This year, the bonus for me was helping out as G4C’s Festival blogger and tweeter, which became an opportunity to participate differently than I’m used to (for one thing, having to focus my undivided attention; it was also the first time I wasn’t demo’ing a game at the Expo Night so I finally got a chance to walk around and see a whole lot of amazing projects). A number of ideas (especially this one and this one) are still marinating in my head for a reflection post here, and I have a whole lot of wonderful people to follow up with, but for now, here are my daily roundup summaries on the G4C blog:

G4C 101 Workshop

Festival Day 1

Festival Day 2

Going to SXSW is a big investment in my own professional development, and I realize I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to attend, let alone eat my my way through a week in Austin. The many recent news stories about exploding demand at food banks across the US have left me very aware and grateful that we’re still able to buy groceries and cook nutritious meals.

Last weekend, as I was planning my SXSW schedule, I made a decision that happens to tie in perfectly with the Pledge to End Hunger: NO BUYING FOOD AT THE CONVENTION CENTER CONCESSIONS. Having attended many, many conferences, I like to think that I’m somewhat of a convention center food connoisseur. I know well the overpriced muffins and heat-lamp-cooked pizza across this great land, and I know that I do not want to eat any of them next week. Neither time nor my freelancer budget are going to permit eating out at restaurants on Sixth Street every time my stomach growls, so in keeping with this new rule, I’m bringing snacks. Yes, I will be that nerd, the one eating goldfish crackers out of a ziploc bag. If you’re going to SXSW, I hope you’ll join me. Skip the concessions, even if just once, and donate what you save to help end hunger for children in America. (You’re also welcome to join me, literally, if you want to grab a bite. No concessions doesn’t mean no food at all. I’d love to meet up.) If you’re not going to SXSW, but still planning to eat lunch next week, it’d be great if you joined in, too — check out www.pledgetoendhunger.com to learn how.

But first, one impression.

This was a relatively small event, but a far more diverse crowd than anything I’ve been to in a while (ok, not including the Inauguration). Not only were there more people of color than I usually see at both nonprofit and K-12 education events, but there were also other young professionals there, which was hugely refreshing after several years of dragging down the average age everywhere I go. Yet I was in the minority in one way — I was the only person taking notes on a laptop. Sure, I am biased toward events that have a technology focus, and this one did not, but it left me wondering, what are all these people going to do with their handwritten notes? I don’t just type mine for the sake of speed, but because it puts me one step closer to sharing them with my network, putting the information out into the wider world. I don’t doubt that my colleagues in attendance will make excellent use of this knowledge in their nonprofit settings, and I really hope someone else typed up their notes and blogged about it, too, but it really made me think that the impact of all this social media for my generation — which was most definitely represented in the room — has been exaggerated if it has little or no role in our professional development, reflection, and practice.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Context for the panel:
There are four generations at work in the workplace — the previous focus of generation gap conversations was on leadership development to prepare for new leadership when baby boomers retire. Now economic crisis is leading to baby boomers not retiring, so we need to look beyond just intergenerational dialogue and leadership development.

Moderator: Christine Rhee – American Express Philanthropy (the next generation of nonprofit leadership is one of their funding themes)

Panelists:

Frances Kunreuther – Director of Building Movement Project, author of Working Across Generations

• Less than a year ago, the conversation in the sector was about filling the jobs of exiting leaders. Now the conversation is about older generations not leaving their jobs and the need to find ways to integrate younger generations into organizations and leadership.
• A decade ago, older generations felt like there was no one behind them to rise to leadership, younger generations felt like they were unseen and unheard.
• One change in the landscape has been an emerging recognition that there are leadership skills that could be taught beyond just energy and commitment

• Her book talks about rethinking the frames around generational shifts
• four generations: veterans of change (aka the Silent Generation), Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials/Gen Y — book defines each generation’s tasks and roles in leadership and each generation’s reaction to the generational shift
• many of today’s organizations have never been through a generational shift because they were founded in the 60s and 70s
• why is there fear about younger generations? why are younger leaders not taking positions?
• there are shared values across generations, but how people enact their values varies based on their life experiences and when they were born
• older people say younger generations are: not committed, too entitled, don’t want to pay dues, too sharp a personal/work life divide
• younger people say older generations are: burnt out, work is their life, not efficient, too many meetings, don’t listen
• there is no charted territory for a generation that should be retiring at 65 and isn’t
• how to build trust across generations?
• structural problem – people were saying they would leave their JOBS in five years (Compass Point studies), but it’s because they didn’t want to be executive directors anymore because the jobs were undoable, and they still haven’t left the sector/stopped working entirely.
• younger generations were always being asked to “give input” but weren’t allowed to be involved in decision-making – they hated this and wanted a different form of participation and accountability
• boards are also an issue – many organizations have boards that are much older than the staff
• currently doing a survey with Idealist.org to find out what works for younger leaders in the sector and how organizations can change culture and structure to implement such changes
• sector also needs to prepare for potential conflict of retirees returning to the workforce

