholarships for my friends in Blanchard, Haiti).

Cool.

If you want to make sure Jodi has the chance for the full 100 rejections you can wait until next week before checking out what she’s up to and why she’s raising the money, or you could go ahead and do it today.  Jodi and he team are already two-thirds of the way there, and they just need to raise $2,500 more to hit their goal.

We come across interesting ideas all the time, risky ideas some of the time, ideas that scare us every now and then.

We cross a line when we go from “that looks interesting, I might want to try that,” to “that looks interesting, I’m doing it today.”

Jodi Sagorin