Tag: Change

What I wish

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

I wish the world could look at images of beauty and resilience and feel compelled to act.

I wish people would see photographs by Nuru photographers, photos that capture the spirit and challenges of the life of the poor in the developing world, and share these photos, these stories, more than 70 million times. Not out of pity, but out of joy.

I wish that, at my local Starbucks at 6:30 on Saturday morning, instead of seeing Kony2012 posters in the window I’d see one of these beautiful photographs from Lagos, Nigeria; from Nairobi, Kenya; from Chennai or from Bhopal in India.

The Nuru project curates breathtaking images from around the world, shares them with the public and uses the proceeds to help nonprofits.  Their first partnership was with Acumen Fund, and together with +acumen chapters, they have helped us raise more than $150,000.

The pictures tell a different story – one of connectedness, one of shared possibility, one of dignity.

I know this blog post and the Nuru site won’t get seen hundreds of millions of times.  But if you love photography, maybe you will check out the site and buy a print for a dear friend.  Maybe you will email the one photography buff you know and let them know about it.  Maybe you’ll spread the word on Facebook and on Twitter about this “this gr8 stuff u hve 2 see NOW!!!”

Let’s start spreading a different story.

The risk of being a bull

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Time is the scarcest of all professional resources, yet we never seem to get enough of it.  A recent conversation with a friend and advisor helped me understand that one of my greatest professional strengths and joys might be exacerbating my time problem.

Earlier in my career, success was doing the right thing in a challenging situation.  Then later on success becam: me, my team, or my organization doing the right thing.

As my span of responsibility has grown, I cannot do everything and I can’t be – and shouldn’t be – involved in every step from here to there.  Obvious enough.  So, outside of work that’s on my plate, I focus my energies on helping those around me solve problems.  I love doing this and I’m generally pretty good at it, which makes it both is intellectually and emotionally rewarding.  I get to problem-solve (fun!) and help a colleague (fun! fun!).  Bingo!

The helpful but very sobering insight is that my enjoyment and capacity at this kind of problem-solving might not be the right end-game.  Because it is so rewarding and because the outcomes are (often) positive – both practically and emotionally – have I created a learned response and, like the proverbial bull seeing a waving red cloth, do I, when presented with a situation in which I might be helpful, just jump in and help?

Why might this be a bad thing?

The suggestion was that consistently helping to solve a set of problems keeps me in the business (forever) of being involved in helping solve those sorts of problems – without ever asking the question: what sort of problems do I want, in the long run, to be in the business of solving?  For example, it could be that I always want to have a role to play in key hiring decisions or important strategic choices, but is there another set of situations that other people are better equipped and better positioned to resolve in the long term?

If so, when I’m presented with a cool, fun, challenging and interesting situation, the first question I should ask myself isn’t “what should we do here?” but rather “is this the kind of problem I should be in the business of helping solve in the long term?”  If it is, great.  If not, how would I act differently?

Whenever I’m looking for advice about a tough situation, working through the solution with a respected colleague teaches me something.  But that process of osmosis could be accelerated by a much more explicit, meta-conversation about how I’m engaging with the problem and how my more experienced colleague is coming up with different and better approaches and solutions to that same problem.

That’s the conversation I suspect I need to be having more often.

Harder, requiring different muscles, and, toughest of all, forcing me to look at all that great short-term feedback I’m getting and say: this thing that I love doing might just be part of the reason I have too little time on my hands.

How Many Ways Can We Be Generous in a Single Day?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Note: this post first appeared on the Huffington Post.  A lot of you know the background, but many have asked how this year’s Generosity Day compared to 2011, so I wanted to share that.  Thank you for making it happen!

That was the question we posed to the world as part of an effort to re-boot Valentine’s Day as Generosity Day. The premise was simple: Could we transform a day that’s been weighted down by overpriced flowers and boxes of candy into one known for active, purposeful generosity to all?

The idea for Generosity Day was hatched last year, after I conversation I had with Katya Andresen at Network for Good about my “Generosity Experiment” — a month in which I said “yes” to absolutely ever request for help.

The idea was simple enough, but changing my standard response from “no” to “yes” wasn’t. Each time I gave to a homeless man or a musician on the street, each time I got a coffee or ate out and I tipped outrageously, each opportunity to help a colleague or greet someone I’d passed every day but didn’t know — these were all opportunities to reassess how I walk through the world, to reevaluate what had become normal behavior of being too rushed, too closed off, too much in my own head to fully see everyone around me.

It was transformative and I wanted others to have that same experience, even if just for a day. Generosity Day 2011 was born out of this very simple idea: Could we get the world to say “yes” for a day? Amazingly, with less than 72 hours of lead time and no budget, we did, so we knew we were on to something and decided to do it again in 2012 to make it even bigger and better.

