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When life stops making sense
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 by richfossWhen life stops making sense, I start writing poetry. The first time I began writing poetry was in my late teens when I was trying to make sense out of becoming disabled wit rheumatoid arthritis at age 17.
Occasionally life becomes irrational and it’s difficult to make logical sense of it. I find poetry, which depends on sound, images and emotion, is a liberating way to explore life when it stops making sense.
Several times in the ensuing forty years I’ve had periods of writing poetry. On March 28 I began writing a poem a day for several weeks, exploring my experience of a series of lung infections in 2009 and 2010, five compression fractures in my back last fall, and a flare up of my rheumatoid arthritis.
The medical conditions left me wondering if I could continue at CEO/Teachers Asst. of Evergreen Leaders. I’ve always been a visionary and suddenly I was so depleted of energy that I couldn’t plan.
Also, I began to use a walker when I wasn’t using my wheelchair. I felt shame at being so helpless.
Every Monday morning I send a e-mail the board and staff of EGL, updating them on our work with Evergreen Leaders. To keep in touch, I included former board members, former interns, and former staff on the e-mail list. It seemed like over the winter and spring I was giving endless medical reports. One morning a former intern sent me an e-mail, telling me that her son wast hospitalized for a chronic condition over the weekend and then she wrote the italicized words the wrap up the poem below. To say I was moved by her comments is an understatement.
Here’s a poem where I explored shame.
Shame
“It is better to give than to receive,”
you said, O Lord,
and I said,
“It is shameful to be helpless.”
“Stop being a big baby,”
rings the voices of my childhood.
To be a man, bent and broken,
who needs a hand…
I would rather sit at home.
What say you, O Lord,
of huge and tiny voice?
For one to give,
another must receive.
For one to bear fruit,
another must die.
I was disfigured
that you, bent and broken,
may be honored:
But some how it gives me pleasure and hope
that you always seem to find the strength to go on.
I am impressed and filled with hope.
And it does not happen very often.
You are one of the truly good people I have met.
How honest should a blog be?
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 by richfossIt’s been three months since I posted and, after reading my posts back through November, I can see that I have been studiously avoiding the central events of my life.
I don’t know whether I was being wise or dishonest.
I’ve decided to be more honest, to invite my readers to be part of my journey in a way that I have tended to avoid writing about.
Beginning in March 2009 I began to experience repeated lung infections, one or more a month for the rest of the year. Then last fall I suffered five compression fractures in my back.
In the spring of 2009 the Evergreen Leaders board and I set a goal of raising $40,000 to underwrite the writing, design, and production of a 200-page ebook, Green Light Fundraising: Your Sustainable Fundraising Guide to Raising $50,000 to $500,000 a Year to Light Up the Eyes of People You Serve.
By the middle of November my back pain was severe, I was losing weight, I could no longer drive because my back screamed when I leaned forward to turn the key in the ignition and move the gear shift, and my energy took a dive, probably from a combination of the compression fractures and the repeated lung infections. I became desperate enough that I asked my family doctor to refer me to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
I was beginning to ponder my death. Sarah, my wife, suggested I might have to go on disability.
I could no longer travel to do fundraising.
It was a very dark, grim time.
There was one tiny beam of light left in my work life–I could still write. I decided to write on Green Light Fundraising and resume fundraising later.
More of the saga on another day.
Nonprofit to help people find ways to help the world
Monday, March 22nd, 2010 by richfossFewer leaders…more productivity?
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 by richfossI grew up on a family farm. The people I grew up with loved working for themselves and those forced to work for a boss mourned the fact.
It turns out that the USA leads the world in an interesting statistic. We have more supervisors than anyone else. Here’s a fascinating article on “Excess of supervisors dulls firms’ productivity”.
Undercover Boss
Monday, 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.
Checklists to the rescue
Tuesday, 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.
Landing in Haiti an hour before the quake
Wednesday, 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
Thursday, 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.
On paths and adventures
Tuesday, 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
Saturday, 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.