All over the place and focus

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I suppose to some people my interests appear to be all over the place: philanthropy, currencies, technology, visualization, mapping, marketing, coaching, leadership, process arts, community development, art, creativity, and some other issues too like globalization, the bottom of the pyramid, social entrepreneurship, etc. And most of these areas I have enough understanding to listen and ask good questions…but not enough to debate academically on the finer points or the history. Coaching might be the exception. Maybe. I am not a specialist. And some say it is a world where we ought to be specialized. I don’t know about that. I think it is a world where we ought to connect and have engaging conversations.

Sometimes, in our lives, we find the varied paths we lead all connecting down the road somewhere. All this leads together…

How? Field building. I will post soon a longer explanation of field building, along with some tidbits of conversation and great links for those who are interested. For now, let me simply explain that field building is the conscious collective development of a network of purpose (both the nodes and the space between the nodes). And I see this as being critical for our evolution. We need to adapt to survive and for the planet to survive. We need to understand our world in more useful and appropriate ways. And all these interests of mine lead back to the many tools, processes, and systems that play a role in field building. An example–Social Network Analysis is an emerging field…It is defining itself, the practices, examining what distinctions are valuable and which are not. It changes how organizations work, and values human connection. It requires message management for maintaining a cohesive set of meaningful terms. It requires leadership to grow the edges and community to build the depths. It takes funding and marketing to keep thriving. It takes mapping and visualization to track and analyze itself. Other examples are Digital Media and Education, Currencies/Flows, and Thrivability (next evolution of sustainability). Sometimes fields are in transition too, like the work we are doing in Philanthropy to democratize giving, promote giving while living, encourage micro-philanthropy, etc.

We need to change our world, to understand it in new ways, to work in new ways. I see my work as building fields that help with that process. And why? It comes back to my core purpose–to help people transform their lives and live with passionate purpose.

Giving and Partnership

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Always a source of wisdom, insight, and fantastic probing, GiftHub posts:

Some of my favorite people, including Anne Ellinger and Tracy Gary, are written up in the Chronicle of Philanthropy for raising the question of how much wealthy families should keep for themselves and how much they should be giving back to society. This is the conversation of fundraising, philanthropy, and donor circles. What will facilitate the mega-giving is better partnerships with the advisors who in many cases control the wealth, as a practical matter, unless the donor bestirs herself to lead or partner. That is the gist of what I am trying to do here, and with Tracy at Inspired Legacies: build inspired donor/advisor partnerships for self, family, and society. In that way we can convert ideals plus wealth to positive social change.

Yes, indeed, when faced with information like this:

Americans have doubled their incomes in the past 40 years, but the share of giving has never climbed above 2.4 percent of the money they have left after paying for basics like housing and food, according to Giving USA, the annual yearbook of philanthropy produced by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

We have to recognize our abundance and contribute at higher levels. My admirable friend Darlene Charneco and her partner Brent Timbol, also encourage giving, they suggest at the tithing level of 10% and joining the 10% Club.

No matter what our income levels, we need to ask ourselves, can I give more? The world needs you now.

Localizing Global Change! Chicago Conference July 20-22

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You are invited to co-create the 4th Annual Chicago Conference for Good. PLEASE join us, bring friends and add spirit! Share this invitation with neighbors and colleagues, people you’d like to connect or reconnect with this July!

“…cuz people who do stuff need to know more people who do stuff.” – ted ernst

Localizing Global Change: Issues and Opportunities

July 19-22 in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago, IL USA

The momentum of community is rising. Please join us! …for More and More.

More and more people. More and more resources. More and more easy. More and more connected. More and more green. More and more power to do good things, in more and more local neighborhoods and organizations.

Three years ago, some of us convened a small but national conference on the future of philanthropy, technology and community action. Two years ago, more of us joined in to create a second and international conference which was also the first-ever omidyar.net members conference. Last year we did it again, and along the way these conversations have sparked half a dozen more conferences and action on at least four continents.

All the while, you’ve been busy doing all the things you do to try make the world a better place, and you’ve been noticing that more and more people are getting together for global community good. This year’s global gathering in Chicago is going to focus on “doing”. All good work. All kinds of local action. We welcome good people from everywhere to join with people we are actively inviting who are “doing” in Chicago neighborhoods. Bring your own local doing to share. We want to do more and more in all localities, and to do it more together.

This year’s conference will follow the same simple and active format as all the previous conferences. We’ll gather for one big opening, create a working agenda that includes all of our most important issues and questions, meet with friends and colleagues to actively address everything on the agenda, document and publish our notes online, and head back out into all the things we are doing with more energy, more clarity and more connections.