The day surpassed all expectations, as people all over the world participated and shared their stories. The word spread on social media, where we counted more than 5,000 tweets seen by millions of people, hundreds of articles and blog posts (too many to count), three amazing organizations made videos on their own dime that were seen more than 40,000 times in one day (here, here and here), and Kevin Bacon even tweeted and took an awesome photo to help spread the word. None of this would have been possible without the spontaneous partnership of organizations like Network for Good, Global Giving, the Case Foundation, Kiva, the Gates Foundation, See3 Communications, the Jubilee Project and amazing bloggers like Beth Kanter, Brene Brown, Kelly Wallace, and, of course, Katya Andresen.

More exciting still, thanks to our friends at Causes we were able to create the Generosity Day Causes site, both so people could learn about Generosity Day and so they could share their own generosity stories.

One person shared that she approached an elderly woman on the street and gave her a rose, only to be told that this the first Valentine’s Day flower she’d ever received. Another woman finally had coffee with someone she’d long thought could a new friend — and she was right. A third person told an 80-year-old woman how beautiful she was and the woman shed a tear, saying that no one had told that to her that in years.

Much more than any statistics about the word spreading far and wide, it is these actions that made Generosity Day real, these actions that created innumerable moments of joy. We heard stories of anonymous acts of kindness, outrageous over-tipping and heartfelt thank you notes. We heard about people paying strangers’ tolls on the parkway, folks passing out croissants to the morning-rush crowd, and loads of people who spent the day or the night volunteering. We heard from people who were donating money, and those who were donating blood. We heard from so many people who made the day better for others and experienced the joy of generosity themselves.

These are the actions that rippled through people’s lives, these are the ways that people created new expectations and a renewed sense of possibility — about how they can act, how others might act towards them, and what, collectively, could happen if we all were more purposefully generous each day.

You too can be part of this movement, today or any day. All it takes is the decision to say “yes.”

Generosity Day – in graphs

~ Sasha ~ 52 Comments

It’s been more than two years since my original Generosity Experiment. The experiment was an intuitive, gut reaction to an incongruence I felt between my commitment to creating massive social change, my work with philanthropists to support this mission, and how I saw myself behave in the face of acute need right in front of me.  The “Experiment” was just that: a chance to test what it felt like to live with a totally different orientation.  It was a commitment to take a door that was too closed for my taste and open it wide.

Of course the story spread thanks to Generosity Day last year and my Generosity Experiment talk getting posted on TED, so I’m having (and witnessing) a lot more conversations about generosity and Generosity Day.

One thing I’ve observed is that the powerful original story – of giving to a homeless person when asked – is both helping and hindering my ability to explain what Generosity Day is all about.  To be clear, generosity day is not designed to be a philanthropic strategy (“say yes to everything”). Rather, the whole point is to use the day (the month) to develop a different practice of generosity in our lives – whatever that means to you.

Since I’m a visual thinker, I’ve drawn some graphs to explain what the Generosity Experiment meant in my life.  The red line represents my perceived “ideal” level of generosity (for me).  The blue line represents my perception of how generous I actually am.

In the time leading up to my original Generosity Experiment, two things were happening.  First, because I was spending so much time with philanthropists, I was gaining a deeper understanding of philanthropy and of giving, and part of my reflection was that generosity was more important than I’d understood it to be. That’s why the red line slopes upwards: what I understood to be the “ideal” in terms of generosity was going up.

Second, you’ll notice that the blue line (my perception of how generous I actually am), is sloping down.  That reflects my experience of spending all my time and energy understanding how difficult it is to create social change efforts that really make a difference.  And so, increasingly, I began to feel like more and more things didn’t hit the bar (“what’s the model for sustainability?” “show me your impact numbers!” “what’s your broader theory of change?” etc.), which, practically speaking, meant that I was saying “no” to more and more people/organizations that were asking for my support.

This is what I meant when I said that I felt like what was smart was keeping me from doing what was right.

This next graph represents what happens (could happen) when you conduct a generosity experiment. You choose to be exceptionally generous and open for a period of time.  That experience changes you.  It gives you the opportunity to reflect on old habits and consider whether they’re still serving you well.   Of course the experiment eventually ends, and you revert to “regular life,” but if the experiment changed you in some significant way, then you reset to a “new normal” of generosity (again, whatever that means to you) – in the graph, that’s why the blue line stays above the red line after the Generosity Experiment.

To you psychoanalytically-minded folks out there, a generosity experiment is a tiny undertaking in cognitive behavioral therapy.  For those on the more spiritual end of the spectrum, it is like a yoga or a meditation practice – a chance, in a controlled environment for a defined period of time to practice acting differently so that, over time, new practices pervade your life.

