Gift Hub

Impact Investing Short and Long

When J.P. Morgan predicts that impact investing will be a one trillion dollar investment business in ten years, it makes me wonder about year eleven.  Maybe a half trillion market, an impending bailout, and a Congressional panel finding that no laws were broken?

Teaching Social Entrepeneurship

Dr. Peter Frumkin has an excellent post on social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, nonprofit management, nonprofit leadership, and social impact, as bodies of knowledge taught at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Penn. He finds the essence the entrepreneurial forms in innovation, sustainability, and scale. Whether these are achieved in forprofit or nonprofiit form is a choice for form, more than function.

The Art of Love in Social Capital Markets

Peter Karoff on the art of philanthropic love, in Stanford Social Enterprise Review. I wonder if that art can be taught? As a liberal art is? By engaging a dormant instinct? By modeling passion and poetics? Interestingly, Karoff cites Harold Bloom on the love of poets for their predecessors, a love that Bloom likens to the Oedipal quest to master, or murder, or steal the fire from, a progenitor. Civic love, the love of poets for their predecessors, the love of philanthropists for their grantees, and vice versa, should we be reading Ovid?

Ch-Ch-Changes: Nonprofit Sector Predictions for 2013

Rick Cohen at Nonprofit Quarterly with a survey of predictions for 2013. I am cited as predicting, or hoping for, a hurricane of impromptu civic engagement.

Let's Make a Market - Gentleman's Cabaret - The Future is Social

To help women of all races and genders put themselves through college without incurring enormous debt, and to teach manners (How to Treat a Lady) to those who would be Gentlemen, my friend, The Happy Tutor, is raising social venture funding via program related investment from Wealth Bondage Foundation: The Future of Good and Evil. I got my own start in philanthropy that way, years ago, in Top Hat and Tail Feathers. Life, my dear old friend, is a Cabaret. Let's make a Market!

Demanding Results as an Unquestioned Habit leading to Unbalanced Character

A business prodigy, and consultant to many, he turned to philanthropic consulting. He has grown an organization of over 100 MBAs. Why did he do it? He says, "I lived in the world of up and to the right. I wanted to do more with my life." And? His firm helps nonprofits build bars, representing results, that go up and to the right. Aristotle said tha we become what we repeatedly do. (Action, then habit, then character, which operates on instinct.) To form habits and character of self awareness, reflection, love and humility. To learn how to be. Who teaches that? The laborer pruning the bushes outside corporate HQ, the woman from Guatemala cleaning our rooms may be our best role models for being. They more than we may be living in community, in faith and in traditions that are more balanced and whole than is our relentless, multi-sectoral, half mad, quest for quantifiable results in systems too complex to admit of our simplication, without groaning under the load of our interventions.

Why are your clothes thrown all over the bedroom?

Why did you miss our child's soccer game?

Why are you drinking so much?

Why are you not exercising?

Why are you so curt and dismissive?

Why are you so peremptory and demanding of others?

Why are you always so off balance?

The answer is, "Goddammit! I have to get Results! The world is in a hell of a mess!"

The answer to the answer is: A deep inbreath, and exhale through the nose: "Yes, Dear." Or, "Yes, boss."

What those who love us know is that we in our unbalanced being are the source of so much that is toxic. They know because they clean up our unacknowledged messes, the ones we make, as the bars go up and to the right. The messes we High Performers make are not measured - not even seen. And so the value of what is done in clean up, the inglorious fixing of our messes, is treated as of no value, unless - yes measured. And how can we measure what we do not even see?

Who am I accusing? Moi, no less than others. Who am I reforming? Don't ask. The results on that are dismal. I will reform myself, yes, but I need to practice on you first!

The measure of Performance in love and giving

Gave my standard talk on Engaging High Capacity Donors for Inspired Legacies today in Scottsdale to 100 or so reps of a financial organization. Tonight at the cocktail hour two women came up to say how connected they felt throughout the talk.I asked one why, she said, “I don’t know you seem to understand. With men it is usually all about performance.” The women laughed, including me in the ages old insight. To clarify, metrics say how much bigger or smaller it gets over time. Bars on the bar charts keep getting bigger. That means we are doing well. When Jesus said, "Bring me the stone the builders rejected, that is the cornerstone," or "the last shall be first," or "the meek shall inherit," or, "love others as God loves you," or "from the smallest seed, the mustard seed, grows the tree," or, "suffer the children to come to me," he was not talking about women, he was talking about those on the margins who without glory or expectation of results do what love requires. "Performance," right, exactly that. So in the name of performance let us mutiliate our humanity. Then, may we be so lucky to find a person, more than likely a woman, to bind those self-inflicted wounds.

Democracy under Capitalism 2.0

Quotations from Jeremy Gilbert.

Big Data NSA-Style

 

The Happy Tutor applies to Stanford and Yale Business Schools so He can Whip the Nonprofit Sector into Shape

My old friend and mentor, The Happy Tutor, is applying at his late age (2000 years old), to business school. He is best known as a drunkard, moral mentor, and sadist in a good cause. "Why," Tutor I asked, "why would you with roots in the very worst of the classical tradition, as a former Trusted Advisor to Nero, why would you now turn to business school?" His answer was simple, "My greatest pleasure and my unique ability is dominating people in the service of power. I know of no system in history that has done a better job in subordinating people of good will than this whole deal about metrics. Even an old sadist can learn new tricks. Besides I need the money to pay the liquor bill." I am sorry that Tutor even saw this video. Can you imagine him in a gold tie with golf clubs on it?