Dave McKinney – Public Allies

• The conversation needs to be about organizational culture, not just “the pipeline to leadership”
• Public Allies: working to change the face of leadership by working directly with young adults who are emerging community leaders, name is a play on Public Enemy (founded in 1992)
• Alumni range from early 20s to late 30s – aspirations in the sector: younger ones say they want to be executive directors, older ones have aspirations but don’t necessarily want to be executive directors, oldest say no – they’ve had enough
• Younger people have no access to interact with leadership or be involved with decision-making, and so the possibility of being in that position still holds some allure for them
• Older young people are looking for other ways to effect change (entrepreneurship, private sector) because they’ve seen what doesn’t work about being an executive director – “don’t believe the hype”
• Public Allies is aging (staff in their 30s, organization is 15 years old) and trying to address generational gaps and culture shift as they work with the youngest leaders entering their programs:
  • managing for results, developing metrics for this (used to be all about process, now it’s about results) – this builds trust, lets people be accountable for their own work
  • the older generations’ obsession with static models is prohibitive to a generation that is used to open networks
  • “create monkey bars and not ladders” – instead of hierarchy, take a holistic approach to the work, create flatter organizations, take a more generalist approach to defining staff positions and advancing mission
  • changing the physical environment to be alive for younger generations

• lessons from Obama campaign:

1. built a powerful brand that reflected people’s aspirations
2. respected the possibility of change coming from the bottom up
3. had a clear and measurable strategy and managed for those results
4. excelled online and in face-to-face organizing (didn’t see these as binary)
5. ubiquitous web presence
6. supported and built leadership of young people

Alexis Terry – BoardSource

• Governance doesn’t usually make it into the conversation about the generation gap
• BoardSource’s mission now includes inspiring board service and reaching out to individuals who want to serve on a board, not just those who already do
• BoardSource study: only 2% of nonprofits have board members under the age of 30. 36% have board members between 30-49.
• Findings on how to engage young professionals in board service:
• common barriers:
  • baby boomers say they don’t know how to find younger generations
  • concerns about isolation (afraid of them being the token youth or token ___)
  • preference for board members to be chief executives or officers at corporations
• Boards need to go extend young people’s involvement beyond either answer tech questions or being the representative young person
• Boards should have an “age down” strategy – figure out your current board age average and plan to reduce it by 5 years over the next 5 years
• Top skills/qualities boards seek in young people in order for them to add value:
  • the ability to think long term (18-24 months into the future)
  • understanding technology as a complement to face-to-face interaction, don’t impose it as the end all be all
  • expecting the feedback loops to be different from what they expect at work – “board work is team work” – don’t expect individual recognition for contributions, the reward is the advancement of the mission of the organization
• Top qualities of boards that are open to young people:
  • view Gens X and Y as leaders today – accept our ability to contribute now
  • remember what it was like when they first joined a board
  • try to restrain themselves from framing situations with, “when I was your age”

Abridged Notes from the Q&A:

Frances Kunreuther (FK): it’s not that people don’t have ideas about how to create new structures, there often isn’t support for doing so – often a fear from boards and funders of an organization that is trying to cultivate a new structure.

Alexis Terry (AT): boards are learning that they need to model things for their organizations – e.g., modeling inclusivity, shared leadership. One way to do this is to set up an onboarding program for new leadership – e.g., pull from a young professional network or membership pool, leverage the ex officio status to bring in young board members (have a first year of board service with non-voting status as a training model).

Dave McKinney (DM): it is hard to do organizational change well, many organizations have a hard time fitting this in, being intentional about it, among all the other priorities.

Question: how does multigenerational partnership work in small or mid size organizations?

FK: often in small organizations, the leader or founder is so influential in the organizational culture that change becomes harder. “You can’t make change without struggle” – don’t be afraid of differences or struggle in the process of change, but there needs to be an openness to it, and all generations need to be open to change.

DM: sharing of stories is a good way to create space for the “congruency of values” across generations (especially when there is a perception of a values clash).

Question: how to deal with founder’s syndrome?

AT: BoardSource has a toolkit for founder’s syndrome and long-term chief executives, includes experiences of Gen Xers moving an organization from founder’s syndrome to them being there for only 5-10 years.

DM: consider value of transition plans, also having an executive coach to help leaders think about their style.

FK: sometimes it’s okay for organizations not to outlive their founders, and there are new organizations and social ventures being launched by younger people all the time.

Question: is one of the reasons that transition planning doesn’t happen because so many organizations follow a model in which the outgoing leader is totally kept out of the succession/hiring process?