Of course the big question is: what happens in just one day?  Does it touch peoples’ hearts enough to create a little shift?  Are enough people touched by millions of acts of generosity that they’re changed as well?  And if we can create a shift for millions of people, will that create a massive change?  I think it will.

Outside of revealing what an incredible analytical dork I am, I hope this post can help broaden the conversation – your conversation – about generosity day.

The whole without a map thing is not (just) a metaphor

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I was running a familiar four mile loop and decided I was feeling good enough that I’d extend the run.  Rather than take the final right turn a half mile from the “end” of the run, I kept going.  A half mile later, on an unfamiliar street not knowing exactly where I was or where I was going, I lost all my mojo.  My stride shortened, I felt the spring go out of my step, everything started to tighten up.

Was I actually, all of a sudden, so much more tired?

No, I was just off my map:  the calculus of where I was relative to where I had to go had stopped processing; I literally didn’t know if I was heading north or east; and I couldn’t tell if each step was taking me closer to or further from my destination.

I wasn’t tired, I was just disoriented.  And once I realized that, realized that the simple act of feeling lost had gotten into my head, not my legs or lungs, I exhaled and things felt better (though not completely back to normal).

There’s a lot of great advice out there that we find so appealing but we stop short of actually taking the advice – because it would be silly, wouldn’t it, to actually go all the way.  So we read and believe that success today comes the moment you recognize that there is no map, no path someone has charted out for you to follow.  And we think that’s a nice idea but do we actually, literally, practice what it feels like to be somewhere without a map, do we observe how we react to this situation and learn how to apply that reflection to our lives?

We read about radical email strategies that could save us hours a day (whether Leo Babuta’s email ninja tricks which include limiting all responses to 5 sentences or less, or experiments like ‘no email Friday,’ recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal) and we nod but then we just tweak things around the edges.

Someone suggests that we could shorten our meetings and change our meeting culture by having all meetings standing up or only holding meetings to support a decision that’s already been made and we think it’s a nice idea that wouldn’t really work for us and our company culture.

Maybe, just maybe, these ideas aren’t metaphors.  Maybe they are actual, real ideas.  And maybe nothing would go wrong if we actually tried them, for real, for a little while before rejecting them out of hand.

Go ahead, go for a walk or run this weekend without a map and see how it feels.

Says who?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I snapped this picture at the local U.S. Post Office.  The question is: who exactly said that they are the “official shipper of the holidays?”

The answer, of course, is: they did

By deciding something and saying it out loud, you give yourself a shot at becoming that thing.  There’s no consecration process.  No one anoints your idea.  No one adjudicates on making your dream official.  There’s no judge and jury whose permission you need.

You just commit, and then you follow through like crazy.

That’s when it becomes real, not before.

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p.s. There’s also a way to do this on the back-end, by naming what you’ve done in a way that empowers your tribe.  For example, I’d noticed a month ago that I had cell coverage inside my local subway station, but it was only today, when I saw the sign from AT&T telling me that this was one of 6 stations with in-station coverage, that I was handed a story I can share.

p.p.s. this isn’t a post about the US Postal Service, which is struggling mightily, or even about the strange sign which seems more like a plea than anything.

Each and every dollar

~ Sasha ~ 8 Comments

If you work at a nonprofit, as I do, you might pause and consider: each and every dollar for your organization comes from a gift.

Obvious at some level, but if you stop to think about this for a second your perspective changes.  Think of the seriousness and the intention of every donor, the dreams – small or big – they attach to the donation they have made.

I’m not at all advocating for penury for nonprofit staff; in fact I firmly believe that we need the best people to create massive change.  The problems we are working on are so important, so challenging, so complex, and pay is part of the equation in getting and keeping the best folks.

But there’s a certain humility that comes with remembering that you are working on someone else’s dime, that no matter where you are and what you are doing, you are engaged in service work thanks to the trust that someone has placed in you and in your organization.

It never ceases to amaze me that the nonprofit sector has a reputation for being less rigorous, less focused, less fast-paced, less strategic than the private sector.  First, because all the people I know who work at nonprofits put their hearts and souls into their work every day.  Second because once we’ve made the decision to do this work we have no choice but to be completely committed and to do our best work every day.

The minimum bar is to treat the money your organization spends like your own.

The higher bar is to remember that it is a gift from someone else, entrusted to you to make a change in the world.

It’s a huge responsibility.

The generosity muscle

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

As we start to spread the word about Generosity Day 2012 (thanks to all who signed up to be part of the core group  – more coming soon!!), we’ve naturally gotten a lot of “why” questions – mostly from enthusiasts who want to be able to explain the day to others, and some from (friendly) skeptics.

If anything came from the heart for me, it is Generosity Day, so unpacking “why” has been an instructive exercise in reverse engineering of an intuitive decision.  Therefore, this (and subsequent) reflections aren’t answering the question “why did I do it in the first place?” (meaning: this was the plan all along), they’re answering, “what insights have I gained along the way?”

