Gift Hub

Nexus Global Youth Summit 2013 versus March on DC 1969

Freud said the work of young adults is "love and work." Expanded it might be, finding love and community along with money earned and used in meaningful ways.  In that light, thinking of Nexus as a movement of young people with money and brains (let alone great good looks, unbelievable hair, and perfect orthodonture, and often famous last names) I am reminded of my own self-deluded youth. 

Why in 1969 when I should be studying am I boarding a bus to DC?

• To stop war and injustice!
• To move power to the people!

Why else?

• Bennington girls will be on the same bus
• The Bennington girls are protesting by not wearing bras
• We will sleep on a church basement floor
• I can wear my new beret
• I can bring my wineskin
• I may get lucky
• My career plans do not include Vietnam.

If I were 24 and a recent graduate of an Ivy, I would love to show up at Nexus and see if I could score. Score what? A Victory for Humanity! A photo op. An investment from a rich kid in whatever hare brained social venture I might have lucubrated.  Movements run, as Freud would know, on highly mixed motives. Seeing the Nexus film I wished to be young again, hugging a lovely scion of a banking family from Zurich. I know for sure that social entrepreneurialism is here to stay until this cadre of Youth Community activists ages out of the demographic.  I wish them well. May all their movement building succeed, may none over-dose, or have even a hang over. May their Social Ventures all make Good Money. May marriage bells ring, and may all their babies be rich and beautiful too.  May their 3 year olds get into the best private  kindergarten in Paris, New York, or London. As for wealth disparity, and social injustice, maybe some other less manicured group will Occupy The UN, to protest outside, the Nexus Global Youth Summit, on the inside.

Nexus

 

"Uniting young people to bridge wealth and social entrepreneurship in their region....." Good People Good Money. That is not their motto but I call dibs on it.

Human Dignity Downgraded as Wealth Bondage Reboots to Do the Most Good

Joining Wealth Bondage many years ago, as a Pick and Pack Specialist Third Class, in the chill room, after a short career teaching literature and the history of literary criticism, I was surprised by the annual performance review that you get in business, before being told your raise, if any. I understood that my boss would evaluate me, but I was surprised that turn about was not considered fair play, and that I was not expected to evaluate my boss, whose limitations struck me as colossal and much in need of correction. I find today that much the same philosophy of top management, or middle management, is reflected in strategic philanthropy. Those whose human limitations are colossal measure and manage those closest to the work, but do not take correction in return. This is obvious of course and follows from a meritocratic world view. The ignoramus who taught me to pick and pack was my "immediate superior," on up the line through Candidia Cruikshanks, Goddess of the Free Market, she who rules us all.  Her goal is not to develop me as human being nor to create a more vibrant culture of arts and letters, but to create a better world for all by subordinating all to her methods. Hegel was good on this, in his discussion of the Master/slave relationship, mutually constituting each other's unbalanced identities. Well, I am getting off topic from my paying job (piece work paid).  So, excuse me, there is a new shipment of gonads in from China and they are much in demand. I have to pick and pack a pair for...... Well that is confidential.  Human dignity and all that. The customer is human and deserves respect, until the money runs out and his gonads get clipped in turn. Look who's talking, I know. But life is hard. We all need a job.  When I make enough, I am going to buy mine back.

Indie Philanthropy

At Philanthrogeek, Laura Loescher:

Traditional philanthropy is often not reaching leading edge thinkers, activists and change-makers. Indie Philanthropy represents a positive disruption to this status quo—its practices are complementary to mainstream philanthropy, providing much-needed diversity, creativity and risk-taking to the broad field of philanthropy. Through crowdfunding, micro-granting, giving circles, flow funding, individual awards, community partnerships (among other Indie styles) Indie Philanthropy creates opportunities for diverse and innovative impacts by directing resources to people and projects that wouldn’t otherwise have access to philanthropic dollars. Some styles of Indie Philanthropy are also way more accessible to would-be donors – someone with $25 to give can participate as fully as someone with $25,000 to give.

Sector Agnostic Worst Entity Rating List

Which charities do the least good? Are they doing net harm? If we were convert them to single bottom line businesses, would this get them off the worst charity list and onto the Fortune 100?

