7 Paths Blog
Undercover Boss
February 8th, 2010 by richfossLast night after the Super Bowl I watched CBS’s new Undercover Boss. The President and COO of Waste Management went undercover in his own company and for a week did frontline jobs ranging from working neighborhood garbage pickup to cleaning Porta-Pottys.
I grew up working class and the show brought back a lot of memories. I grew up knowing that bosses were people who didn’t know how to do the actual work and made life miserable for those who did. The COO of WM had a very hard time doing the work and he saw up close how his productivity policies made life miserable for workers. It was beautiful.
Teaching people how to lead without making life miserable was a big part of my motivation in launching EGL. Perhaps we should launch a version of undercover boss for nonprofit CEOs.
Black History Month becomes personal
February 3rd, 2010 by richfossI have two wonderful black son-in-laws and three black grandchildren. Black History Month is taking on a new meaning to me. Here is a link to Rosetta Thruman’s blog where she is posting about 28 black nonprofit leaders in 28 days.
And here’s a great story of making a difference from Rodney D. Coates about a black student starting an organization called Gentlemen of Distinguished Character.
Checklists to the rescue
January 26th, 2010 by richfoss“Fundraising books all make it sound so simple,” a director of development said to me when I was consulting with her organization.
“When you combine 792 simple things combined you have is complexity,” I said.
I’m deep into writing a 200-page ebook—Green Light Fundraising: Your guide to raising $50,000 to $500,000 a year to light up the eyes of people you serve. Through the book I’m teach a system to make it possible for smaller nonprofits to put into place sustainable fundraising.
To be effective the system requires the organization to be highly organized in order to use volunteers. I’ve been looking for a way to keep the development staff of the nonprofits from becoming overwhelmed with the complexity of sustainable fundraising.
I think I’ve found a way through a New Yorker article on Intensive Care Unit in hospitals. The Israelis did a study and discovered that the staff in an ICU has to perform 178 distinct steps each day with an average patient.
With 178 steps to be performed in ICU each day missing even one or two steps can be the difference between life and death. In 2001 a physician, Peter Pronovost, who works full time in the Johns Hopkins ICU, began to wonder if a checklist would help the ICU to do a better job. Covering everything in a checklist would be impossible so he started with a regular source of infections in ICU, inserting lines in a patient.
He mapped out the five steps commonly taught to prevent infections while inserting lines. Then he had the ICU nurses check to see how frequently physicians followed the five steps.
At the end of one month the nurses documented that the doctors missed at least one step in more than a third of the patients.
The next month Pronovost persuaded the administrators to authorize the nurses to stop the doctors if they missed a step on the checklist.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.
If checklists can help ICU doctors execute their plan, I think checklists will be an excellent way to help nonprofits execute sustainable fundraising. I’ll supplement Green Light Fundraising with free, downloadable checklists.
Good news from Haiti
January 16th, 2010 by richfossHere’s good news re Lavona from Pete Begly: We have not heard directly from Lovana but a relative left a message on our answering machine that she and her children are doing fine! Please keep praying for her travel plans and that her children still have thier documents. Especially keep praying for Haiti.
I’ll post when we hear directly from Lavona.
Here’s a link from another nonprofit that I know personally that do good work in Haiti:
http://mcc.org/stories/videos/mcc-haiti-earthquake-response
Landing in Haiti an hour before the quake
January 13th, 2010 by richfossA year or so ago, Lavonna, a young Haitian woman. began attending our church. She has USA documents but her two young children did not have papers and still lived in Haiti. She worked with the State Department and secured documents for her two children. Our whole church was excited.
We assisted her in securing airline tickets for her to fly to Haiti yesterday, Tuesday, and return with two children on Friday.
Her plane landed an hour before the earthquake struck. Because of the broken communication system we have no news of Lavonna and her children.
I’ve met folks from a nonprofit, Beyond Borders, that works in Haiti. By last night they had heard from a couple of staff members but not from others.
Please consider helping Beyond Borders to respond to this emergency by making a gift to their Earthquake Response Fund. They will work as quickly as possible through their local partner organizations to reach those most effected by this disaster.
To make a donation go to the link on the top left corner of the Beyond Borders Web site at: www.beyondborders.net.
Cornered by job loss
December 10th, 2009 by richfossLast night I watched an Italian film, Days and Clouds, about a man, Michele, who is forced out of a twenty-year business partnership by a good friend. For two months he keeps the loss of his job a secret from his wife, Elsa, who is completing a degree.
The 2007 film is an unblinking look at a marriage under the duress of a man losing his career. Life closes in around them and they are forced to sell both their boat and their home. A middle-aged man, he desperately tries to find another job while dealing with the shame of his job loss. Not only did he not tell his wife for two months, even after he told her, he refused to tell their twenty-year old daughter. She discovers her father’s job loss when she sees him working as a courier delivering packages on a motorbike, a job he has taken out of desperation.
