[This is the third of three posts on terrible gifts] I book binge. I consume a book all at once, as quickly as possible, preferably in one sitting. I will read right through any activity that doesn’t require my visual attention, including eating and tooth-brushing, until I hit the final page. Needless to say, this [...]
[This is the first of three posts on Terrible Gifts] My mechanic had bad news. “It will cost more than what your car’s worth to fix it,” he said. Then he amended his thought. ”It will cost more than what your car’s worth to just figure out what’s wrong with it.” So we got a [...]
Tags:Seriously still can't get over the fact that we own a minivan.
When I was ten years old, I auditioned for a production of the play The Pied Piper of Hamlin. I was cast as a Rat. Naturally, the only way to handle this event was to instantly fall in love with the arts. My passion for the arts guided my career path. It shaped my education. [...]
All that stuff about whether nonprofit staff should give to their organizations also applies to the nonprofit fundraising staff. Except quadruply so. Fundraisers hear the pitch for support constantly. The pitch is even coming out of their own mouths. People can only make a persuasive argument so many times before they’ve convinced themselves. So if [...]
Donors and funders are always on the lookout for signals that indicate how a charity operates. Fundraisers are always on the lookout for people committed to the nonprofit’s mission, and especially those already part of their community. And so both have taken a looksie at the Cinnabon-ly sticky question of: Do the staff of the [...]
Tags:(The sneaky stuff you can say in parens!)·nonprofit staff
Being a capitalist society, we’re far more likely to run into the discombobulating experience where something we think should be proprietary is given away instead. But of course it happens in the other direction, too. Here’s Lewis Hyde’s telling of white Europeans turning the gifts of the Native America Indians into capital: Imagine a scene. [...]
There’s two ways for us to think about our stuff. One way is to think that we own it. Right now, you’re thinking: Um. Duh. Ownership is so obvious, so prevalent, so common in a society like ours that we frequently don’t even recognize that there is another way of considering our stuff. Everything I [...]
Tags:capitalism·economics·Thanks again to Lewis Hyde for this post
