Lee's Blog

Opportunities for good kids

Just got back from a great dance class with some live drumming, which I hope happens again soon.  Tomorrow I give a presentation on the "Faces of Dancing", in a format where I have 20 seconds for 20 slides, and all my slides are great shots of peoples' faces while dancing. 

I usually don't get political, at least not on my blog, but the issue of higher education for undocumented youth (the Dream Act) is simply a no-brainer that Republicans and some Democrats continue to shoot down.  Why prevent innocent kids from furthering their education?  These kids aren’t going back to their native country, nor do many of them even know their native country because they were so young when they moved here. 

I'd rather they go to school after high school instead of putting up walls and saying good luck with life without higher education.  I've heard some of them speak and it's heartbreaking to hear that they've worked so hard and done so well, but they can't achieve their dream of being the first person in their family to go to college because they don't have a number.  These walls around education isn’t good for our long-term progress and it limits the number of people who can do great things for our country. 

I don't buy what's pretty much the only argument against these initiatives that it'd encourage more illegal immigration.  I don't think throngs of people would come here now if this passed given the increased violence along the border and the harsher atmosphere and laws around immigration.  More people are getting deported (sometime they're own fault because they break laws, but sometimes for very minor offenses).  A majority of the U.S. supported the Dream Act, but they weren’t listened to.

ASSET is Colorado's local initiative to grant in-state tuition that is currently being discussed in the legislature, and you can read about specifics and ways to help at HEAA's website here.

Educate yourself more about this (including argumenrs from the other side too) and talk about it with your friends.  Like many other issues which I feel are no-brainers like permitting gay marriage, it's just a matter of time before the Dream Act passes, but it's going to take more people telling their stories and more people sharing these stories with folks who need to hear them. 

While I'm on the topic of immigration, I want to address the unbelievable anti-Muslim sentiment from so many people.  Yes it’s great to fight terrorism, but we need to recognize the fact that not everyone from any one religion or race is bad.  Not everyone who wears a head scarf is a suicide bomber. 

We need to be able to expect all humans to stop hating certain groups of people now.  They can hate members of those groupswho are doing bad things, but don't hate the whole group.  That’s just stupid.  There are people out there who would hate me without knowing me because I’m Jewish.  There are people who hate you because you are American, or black , or Mexican, or whatever you are. Shouldn't that change now?

Let's end on a happy note.  I'm planning to go to Peru in a month for Vicky's wedding.  Vicky worked with Intercambio for 4 years for those who don't know her.  As part of my performance evaluation from Intercambio's Board of Directors (who are essentially my bosses) they wanted to force me to take a vacation.  I guess they're right.  Now I need some sleep, so goodnight and thanks for reading!   

Fiesta, Halloween, European Journalists and More

I haven't posted anything since La Fiesta, which was amazing.  I posted some fiesta photos on Facebook here.  And a couple below

Halloween was also super fun.    I was "Ironman" :)  Going out on Pearl St on Halloween is amazing - so many people, so much creativity and good vibes.  

  

In the last 2 weeks I've sold over 2,000 immigrant guides, and I continue to get great feedback.  I updated the website www.livingintheus.org and I'm working on a basic version for new refugees.  I gave a workshop yesterday morning for teachers and 4 people suggested developing a simpler version.  It was something that I've been working on but they gave me an extra boost to get it done.  One also asked Why doesn't the government provide this"?  I told her I don't know, and that's why I developed the guide and workshop.  I'm also getting it translated into Somali (through a grant someone got in Fort Morgan, CO) and Portuguese (through a super cool person I met at the conference in Miami).

Friday night I danced disco on a platform for EFAA's (Emergency Family Assistance) fundraising event.  They told me I'd be dancing in a cage and I thought I'd be able to check off another dream as achieved, but there were no cages.  It was still fun though...me and 5 ladies form the CU dance team.  I'm not sure what they thought about me.

Thursday we had a group of 22 journalists from Europe come for a conversation about immigration.  They each came from a different country and had tons of good questions (they were all journalists).  One guy from Malta told me about how he was very anti-immigrant in his country until he started to meet the immigrants and hear their stories.  Now he is very involved in the immigrant community and recently took a trip with many of them.   Before they left we did a mini dance class and the ladies danced with us while the guys took video and photos.  I was glad they got a little taste of Intercambio...serious community progress and a little fun and dancing :) 

That's enough for now.  Thanks for reading!!!

Bob Barker, Immigration and Denmark

Those three things have probably never been together in a title before.  I'll start with Bob Barker.  I played Bob for an event with a Price is Right theme to benefit the Community Foundation last week.  Needless to say it was fun.  A little ridiculous but fun.  There are some photos on my facebook page. 