Elsa responds to their plight by taking two part time job as a telemarketer and secretary, both jobs that do not use her degree.
The film especially hit home for me because earlier this fall I began to have back trouble, eventually diagnosed as four compression fractures of vertebrae. In the middle of raising funds for a EGL project, I haven’t been able to drive for almost a month. Sarah has had to give me a hand much more than usual. She recently told a friend that in addition to her job as a nurse, caring for me is like a second full time job. Life has closed in around me. It’s been very humbling to not be able to travel for my work like I’m used to doing. And it’s very humbling to have to ask Sarah for help and other friends as well.
I’m fortunate that I haven’t lost my job. I’ve switched from raising funds to underwrite the writing and production of a 200-page eBook to actually writing the book (Green Light Fundraising: Your guide to raising $50,000 to $500,000 a year to light up the eyes of people you serve) with plans to pick up with the fund raising in 2010 when my back has healed.
Also, unlike the couple in the film, Sarah and I are part of Plow Creek Fellowship, a group that shares finances, so we will not lose our home because of my health crisis.
As I watched the film I couldn’t help but think of all the people my age who have lost their jobs worldwide in the two years since the film came out. There’s no easy way out of the wilderness when life becomes uncharted territory.
The film and my life both point to the same faint hope–the people around you suffer with you, struggle with you, and love you. Thanks Sarah, Plow Creek friends, and Evergreen Leaders board.
Three things, no four to be thankful for
November 26th, 2009 by richfossOne, three wonderful children, three lively grandchildren, and one amazing wife. For 35.5 years I have had my dream family.
Two, a people and place. Plow Creek is my people and place. For 32.5 years I have lived among friends, fellow faith folks who serve freely and generously with their gifts, talents, and money. Even though I cannot farm I have the honor of living on a farm and cheering on the farmers and gardeners and enjoying the fruits and vegetables of their labors and of the earth.
Three, good work. For 32 years I have had the honor of building up, as a leader and fundraiser, nonprofits who provide essential services to the people who live on the edges of our communities. What a privilege to give my heart and mind to this work.
Three things to be thankful for, no four things. This amazing life is made possible by our generous, merciful, and holy God. Thanks for life, son of the living God.
On paths and adventures
November 24th, 2009 by richfossMy earliest memory of a path, at age five, was of one that wound up a mountain from the small Montana village we lived in to the dump above the town. There was a road that went up to the dump but there was also a faint foot path. Ever since then I have been fascinated by paths.
When my three children were young I took them on an adventure for two hours a week. It gave Sarah a chance to be home alone and gave me time to be with the children.
One of my favorite activities on adventure was to drive down obscure back roads to see where they went. One day this led to a real adventure. We were half a mile from anywhere on a road that was little more than a track when our radiator over-heated. This was before cell phones and no one knew where we were. There was a creek nearby but I couldn’t get to it because of my disability. I coached Hannah, our eldest, who was probably five at the time, to carry cups of water from the creek that I added to the radiator. Eventually, we had enough water in the radiator that I could drive us home.
A few years ago, when I began teaching about leadership and organizations, I found myself using the metaphor of paths to describe patterns in organizations that a leader can use to help the organization thrive.
Here are the musings of Dick Richards on “The Mythic Pull Of Pathways.” Thanks, Terry, for pointing me to Dick’s musings.
A tale of two schools
November 14th, 2009 by richfossI am endlessly fascinated by how organizations treat people on the edges of our communities, those people who don’t fit the norm. It’s partly personal–I became disabled when I was a teen and have used a wheelchair a lot since then–and partly professional because I’m passionate about helping organizations thrive that work with people on the edges of our communities.
Here’s an amazing personal story by a Texas Baptist preacher–Part 1, Part 2–that portray how two organizations with the mission of educating children respond to the same child in very different ways.
Reading the IRS
November 11th, 2009 by richfossEvery nonprofit exists in an ecosystem. For nonprofits the IRS is part of that ecosystem. Evergreen Leaders is a public charity so I recently skimmed through the IRS’s latest compliance guide for 501c3 organizations.
Since we are in the middle of a fundraising campaign I paid attention to the rules that cover donations. It says “A donor cannot claim a tax deduction for any single contribution of $250 or more unless the donor obtains a contemporaneous written acknowledgment of the contribution from the recipient public charity.”
What’s this about $250 or more threshold for any single contribution in order to claim a tax deduction?
Reading on I came to this: “Separate contributions are not aggregated for purposes of measuring the $250 threshold.”
If I am reading the IRS correctly, you have to make contributions of at least $250 to a 501c3 to claim a tax deduction.