NeighborScapes

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.