NeighborScapes

I do a lot of things at NeighborScapes. I’m a mentor for a few young adults who I’ve bonded to particularly over the course of some of our organized programmatic activity. I’m a liason for the nonprofit to community stakeholders and partners, and frequently the first point of contact for donors and volunteers (or have a propensity for recruiting random people I encounter to donate or volunteer…) I’ve done limited program design, and some extremely reluctant audit work. But, lately, I’m a grant writer, bolstering the capacity of other nonprofits in the Southland and cavorting about as a gun-for-hire. I get a kick out of finding out how to run a nonprofit at optimum performance, and helping grow nonprofits to that point.

And, over the course of my grant writing experience, I have indeed learned a lot about what makes nonprofits function. A staggering proportion of them cater to the grant, fulfilling the expectations of whoever promises to keep their doors open and their salaries paid. All of the grant writing training I’ve had, has told me to write the grant by promising to fulfill each of its terms, and do it cost effectively.

The problem with this, is that it creates a culture of thousands of cookie cutter programs vying for limited (and shrinking) federal funding contracts; the effect is replicated in the hundreds across State contracts and in the tens across County ones. The bigger private foundations see the same effect, in proportion to the degree of detail their proposals ask for. Requests for Quotes (RFQs) tend to be pretty specific in the activity they want the recipients of their awards to perform, and if an applicant fails to make those promises, that applicant is Seldom Offered Licensure (S.O.L.).

This frightening reality often makes the more hefty, established nonprofits that really could drive meaningful, sector-wide change, paralyzed and less able to enact this change. Instead, they strive to always do what they have always done, but better and cheaper and for more people. This is good, if what they are doing is sensitive to the needs of the surrounding community and the modern era. But it is very, very bad, if, say, Washington DC or Springfield, IL do not know the needs of Dolton, IL, and don’t know what questions to ask. Or, if a nonprofit in Tinley, IL designs a financial literacy program in 2001, the cornerstone of which is “buying a home is always a good financial investment”- and relies on the grant to pay its people, and fears changing the curriculum for ear of losing the grant, to the point that it runs essentially the same program by 2010.

The NeighborScapes philosophy is to always do one better than the grant asks for. This is smart, from a competitive angle- an application that promises 110%, and a nonprofit that has been coached to perform what it has promised, will almost always have a strategic advantage over those who only promise to do what’s asked of them, all else taken equally. It’s smart, because it gives back to the funder- not only in supplying the funder with feet on the ground to carry out the funder’s mission, but with a deeper understanding of the social goal the nonprofit and the funder share. And it’s smart, because it preserves the diversity, individuality, and nuance of the individual nonprofit applying for the grant. If, after all the boxes are filled, there’s still room in the margins- a nonprofit is free to add whatever to the margins it pleases, so long as it believes this extra will also please the funder. And, you know, that the RFQ has not specifically forbidden such margin doodling.

It’s why I’m sitting in a borrowed office today, far past when the regular tenants of the miles of cubicles surround me have gone home, busting All Services Securable to bring in yet another massive federal grant with draconian expectations. I’m an hourly employee, my job doesn’t offer benefits, and I’m making far below my worth in a for-profit company. But I love my job.

I think it’s because NeighborScapes takes the same philosophy for its youth- and its staff. Yes, I’ll design a GED program for Yasmine- but if Yasmine wants to be a CSI, I’ll design a GED program catered to getting her into crime-solving. Karen wants a job with benefits and health insurance, to support her family- but also loves numbers? Okay, let’s put her on a career track, not just somewhere that will take care of her basic needs. Let’s preserve the artistic leanings of the youth who come to us looking for menial jobs that will pay regularly, let’s make businessmen out of hustlers, let’s make scholars out of students and advocates out of earnest individuals.

People- and organizations, especially nonprofits- are complex and nuanced and beautiful. And I’m so glad to be able to help keep them running- and keep them remembering what it’s like to be themselves.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.