The momentum of community is rising. Please join us!
…for more and more global good on the ground where you live.

WHEN? July 19-22, 2007 …music and barbecue on Thursday night, conference all day Friday and Saturday, finishing by noon on Sunday, with airport drop-offs or excursions for out-of-towners on Sunday afternoon.

WHERE? General Robert E. Wood Boys & Girls Club, 2950 W. 25th Street, Chicago IL 60623

WHO SHOULD COME? Anyone who wants to get more and more into community, technology, environment, and other social justice kinds of work and practice. Anyone who wants to make more and more connections between all these sorts of things. And anyone who wants to have more and more fun and friends in the process of community leadership.

WHAT TO BRING? Food to eat/share, materials to show/share, ideas and questions, issues and projects that you care about and want to inform and be informed by others AND a total of $40 (scholarships may be available) to pay for basic costs of site and materials for all three days of meetings.

NOW WHAT? Send an email to nurturegirl@gmail.com, make a payment at paypal, forward this invitation to friends and colleagues, people you work with — and people you want to work with. we’ll send you details about places and times and be glad to answer any other questions. Stay tuned to www.GlobalChicago.net for more information.

CO-CONVENERS? Ted Ernst, Hermilo Hinojosa, Kachina Katrina Zavalney, Michael Herman, Michael Maranda, Jean Russell, Dave Chakrabarti, Pierre Clark, and You…

Discussion

What kind of stuff
have we been doing?

* hosting and attending green dinners,
* community gardening,
* blogging,
* digital excellence & inclusion,
* chicago conservation corps training,
* growing food,
* organizing block clubs and parties,
* depaving your yard and inviting neighbors,
* restoring a riverbank,
* planting native prairie in your local park
* organizing your neighbors to work with the alderman or CAPS to get a camera,
* or get one taken out,
* recruiting volunteers,
* organizing safe routes to school,
* buying organic foods,
* experimenting with new tech ways to connect people,
* and living with less tech
* driving less,
* recycling more,
* ensuring all differently brained people are seen as human beings,
* seeing to it that the ADA laws are followed,
* making social activists are supported and nurtured,
* urban chicken egg farming
* block clubs
* traffic calming
* peace parks
* “doing.”… ,

Foundation and Capital Voices

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I have found foundation representatives here at netsquared. However, I have not heard from them publicly. I think foundation representatives have a lot to offer to emerging nonprofits and technologists as they are trying to gain clarity and grow. Similarly VC folks have wisdom and questions that can help prime projects for receiving funding and building viable business models.

Also, I would like to see more nonprofits and technologists putting pressure on foundations to consider expanding program support beyond granting to blended offerings of loans and other investment tools that support emerging social purpose organizations and projects.

We need to be surfacing the resources we each have, acknowledging our own needs, and sharing together to make more and more good things happen.

Resources Lost

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Still here at netsquared. Looking around at the audience in this economic sustainability session…and I think we are not capturing the resources that are in the room. When someone is sitting not far from me that is with pledgebank, and yet we aren’t talking about pledging…or Bring Light, who sponsored the event, doesn’t get to share how they work…these 21 projects need to hear about tools in the room that they don’t know about.

Here is a project–what can each person in the room bring to it to move it forward? And what collectively do we as a group think would be most valuable from that.

Interesting question from the moderator: he asserts that some nonprofits simply suck. One of the panelists retorted that the trick about that subjective judgment is WHO gets to make that call. I wonder how valuable even figuring that out is! When talking about services that cost a certain amount to be able to do–and that cost is fairly unrelated to number served. Grassroots.org for example has a certain cost that doesn’t. I imagine, increase significantly whether they serve 5000 or 7500. It isn’t worth the sorting process which becomes a trade-off–the value of being an open provider gets compromised by being some judgment making organization.

This is one of the values I really appreciate about Catalytic Communities. They share projects from any community leaders who have innovative solutions. Those leaders get to decide what is innovative. I think that can really resonate for people who are skeptical of the power aspect of subjectively choosing who gets in and who gets out.

Acknowledgment Tools

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I just had a fantastic conversation with Eric Harris-Braun of
Open Money. I am really excited to share this with you. Eric has started talking about currencies in a new way. He talks about wealth acknowledgment.

Open Money, of course, is a group of people (Micheal Linton, Jean-Francois Noubel, and Eric Harris-Braun) working to open up currencies.

Open Money is still in development on the tools (anyone want to help on this open source effort?). But soon to come will be a widget that can be put on any webpage that will be connected to a system tracking these acknowledgments–whether that is reputation or more traditional forms of transactions.