DM: there should be responsibility on the part of the Executive Director to think about the position as something bigger than him/herself and work with the board to make succession happen.

FK: it’s a fine line – there should be a way to let the outgoing leader be involved, but not control the process. Also, there is more and more evidence of Executive Directors leaving their position, but not the organization – mixed results on that.

Christine Rhee (moderator): Important to embed talent management in the organizational culture so that there is a clear understanding of who within the organization has the abiilty to rise to new leadership when the opportunities emerge.

Question: Addressing people of color (and absence thereof) in leadership roles?

DM: need to make an intentional effort to develop leadership of people of color so we can contradict the notion that white people should be EDs, Development Directors, Board Chairs (i.e., the ones who control the money). We need to have conversations about privelege and power, which are often the elephants in the room, so that there is a culture where it’s ok to talk about it.

AT: Look at the work of the Foundation Coalition in California – ten foundations that have articulated what they will do to fund work that focuses on inclusion.

Question: how do you ask/know when the purpose of your organization is not valid anymore?

FK: outside forces tell us – when you can’t gather the interest from constituents that you once could…sometimes there are things that in our minds are important to us, but it jut isn’t the right place and time for it. And it’s okay to let things go because new things will emerge. It’s so hard to have that conversation because we’re so invested in what we do, but it’s really important for the board to ask itself, “are we still relevant?”

AT: Look at the work of Rick Moyers from the Meyer Foundation, who writes a lot about the role of mergers in addressing the relevancy question.

Questions: How to balance addressing basic human needs (hunger, homelessness, health) vs. this kind of overarching capacity building for the sector? And how to integrate this kind of civic education/leadership development in school?

DM: Public Allies’ strategy is to expose people to issues, teach them how to act on the issues they care about, and cultivate a long term commitment to working on those issues. If they’re able to engage people in the issues, they’re supporting the growth of our democracy and giving them voice on the issues that affect their lives.

FK: We need to teach critical thinking skills in conjunction with teaching the issues that matter in people’s lives if we want them to be able to make a difference. Also need to focus not only on cultivating young people’s individual voices but also the power of collective voice.

My notes:

Eli Pariser

• we can allow ourselves some giddiness over the next few days, but then we have to address what this means for our politics and take it seriously — moments when people fear for their economic survival = shifts toward conservatism, so we can’t ignore the possibility of that challenge emerging and the pendulum swinging back the other way
• can’t build sense of togetherness and guard against reactionary behavior through the media because it thrives on fear — and Obama can’t do this alone, either — has to happen through organizing.
• collective action problem — not just one person can spread a sense of hope, everyone has to do it together, build institutions together through the struggle
• “virtuous cycle” – people believe their actions can change things, sense of hope becomes an incentive (so need to leverage people’s recent experience of doing something that led to tangible change — this is an opportunity to create great change in a short period of time)
• not a single troop has come home from Iraq, not a single green job has been created, no one has better healthcare…yet. this is the work we have to do now.

JoDee Winterhof

• CARE measures impact of development work on women and girls
• how to partner with members of Congress and agencies, create participatory democracy is a shift in thinking after so many years of working against government
• “build the boat while we sail it” – have to act quickly to create change
• CARE’s constituents (in terms of advocacy) are people who care about what happens in the development contexts where they work
• the stories of how policies/potential policies are impacting real people are known to those who are working in communities, not those creating the policies in Washington – community workers have to keep getting those stories to the people at the top
• continue using all the avenues (Facebook, letters to the editor, email, etc) used during the election to advocate for change

Van Jones

• emotional to be older than MLK was when he was killed
• have to remember those who won’t be at the Inauguration because they sacrificed to get us here
• recognized Green for All staff by name in audience
• also have to think about the people who aren’t celebrating tomorrow and will be scheming, because our dreams are their nightmare
• campaigns have to win one day, governance has to try to win everyday
• tendency to get our own history wrong and believe that Obama is the most central figure in this movement, and everything has to relate back to him — important to remember that we were working to build this before anyone had heard Obama’s name
• struggle for economic justice, taking to the streets around the prison-industrial complex, WTO — building our pro-democracy capacity goes way back beyond what started a year and a half ago (and now people act like nobody voted for Nader)
• “we had to drag that flag back to make it a peace flag” – the struggle against injustice during the Bush administration
• “pro-democracy movement made a fool of Karl Rove” by 2006
• Obama saw that the country was ready for change because of the movement that had been building for a long time, he was the vehicle for the movement
• Obama and the country do not need us to go spend four years in a state of elation, agreeing with Rachel Maddow
• “you only get a couple of lines next to your name” (“Lincoln: freed the slaves” “Churchill” beat Hitler”) – the lines next to Obama’s name are up to us. Could be “first black guy” or it could be “world’s hero” — so don’t go easy on him. Set the bar high and give him a challenge so he can be the world’s historic figure he needs to be.
• when Mandela was released from prison, he said it was the time to intensify the fight against apartheid, not ease up — now is the time to intensify the struggle for democracy here

Q&A

*The question and answer period pretty quickly unraveled into a series of appeals to Van Jones for help in one way or another, so I eased up on the notetaking at this point.

question: how to continue to broaden the base for a progressive majority, building on all the people who voted for Obama after never having voting for a progressive?