That same day I did an interview on the radio (KGNU) about immigration.  It was following up on a project that a group of 7th grade Mexican kids did about immigration and the backlash happening toward Mexicans.  They really genuinely wanted to know why so many people hated Mexicans so much.  They did a great report and they learned a lot.  I talked about how there are people out there who hate anyone who is not white, Jewish, gay, etc. and that right now the focus is on Mexicans because racists have ammunition because a law has been broken.  We shouldn't worry about those folks.  There is also a population of people that are more rational who do have some valid concerns about the impacts of immigration and the trends out country is seeing, and we need to hear those valid concerns.  

A friend of mine recently said she doesn't trust illegals because they "broke the law".  I told her that I've broken many laws and asked her if she's ever broken a law, including speeding. She quickly got it that it's not that easy to just use the "they broke the law" argument. Enough about immigration, I could go on forever.

Last week I hung out and did a beautiful 14 mile hike with Russell Evans, a good friend and former Intercambio staff member who teaches high school Spanish in Montrose, CO. A few days ago in Olathe, Co (about 5 hrs west of Boulder) he facilitated one of the Living in the U.S. workshops that I developed using What Every Immigrant Needs to Know.  I thought he'd get 5-10 people, but he had 120 people, and I was so psyched to see this critical info to spread to so many folks at once. 

I'm also happy about all the "Building Cultural Awareness" trainings we've done for around 400 people so far this year, including a bunch of rotary clubs.  We're reaching both immigrants and native-born community members and initiating important conversations around respecting difference styles of communication and interaction, reflecting upon our own culture, and discussing the roots of some specific cultural differences.  It's so important that we have more conversations like these if we every truly want global peace. 

That's it for now.   Thanks for reading!  

Why we need to replicate more nonprofits

First, check out the recent article about the immigrant guide if you haven't already here. 

After graduating from Business School and running a nonprofit for the last 9 years I have recognized major a gap in the world.   There are no efforts I have come across that are actively encouraging organizations with strong models to share their models, or for organizations that could benefit from concrete components of stronger models to seek them out and implement them.  What I see is the same high level technical assistance being offered everywhere – help with Board training, strategic planning, individual donor cultivation.  Yes all those things are essential to success, but often times those trainings and conferences result in very few concrete changes.   Many groups could benefit from more than just information about what they need to do. 

When we started Intercambio we used templates from other organizations to develop our own personnel policies, Board member agreement, job descriptions, etc.  This allowed us to save a ton of time and focus that time on growing our program.  However, we did not find a database, a volunteer training, a curriculum, workshop templates, and other materials that were more specific to our field.

What nonprofits struggle with is building infrastructure – a database, trainings, orientations, evaluations, consistent program policies and procedures, etc.  Rather than spending resources on going to trainings that provide information that they may or may not use, they should be able to spend resources on concrete infrastructure building such as buying trainings or policies from existing organizations for reasonable fees.  They could then tweak those products and customize them appropriately to fit the needs of their specific agency.  These investments would last forever. 

There are many wonderful foundations including Skoll and Ashoka that are focused on working to support amazing new ideas that are replicable.  However, they are not interested in ideas and methods that are meeting emerging needs, have proven success, and are replicable but not new.  I think there should also be emphasis looking at what’s working and how could we make it work more, whether it’s new or not.  Currently there is an exaggerated focus on new and not enough emphasis on thinking about what is best and most efficient for the entire global nonprofit community.   

Some nonprofits that are establishing affiliates are following the franchise model that has worked so well in the for-profit world, but there is so much more potential to spread the “Starbucks” (efficient, high-quality organizations) of the nonprofit world.  There are many nonprofit models that are doing an incredible job impacting their community, but they could be doing so much more if they were intentional about sharing their model with other communities.   Some will need incentives to want to share their models, but right now those incentives don't exist and there is simply not enough talk about nonprofit replication.  We don’t look enough at other models to share ideas to maximize efficiency.  The nonprofit world is riddled with good-hearted but inefficient people working at nonprofits.  They don’t see their organizations like a business, always trying to become more efficient and effective.    

We need to create a database of nonprofits by category and have them list the products they could potentially offer.  For example, a food bank may feel that their inventory database is amazing, so they could put that out as something that could be shared with other food banks throughout the country that are using less-efficient databases.  Those food banks could apply to a “Replication Foundation” to receive the funding necessary to buy the database from the food bank and pay them for training time.  This initial investment will support the food bank selling the database and it will improve the efficiency of the less efficient food banks forever.  

Local governments share the same inefficiencies due to lack of sharing of critical information and materials/templates.  I was talking with our County Commissioner who has been documenting the county’s strategies around responsible growth.  This is an issue that so many other counties deal with, and many counties will begin at square one and retrace the same steps and learn the same mistakes that our county made.  He wants to share the strategies they’ve developed so that other counties can benefit from all the time already put into the learning around the growth issue.   

Our country needs to focus more resources on sharing concrete materials and templates with each other in addition to information if we want to improve our efficiency.  The first step is going to be talking about it more, and that’s what I want to do starting now.