nonprofit field
Hi everyone. Go Seahawks! That was the best Super Bowl ever! Sure, no one came to my Vegan Super Bowl viewing party, so I had to watch and celebrate alone with my Buffalo tempeh “wings,” (with raw-cashew-nutritional yeast sauce), but whatever, the Hawks won! They didn’t just win, they
ED Life
My friends from the business community: As an Executive Director of a nonprofit, I want to say that I love you guys. Almost as much as we all love the Seahawks (Go Hawks!). You do so much to sustain our work—volunteering countless hours, donating funds to programs, and telling
Cultural Competency
Note: This post was written in 2014. For this year, the Lunar New Year starts on Thursday, 2/8/16, ushering in the Year of the Fire Monkey. Everything else still applies though. Lunar New Year is coming up, and those of you who still keep referring to it as
Board Relations
Last week was rough, as we received not one, not two, but…ok, two grant rejection notices (so sweet and thoughtful of people to wait until after the holiday break to send rejection letters). Whenever I get stressed, my face breaks out, which causes me stress, thus perpetuating a vicious
Donor Relations
Happy new year, everyone. I just came back from visiting in-laws in Louisiana, in a little town called Greensburg, which is so small that the local newspaper's front page headline read “Man arrested after bar fight.” I probably could have made the headline too, something like “Seattle man
Cultural Competency
Hi everyone. I am in Alabama visiting in-laws for the holidays. It looks like the nonprofit funding landscape: dry, barren, everything withered, a few ravens squawking on brittle, gnarled branches. Every year, I make a list of resolutions. Not for me, though, since I will invariably fail at all of
Cultural Competency
Around this time of the year, as I drive by the houses lit up with holiday lights, I think about Mr. Farnon and his family. It was about this time during the year when my family and I first arrived to the US, to Philadelphia. This was after a half-year
ED Life
Last Friday, 9 EDs got together for our monthly ED Happy Hour (EDHH), a time for us to discuss the challenges of our field and brainstorm ways to collaborate so that we can shift the paradigm and move the needle on collective impact around systemic change. Or something like that.
ED Life
Hi everyone. Our computer got infected with a virus, so I couldn't work on my blog post today. I am on a tablet, typing approximately one word per minute. This paragraph has taken one hour so far. I'll put up the post later. Meanwhile... An Executive
ED Life
Last week, someone told me I should go into stand-up comedy. I started working on some jokes. Here is the first batch. Try them out at your next cocktail party or annual dinner and you should have people rolling on the floor. ***An Executive Director walks into a bar. The
Board Relations
In this field, we deal with people a lot. In fact, over 80% of my work is attending meetings. (Of the remainder, 20% is spent emailing and 10% is spent cowering under my desk, rocking and shaking, staring at our budget, wondering why it wouldn’t balance). Considering that at
ED Life
Hi everyone, you may notice that the blog looks way different. I asked my ridiculously talented friend Stacy Nguyen to make it awesome. We are still experimenting with the features and getting everything to work right, but I hope the new blog format will be easier and more fun to