This is a critical piece we have been looking for–a tool independent of the particular implementation. So it doesn’t matter if you are using a Drupal site or anything else, you can use this system for tracking one or more currencies/acknowledgments. Also, this is a critical piece in the sense of explaining currencies in a way that is graspable to many. Eric said that after years of trying to explain currencies to people, he is finally able to get people to understand and, even better, get excited about using currencies/acknowledgments.

We are also talking about how acknowledgments help facilitate network weaving, helping make more dense networks.

I will be opening a conversation on Omidyar.net for open discussion of what they are doing. I will put it in Targeted Currencies group. (Arthur Brock and Eric are good friends of course.)

I would like to see two things come together, so let me know if you are interested in either or both extended conversation around this breakthrough or the development of the tools and implementation of them in spaces like AboutUs.org, Hooze.org, and CatComm.org among others.

Let me know if you are interested in continuing to learn about this powerful way of transforming our world together.

Giving in More Ways Than One

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We need a better world. And to have that better world, we will need better models. Ned may be the brand behind better worlding to come.

Mark Grimes, founder and serial enterpreneur committed to doing good, describes Ned:

Ned (a philanthropic franchise) is a small retail location in Portland, Oregon that is part better world membership group, part community center, part retail, part office space, part Starbucks, part 10,000 Villages, part Grameen bank, part Ashoka, and very interactive…all aimed at creating a better world experience. It exists in both the real world physical location…and online. The brand of doing good things. This effort has been bootstrapped, meaning being done with a budget of near zero and tons of sweat equity.

Ned will have weekly and monthly meetings on better world topics ranging from Millennium Development Goals, poverty, trafficking, HIV/AIDS, education, art and much more. There will be group documentary screenings, speakers, and various ways to people to connect with their community (and globally). Space will be given for free to local nonprofits for members meetings, board meetings, and fundraising events.

Product sales information “goes beyond” traditional fair trade in that it will be (and buy from organizations that are) 100% transparent (open) about finance, governance and operations. Ned truly desires that each and every transaction (financial and social) make the world a little better place in some small way. A percentage of gross and net sales will be distributed to grassroots local, regional, national and global nonprofit, nongovernmental and community based organizations. The Ned Giving Project members (invitation only based on personal friendship, reputation, and trust) who pay a $31 monthly membership fee (90% going to the orgs) decide the monthly categories of giving, and the groups that receive the funds.

Mark is certainly meeting my criteria for doing good in the world. I look forward to seeing Ned grow and replicate.

I am not the only one noticing. There is already a review on Tribe.

Jean’s Idea of the World We Want

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The question has been asked: What is your idea of The World We Want?

I have chosen to answer.

I have been reflecting on this question for a long time now. And while my answers are not yet complete, I am ready to share my first draft with you…

What is your vision of a better world?

A world in which many revolutions converge to change this world into a world with more honor, respect, and ecological awareness.

What converges?

The eradication of major diseases. Small Pox down, Polio close, Measles next, then each one or even many simultaneously. And more and more of this being achieved by organizations working together as a global health community using more and more complex and responsive information tools. More safe drinking water made available through coordinated efforts using community-labor and resources along with global data tracking and local/global teams which share and transfer expertise. We begin to take care of the bottom of the Maslow pyramid for all people. Put a bottom under it so all people do really and truly have a chance to have dignity and health.

WEB 2.0—mass communication centered on user-experience. The many edges all empowered by mediums of information conveyance to speak across traditional boundaries and be honored in a customized user-driven fashion. Power to the edges, baby!

Increased transparency of our resources above and beyond money including:

Social Network Analysis—beginning to map and value the actual relationships that exist between us rather than the relationships placed on us by org charts.

Community Asset Mapping—tapping into the greater wealth of our communities—our connections, the resources we can bring to bear. Going beyond money to do more and see clearly, visually, what is available so making intentional choices is easier.

Open Source—community working together producing property for the commons and changing the model for developing intellectual material.

Volunteerism on the rise as more and more boomers get back to their ideals. Retirement moves from retiring/resting from work and community for an extended vacation to giving/contributing supported by financial independence and allowing the vast intellectual and social wealth of the Boomers to be reused and shared through extensive volunteer and community efforts. (Get that writer a decent editor!)

The Organic Movement and other ecologically sensitive movements growing in popularity. People more and more realize the cause and effect relationships of their consumption and for their own health and the health of the world make different more sustainable choices.

