Sliding Into Home

We're at the final stages of preparing for our 30th Anniversary Celebration here at Cause Effective, and we're going through what we've been through with our clients so many times... that feeling of being on a shared enterprise that is rapidly, rapidly, rapidly coming down for a landing.

But it’s the shared enterprise - the team - that I want to take this space to reflect on.

A nonprofit is, by its very nature, one of Tocqueville’s “associations” – a group of individuals coming together for a shared purpose.

In the 1830s, Tocqueville traveled to America from France and wondered at the preponderance of voluntary associations to accomplish social good: “Americans

of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” he mused.

Almost 200 years later, we still are.

But my point here is not the proliferation of nonprofits in the past several decades – though that’s certainly true – it’s the idea of a joint endeavor. At the heart of board-staff relations, at the core of how we run our organizations, is the concept of collective shoulders to the wheel to get the job done.

And even more than the idea, that concept of collective associations – is the feeling of shared purpose and collaboration.

It’s exciting, it’s affirming, and it’s reinforcing. I’m not in this alone – we’re all pulling the cart along, together.


Nothing brings that home more than sliding into home on a special event.

The whole office is working late. People are taking on responsibilities that “aren’t my job” to help each other out. Board members are responding to emails within seconds, even generating an-idea-a-minute to help the engine along.

I know I’m using a lot of movement metaphors here, but that’s what it feels like – we’re being swept along by a collective force that’s far, far stronger than any one of us doing our jobs in isolation.

And the question post-event?

How to keep that collective energy going, albeit at a lower pitch, to keep the communal strength of purpose and lightning-pitch clarity about goals that we experienced with the event.

Stay tuned…

Of de Tocqueville and Exercise Philanthropy

Alexis de Tocqueville is well-known for his observations, while traveling America in the 1830s, on the countless voluntary associations – from musical societies to political parties – that Americans form to accomplish a variety of social purposes.

So, too, under this umbrella, come the myriad -thons (walk-a-thons, bowl-a-thons, dance-a-thons, dress-a-thons) of fundraising infamy.

In an op ed in last Sunday’s New York Times, Ted Gup marvels at the success, and the absurdity, of the walkers against hunger striding across his neighborhood. What better use could their volunteer hours be put to building houses or volunteering in direct service, he wonders?

But ah, this is America – where we love to band together, and to urge others to join the fray – and how we take responsibility for social change. Gup reconciles the appeal of the walks to the accomplishment of public good:

“Where abstract appeals on behalf of the faceless needy may fall on deaf ears, appeals from family and neighbors do not…It personalizes the issue, quite literally turning the abstract into the concrete, converting perspiration into philanthropy.”

Now as a fundraising professional, you might expect that I come down firmly on the pro-thon side. Or even that I shudder at the thought, knowing the work involved (I was part of the initial birthing of Transportation Alternatives’ NYC Century – a 100-mile route bike ride through NYC streets, to mention only one logistical nightmare I was unafraid to tackle in my youth.) But neither of these professional positions inform my take on this phenomenon.

I do applaud the generosity of spirit that leads people to solve problems together. Walking, bowling, dancing, dressing (yes I’ve heard of that one somewhere).

But I also understand how individual effort takes the place of collective, governmental responsibility for realigning the distribution of resources and opportunity.

We can walk all we want, but people will still go hungry, until there is a collective will to shape public policy to change that.

There, now I’ve said it.

Now I have to go back to sending emails soliciting volunteers for the local school’s “Run for Health…”

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