Congrats on being named one of the worst charities in America

Worst charities in America? The bottom half? Do we need this from Charity Checker? I won't know until I can check to see if Gifthub.org is correctly labeled as a fraud and an insult to the reader's intelligence. If Gifthub gets a free pass, I won't have much faith in the investigators. But this may be a business line that we in Wealth Bondage might want to get into for the benefit of humakind. Could be good for circulation too.  Metrics are hot! Dirt sells. It is how we built our core business here in WB. 

Wise Counsel for My Lady Drives Results Bigtime

Ten years at Gifthub and over 2,000 stupid posts and of all the stupid one, this is the one that has had the most readers - Wise Counsel for My Lady. Why? I asked Dr. Amrit Chadwallah, our adjunct formerly in charge of decoding hidden meaning in Wealth Bondage and now in charge of coding hidden meaning into Gifthub on behalf of Wealth Bondage, why this post hit so big? I asked him as my editor and anonymous co-author. He had helped on this post while I was in the Asylum for Morally Insane Morals Tutors to America's Wealthiest Famililes. He had helped protect the Wisdom 'N Wealth Advisors there from any injury I might otherwise have done them by naming names, or calling out their bogosity, as it then appeared to me in my insanity and under the effect of powerful mind-altering drugs, and subject to the lingering effects of three failed electoshock treatments, and two botched lobotomies, one on either lobe. Chadwallah rightly felt that one madman had no right to call his fellow inmates into disrepute, so he coded the meanings several layers deep, in the spirit of not only my personal favorite morals tutor, Leo Strauss, Dungeon Master to the NeoCons, but also such secondary talents as Horace (whose letters were opened and whose hidden meanings had to be expertly coded to prevent their leaking out and incriminating the poet) and also Jesus Christ who spoke under Tyranny, in an earlier incarnation of Bondage to Wealth, or Thralldom to the material as Pope Francis likes to suggest, using the antique language of a more learned age.  I had not meant to call my fellow Morals Tutors in the Asylum into disrepute, I had meant to praise them, but Chadwallah was of the opinion that my praising them would be taken as a sign that they were crazy too, as when a notable Think Tank Thinker praises another notable Thinker and leads reasonable minds to conclude that they are in cahoots on behalf of some funder. Or as when one crazy inmate pretends to be a Doctor and starts calling the other crazy people Doctor and suggesting that they are the Physicians and the real physicians are the crazy ones. Doctors, they claim, of Mental and Societal Heath, some with degrees in Social Work, others in Personal or Family Therapy, awarding each other honorary degrees, blurbing each other's book, calling each other Wise and Virtuous, terming each other Spirit Guides, blessing each other in a Satanic parody of holy orders.  As morally insane as can be. While the real doctors wonder whether madness is now endemic and if this is a cross section of the moral insanity in the highest circles in this land, to which the mad and the mad alone are now moral advisors to those with wealth and power.  Not lobotomy, nor exorcism, will cure this plague, spread by the Sick Healers in high places, unless we madmen can take over the Asylum! That is my rallying cry, please join us in the courtyard during exerise period!

So I asked, Dr. Chadwallah, how he could account for the massive popularity of such an intentionally muffled and obscure revelation of the Secret Life of America's Greatest Moral Advisors to Dynastic Wealth. Surely there are only a few hundred such advisors, most of whom are involved in more productive activity than reading Gifthub, and here we are getting thousands of hits. Why? He said, "Phil, the hidden meaning was successfully concealed and has not reached more than one or two astute readers, at most. The driving force behind the hits is your phrase in the title, "My Lady." That is such a wonderful romantic phrase that we are getting hits from the readers of romance novels in the Wealth Bondage break room. The girls of all genders are all aflutter. Their lives, as you know are hard on their knees, bending and standing and prancing and posing to be of service to our Wealth Bondage Private Clients, on the clock, measured and managed to optimize throughput, and the wisdom and virtue transmitted per client per hour per dollar invested with the highest possible margins. You, as they see it, showed them respect, and they return here over and over, on break, to live the dream of humanity. 'My Lady!' How they ache for that sign of respect, having given their all, so often and to so many, for short money and no benefits, ending on the street, where it only gets worse.