The rise and flourishing of our neglected gift economy via increased information sharing, matchmaking of needs with resources, and spiritual sense of oneness promoted by globalization in the best sense.

What are the conditions needed to realize it?

That the converging efforts find support and common cause and so unite and reinforce each other bringing together multiple upward spirals to change the overall flow of our culture.

What are the obstacles?

  • Old thinking which focuses too much on immediate needs, get me mine thinking.
  • Fear and scarcity thinking.
  • Old established systems slow to change.
  • Over-focus on band-aid efforts like micro-lending or over-glorification of system-reinforcing work that plays itself like change such as the Grameen Bank (which perpetuates debt-based systems).


Based on your experience, what parts of the vision are realistic and what ideas, strategies and plans can make it so?

My vision is not only realistic; it is already in motion. The main question is about timing. How soon will we change? How many of us need to have an awakening in order to tip the change?

I partner, as I can, with those who are doing everything they can to enable the dawning of a new age of sustainability, respect, honor, and ecological awareness. I spread the word to you, and you pass it on. If it is a message people are ready for, it will spread virally far and wide. If not, we re-work the message, lay more groundwork, develop more tools, share more information, and reach out to more hearts.

I believe…
I have a dream…
I hope.

Philanthropy, Social Justice, and Tax Incentives

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A Failure of Philanthropy American charity shortchanges the poor, and public policy is partly to blame By Rob Reich

Interesting article. It is a reframe for me, since working with a financial advisor, I am used to the government "discount" on giving being a positive thing that helps people give. However, when I came across this statement, the whole thing started to fall apart for me:

A $500 donation by the person in the 35 percent bracket costs the person less than the same donation to the same place by the person in the 10 percent bracket. Because the same social good is ostensibly produced in both cases, the differential treatment appears unjust. If anything, lower-income earners would seem to warrant the larger subsidy and incentive. [20]

[20] The upside-down phenomenon is not specific to the tax deduction for charitable donations, of course. Deductions in general overwhelmingly favor the wealthy. In 1999, 50
percent of all tax deductions were claimed by the wealthiest decile of earners.

Because rewarding the lower-income earners for giving when it is harder for them and de-incentivizing those who can more easily afford it would seem to lead to a grosser disparity! The rich, with less of a carrot on giving, would give less, aka keep more, while the poor/middle class, with more of a carrot on giving, would give more, aka keep less! Does
that logic make sense to you?

I am interested in how we can incentivize giving to social justice. And I get that the article is in opposition to the "Greater Good" argument that philanthropy saves capitalism and democracy. However, I think they should have stuck with the question of: "How do we incentivize giving specifically to social justice through tax law?" That seemed a stronger and more robust case to me.

The “Gift” can be Deceiving

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Over in Gift Hub, Phil was talking about a recent article in Chronicle of Philanthropy where I was quoted. The article described "The Ultimate Gift" as a movie to drive donors to advisors.

My quote in the article was:

"On the one hand, I want to applaud them because we do need to have more conversations that lead to inspired philanthropy," says Jean Russell, a consultant in Normal, Ill. who helps people, charities, and businesses identify goals and create strategies. "On the other hand, it’s so on the salesy side that it comes off as disingenuous, and you find yourself asking questions: What is the agenda behind this? Are financial planners using the idea of values as just another way to snag clients?"

Here is what Phil said:

The best is an impossible standard. Good enough is better than nothing. Some of the advisors will have training, to some degree, in charitable tools, some will have an inkling of idealism, most will see it as a prospecting tool. As Leo Strauss said, "Democracy builds on low but solid ground." So does the market.

Maybe the best way to say it is, how can we do better? We being a collective "we" of the various fields of practice, and specifically we ourselves, each of us?

If Stovall can stimulate demand for charitable planning, then maybe more will come into it, and maybe companies will spend more to train them, and maybe that will create an updraft for people like you, Lisa
Tracy, and Tracy Gary who have a larger vision, as well as specific skills around coaching, planning, and community engagement. I hope so.

Then Jane King said, "Hokey, yes, but what is the harm?"

Well Jane and Phil, the harm can be pretty great. These are not pennies tossed into a waterfall or pool. These are real investments done well or done poorly. These are real people, perhaps led far astray by wolves in sheep’s clothing. And, for those who honor the greater good and civil society, they might be coupled in name and reputation to those who dine on lamb. Will some good come of it? Yes. Perhaps much. Might there be many donors harmed? Yes. And that we should mitigate as best we can.

I would love to see an updraft of giving. Nothing could be more natural in this time of sufficiency and abundance. But the quality of the giving is important just as the quantity is important. We need both. Yes, I am an idealist.