When I was growing up, my favorite Disney movie was The Little Mermaid. Setting aside my problems with the show now that I’m an adult, I manifested my true, middle-class, capitalist gestalt by loving Ariel’s collection of junk. These were things that had been lost in disaster or cast aside as useless, preserved by someone who had no idea what they were, but was enraptured with the possibility of them- and the connotation that those objects had, of a world that was mysterious but beautiful.

Ariel only got it halfway, though. It’s not enough to just collect the junk; you have to fix it, shine it, make it do things. It’s not enough to demand an answer of Scuttle for what the items did; you have to use them, and teach others to use and value them, too.

My living space, alas, looks a lot like Ariel’s cavern. I love books, and show my love of them by collecting them constantly. My library would look a lot like the Beast’s, if the Beast had no taste for presentation; the shelves are crammed with books without any real governance, and the space in between is filled with other miscellaneous bric-a-brac that is  both supremely useful-someday, and presently quite useless.

The key to this collection compulsion is that every item I collect symbolizes possibility. With the yarn, I don’t know yet what I will make, but I know it will be beautiful because I value my skill at creating things. With the books, I don’t know yet what they will contain, but I will almost certainly someday discover it.

Figuring out what makes a good nonprofit run, and then doing those things, feels very similar. A good grant provides governance, and a skeleton of how goals should be achieved- but deliberately leaves the entrails out. It’s up to the grant writer to invent things like the heart, the lungs, and the liver. Even if the appendix isn’t strictly necessary, it’s usually good to include it just in case.

I like discovering things. Discovering talent, discovering possibility, and cultivating it to bring it to bear fruit. I believe that the strongest tenant of environmentalism and the strongest tenant to social change is to waste not, and there’s so much out there that, with some repairs, a good scrubbing, and a coat of polish, can run far beyond anyone’s expectations.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.

There was a point in time over last summer in which 60-75% of the staff in the NeighborScapes office at any given time was Jewish. Purim was a big deal, and most of the staff were gone for the High Holidays; I think I spent Purim alternating reading about it so I’d be more prepared next year and trying to do billable work. The nuances of Hanukkah and Passover remain a mystery to me (what the heck, what is an orange doing on a passover seder plate? I GUARANTEE the Jews did not have oranges when they were fleeing Egypt), as much as I’m trying to learn.

But there’s a certain charm to Hanukkah, that comes from more than just being the Jewish holiday that’s chronologically closest to Christmas that also involves exchanging gifts and lighting candles. I’m overcoming the irony of a nonprofit that focuses on green jobs and a Green economy celebrating a festival of oil. Instead, I look at it, as with everything, from the perspective of nonprofit operations, where using one day’s resources to last eight is the kind of holiday miracle that our funders expect us to perform regularly.

Giving us one day’s resources to last eight is impossible. It’s insulting. It defies science and common sense and spits in the face of good work. It takes overworked, underpaid employees and demands that they do ever more, work ever harder, to meet need rising like a tsunami with resources washing away like sand.

This, I think, is missing the point of the miracle. It is a superhuman accomplishment to do eight days of work with one day of oil. It is superhuman to achieve in six months what should take a year, it is superhuman to meet 2010 (or 2011’s!) needs with resources at 1990 levels. There is no science or logic to it. I want to throw up my arms and quit.

But, always, something comes along. Prairie State offers us a partnership with YES right when the NeighborScapes network has been exhausted for summer fundraising. HCI pays us when our operating funds are right about to dry. A new van is donated right when the possession or absence of a van will make or break our summer camp, a high-skill volunteer with specifically the skills we need shows up on our doorstep a day before we need them. A partnership with National Able brings us Sandra, right when we need her most- even though we’ve tried to reach out to National Able for months before.