One of the core insights is that for many of us – especially those who are more cerebral (and in this I include a big swath of the “smart philanthropy” crowd, whether donors or social enterprise enthusiasts) – our thinking around smart social change is crowding out our natural instincts about how we want to be in the world.  Put another way, we are letting our thinking about what’s best get in the way of how we want to act.

Ironically, in our pursuit of better solutions, we continually reinforce our own practice of turning things down – things that don’t meet our “evolved” criteria of good social work.  The end result of this is atrophy of our generosity muscle, since anything that is underused withers away in time.

The intentional practice of generosity is a way to strengthen this muscle, to get us more comfortable using it, and to make using it a more regular part of our lives.

That’s very different from claiming that saying “yes” to everything is the best kind of philanthropy.  It isn’t.  But philanthropy that doesn’t incorporate generosity doesn’t make sense in my book.

If you’re the equivalent of muscle-bound when it comes to generosity – if it’s part of who you are and how you walk through the world every day – then you probably don’t need Generosity Day.  But I suspect many of us could use a generosity tune-up.  Indeed, my wager is that a large group of people taking the same leap of faith around generosity, pushing themselves to do something outside of their comfort zone, and then coming back together to share and reflect on that experience, will generate new insights for all of us.

For those in our core group (could be you!) who want to help spread the word about Generosity Day, we’re going to propose undertaking a one week generosity experiment, before October 31st, to see how it feels.

You could give it a go too.

Go ahead, flex the generosity muscle, reflect on the experience, see how it affects how you go through the world.

Gifto reducto ad infinitum

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

A donor with $50,000 to give faces a surprising conundrum: she knows, intellectually (and perhaps in her gut) that $50,000  is itself not enough to make lasting, large-scale change.  However, we can all agree that $50,000 is an awful lot of money, and the donor is well within her rights to ask what will happen as the result of her donation.

Donors who push hard on this question may be asking one of three things.  It could be about accountability (“I’m going to make sure you’re not going to waste it”); it could be about comparison shopping (“the nonprofit down the street told me they could buy __________ with this money”); or it could be about the story they need to tell someone (their board, their spouse, themselves) about what they “bought” with the gift.

The real challenge here is that a number of seemingly contradictory truths happily co-exist: if you give someone in need $5 worth of ________ (de-worming; safe drinking water; emergency shelter), their lives will absolutely be significantly better for a period of time – so 10,000 “significantly betters” are potentially on offer for this $50,000 donation. OR a few medium-sized things can be built (a library, a well, a school) for $50,000. AND we also know that large-scale, lasting change comes in much bigger bites – whether to fill that school with teachers; to transform the educational outcomes for a community; to dig not one well but instead to build an organization that’s going to solve the water problem for a village or a hundred or a thousand villages.

So $5 and $50,000 and $5 million and $50 million all co exist.

More complicated still, each of those numbers is, alternately, either really big relative to the problem ($5 is a lot for a subsistence farmer making $1-2 a day), and small for the problem ($50 million doesn’t hold a candle to the annual health budget of even a very small, very poor country).

Echoing a theme from yesterday, the only truly satisfactory answer I’ve found is around solidarity: this is a change we are making together, this is what success looks like, let’s make this happen…and you figure out the piece that you can do relative to your own ability to give.

I recognize that this isn’t the strongest sales pitch, and that part of our job as people who mobilize resources is to right-size the solution to the funds being given – since it is 100% true that a gift of any size, when given to an effective organization, makes a significant impact.  But I still feel at some level that the game of optimizing a message to a particular giving level inevitably falls short of all the honest-to-goodness complexities of solving real problems in the real world.

Benevolent dictator?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Another gem of an exchange with my son, whose recently-acquired ability to read (my open laptop) has opened up a whole new set of conversations.

Him: “Daddy, is Generosity Day like a new national holiday?”

Me: “Sure, I guess it is.”

Him: “So will people celebrate it just in the United States or everywhere in world?”

Me: “Well, I hope everywhere, but probably it will be more in the United States because Valentine’s Day is such a big holiday here.”

Him: “And will everyone celebrate it?”

Me: “I don’t think everyone will.  But we’re going to try to get as many people as possible to celebrate it.”

Him: “Yeah, it can’t be everyone…(pause).  It couldn’t be like that unless you were Emperor or King of the World or something like that.”

*                             *                             *                             *                             *                             *

In the old days, if you wanted a zillion people to do something new and different and exciting, you had to be King of the World, or some close approximation thereof.  Now you need a great idea, an audience, and a bunch of allies.   That’s it.

It is indeed a brave new world, if you’re willing to take that leap.

Now if only I were Emperor…..