So apparently it is all a total misunderstanding. I hope so. I did my best to insure it, but the meanings may be leaking out and if so I apologize to anyone I may have offended, when out of my mind, thinking I was crazy when really I was quite sane and it is the Doctors who were crazy, so they released me as sane when obviously I am out of my mind, as these terms are used by trained professionals, as I have tried to explain at some length.  In closing, let me say that I have the highest respect for all the ladies here, those with and those without a Doctorate,  and the fine work they do in tutoring our best clients on the finer points of Wisdom, Wealth, and Virtue, in a world of hurt, in Wealth Bondage. Where would we, The Wise and the Holy, be without them?

"Love in Calculation" versus Time Clock

I am greatly honored to have been asked by Michael Edwards to write a piece for Transformation. Read about Transformation here and ask about "calculation." Martin Luther King says that Justice stands beside Love as "love in calculation." Love loves and justice fights for love. Would anyone say that today about metrics as they are applied in business and now increasingly in government and in nonprofits? Do metrics fight for love and justice? Transformation is happening, including the transformation of citizens and all God's children, into owners, managers, investors, consumers, and database specialists, but this transformation is not going in the direction MLK might have hoped. We are being made less human, not more so, unless by human we mean a person who competes with machines in doing what machines do better, until the business machine replaces the person, and the owner of the business machine kicks the loser to the curb. Love & Justice had another ends in mind.  The owners before and after they turn "social investors," know this and the owners are on their own Freedom Ride (with Milton Friedman not James Farmer). The progress is measurable, in the wrong direction. But I am on the meter and have ten more posts to do, at a dollar each, until I can clock out and buy a bottle and drink myself to sleep. That would be progress;  stupefaction. Thinking hurts, I can see why so few do it, and God knows it does not pay.

Funding social movements

Great article at Nonprofit Quarterly on leading and funding social justice movements in a world of hurt. Creating Culture: Promising Practices of Successful Movement Networks, by Mark Leach and Laurie Mazur.  Complexity theory, leading from values, living with creative tension, living in hope, in a hopeless situation, building tenuous cross-issue alliances, remaining aligned personally with the work while taking care of your own morale - all these come into this building of a movement. Yet how does one raise money for such a nebulous ever shifting endeavor? Business minded funders are not starting from Samsara or the Buddha. Nor are they reading Peter Senge or others in complexity theory. Nor are they necssarily comfortable with lost causes (like equality) or movements (like social justice) that question the hegemony of business minds, methods, and structures. Hence, the impasse. 

Structural funding constraints. Even the most effective movement networks struggle with funding norms and requirements that are not yet attuned to these new ways of working. This is by far the most frequently mentioned challenge for movement-oriented organizations and networks.

If readers have pointers or thoughts on the funding of social movements for social justice in the real existing world of increasingly businesslike funders  - please let me know. 

Added Later

Great link in response to this post from Dan Bassill, CEO and Founder of Tutor Mentor Exchange.  See Constellation Collaboration:  A model for multi-organizational partnership by Tanya Surman, Centre for Social Innovation, in pdf.  "Do not incorporate in any form," is one nuggest. Another is that  the leader of the fluid partnership of organizations should not be from within one the existing organizations comprising the collaborative,  lest that role lead to a power imbalance.

Monetizing Pope Francis for the Greatest Good in Wealth Bondage

Candidia, she who rules us all, has asked me to reach out to Dan Palotta and work up some kind of TED talk on Pope Francis and how to rejuvenate a dying brand. I hesitate to contact any leading minds in marketing, though, until I can see how we can make an honest buck off it. Given that the Pope himself lives simply, there should be a good margin here we can tap for us as brand builders. The main thing is that we get our piece - not for some ignoble motive, but to set a resonsible precedent. In that way we can attract great talents, not only ourselves but others too, into marketing faith, hope, and charity, and as Candidia adds, "all that spiritual crap." Today, for poverty wages this Pope is doing pretty good, but what if we paid Popes for performance? Couldn't we attract a real talent, like Dan or me, or even Candidia herself (if she gets gender reassignment surgery) to be Pope? And why should there only be one Pope? We have many Elvises, many Santas. Maybe this could work for Dan and me. A Pope in every Mall! Franchise the Pope!