I’m educated. I like to operate with certainty and science. I like to look before I leap, plan for the worst, have a back-up strategy AND an exit strategy. But that’s not the funding environment I find myself in, nor the kind of nonprofit I work for. With the economy so unstable and NeighborScapes so new, sometimes I only get one night’s worth of oil.

But NeighborScapes is a lighthouse to too many people for me not to keep the candle burning. So maybe I’ll learn from my Japanese heritage and study a little Kaizen, working towards constant improvement in myself, my work, and those around me. Maybe I’ll honor my white grandfather who spent forty years in a factory for Ford, and see my work as one powerfully important step in a much larger picture. And maybe, during the winter Holidays, it’s the time of year for Hanukkah Miracles to happen.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.

A trust fall is a trust-building game often conducted as a group exercise in which a person deliberately allows themselves to fall, relying on the other members of the group to catch the falling person. Variants increase the risk, by having the falling person start from elevated positions, be blindfolded, or not know who will catch them. And there is every reason in the world for youth services nonprofits to teach trust falls to their participants, but not engage in them themselves.

Kelly Evans from Hire Learning runs a tight ship. She takes an innovative approach to job training, and runs the kind of program that should rightly be replicated across the greater Chicago area, if not wider audiences. She is the kind of shrewd, fast-moving, strategic start-up executive director that all startup executive directors should aim to be. And I can easily see Kelly Evans being the next Gary Leofanti and Hire Learning being the next Aunt Martha’s.

Hire Learning has a lot of overlap with NeighborScapes. We serve much of the same population, doing many of the same or similar services. Hire Learning is headquartered in the same town that NeighborScapes’ board president and two board members live in. And, according to conventional wisdom, we should be competitors, and I am a fool for saying that Hire Learning will catalyze your dollars and volunteer hours to enact a far more powerful and lasting change than almost any nonprofit I’ve seen in the Southland.

But Hire Learning knows something that most other nonprofits in the Southland do not know, and this will be the key to their exponential growth. Hire Learning needs only Kelly Evans’s shrewd interview of a potential partner and her Board’s approval, before she will throw the full and growing heft of Hire Learning’s capacity into that strategic partnership. Hire Learning is an engine catalyzing other organizations’ growth, and uses the goodwill that it builds up and the collaborative fundraising that results to drive its own growth. Hire Learning helps itself by helping others.

This has been juxtaposed recently in our application for a Federal grant. Hire Learning was brought to the table two days before Thanksgiving and had a letter of commitment detailing specific offered in-kind services by Tuesday before the holiday. Other, far more established nonprofits with far bigger operating budgets, who have the full cost of the federal grant in the bank as cash reserves, took a far slower approach, and required a full month and the absolute guarantee of a subgrant in the case of winning the federal grant before making the same commitment.

This, I think, will be the key to who survives in the face of an IL budget crisis. I’ve seen the United Way numbers, and know that offices will close, staff will be laid off, hours of operation will shrink, and it’s very likely that some of the more unstable nonprofits will halt operations altogether. But Hire Learning is going to go for broke, making the dream happen for other startup nonprofits, strategically selected by a shrewd executive director with an eye for explosive growth. Maybe some of those nonprofits will be selfish with that money. But maybe subgrants and goodwill built up by Kelly’s efforts will translate to capacity building for Hire Learning, and be the route to Hire Learning’s true potential. I hope so. NeighborScapes is taking the same route. Kelly is an inspiration to how I understand nonprofits in the Southland, and I think Hire Learning and NeighborScapes share a lot of ideology.

So, here’s to Kelly Evans and Hire Learning, and a paradigm of collaborative growth. I trust Kelly Evans and Hire Learning to catch me or mine when they need it, and be a model for other start-up nonprofits to do the same. And, Kelly? We’ve got your back, should you ever need us.

Chris Furuya is the program coordinator for NeighborScapes, a volunteering, community organizing, and civic leadership nonprofit located in the South suburbs of Chicago. Her twitter handle is earthangelNS.