Eli Pariser: MoveOn.org tries to listen to its members, find out what they care about, and make it easy for them to make change – technology makes it easier to figure out what those issues are…have to use listening mechanisms to understand what is important to actual people. We have to keep the channels clear from around the country so Obama can hear us, over the pundits and insiders.

JoDee Winterhof: help people stay focused on the core issues, not the distracting issues that conservatives want them to worry about

Van Jones: the gov’t is about to spend $1 trillion — it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for people to try to shape that stimulus. We need to advocate for projects that are people ready and planet ready, not shovel ready.

The movement has picked up bad habits of how we treat each other — “need to go from diesel to solar” in how we relate to each other — the movement needs to stick together, be kinder to each other. “it matters who we are being” as a progressive majority – “do the right thing, but be the right people as we do it”

question: it’s inevitable that many of us will be disappointed by our elected officials during this administration, how should activists behave when our elected officials betray or disappoint us?

Jones: it’s up to movements to create political space for them to step into, so if they fail us, we should assume we didn’t.

Winterhof: we have to make sure our voices are heard and are at the table

Pariser: have to remember how many people will be spending this administration reading the polls and thinking about the next election, not doing what they think in their hearts is right. So “creating the political space” means continuing the persuasion campaigns of the election that move public opinion throughout the country toward supporting “what’s right” (e.g., green jobs) that politicians might not otherwise support if they don’t see it in the polls.

Winterhof : approach advocacy by layering strategies and broadening appeal over time

Jones: need to create jobs for the most marginalized people (“green economy Dr. King would be proud of”)

question:
how to use technology effectively for advocacy without diluting all the progressive causes due to information overload?

Pariser: one cannot assume that when there is a problem, others are taking care of it. it’s up to us to see problems, accept that we might not be experts, but do what needs to be done. what needs to be built, and maybe i’m the person to build it.

figuring out how to make information move up, down, and across networks is a challenge that has not been solved — although technology has helped in recent years — and we still have to experiment and mess up to get it built.

Final Highlight

Among the celebrity guests, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang the campfire favorite, “If I Had a Hammer” (Yes, we sang along. Yes, we even did the camp hand motions.) and agreed to pose for a picture with us:

I was refreshed by Noguera when I tried to listen from the perspective of that particular audience – primarily educators and policymakers who are reimagining school through the lens of global education. It is of massive importance that we don’t reserve global learning as such a precious thing that only the rich kids get to participate in and benefit from it.

So, here they are, with a few of my own reflections in italics:
* 50% of African American males in NYC are unemployed (in what age group, though?)
* anti-immigration sentiment in US means that many teachers are working with students whose parents are treated like fugitives
* most secondary teachers confuse teaching with talking, and are bad teachers because they imitate the worst teachers of all: college professors. Teachers think if they’ve covered it, therefore the kids learned it, not based on what the kids can do (band and shop teachers know this)

* most of what kids learn in school they will forget, except what they continue to use
* what matters most is how well you have learned to learn and solve problems and process information; need to prepare students for the creativity and innovation sector of the economy
* how can education cultivate imagination?
* soft bigotry of low expectations: Bush is right that this is a problem with schools (even if he doesn’t know what it means)
* the education of poor children is approached based on what will be on the test (art and music aren’t integral to learning for ‘those kids”)
* we”ve forgotten that Dewey was writing about the whole child 100 years ago; Gardner: through the 1960s, most kindergarten teachers knew how to play the piano and had one in the classroom
* why do kids say school is boring? Because it is.
* research shows that interactive learning is good for retention of knowledge. It is traditions and low expectations that keep us from changing pedagogy.
* suburban schools are more diverse than urban schools, but are segregated from within
* the gatekeepers deny “low expectation” kids opportunities for rigorous learning
* algebra as predictor for going to college
* all the countries that are “ahead of us” in international test scores do things we don’t do: they provide universal access to health care (“you can’t teach kids to read if they can’t see”), to preschool
* Montessori schools were founded for poor children in Italy but are usually exclusive to affluent children in the US
* school system lacks a sense of trust in children
* schools and teaching still assume that intelligence is innate and the function of schools is to sort and rate based on intelligence — we need a new paradigm that cultivates all kinds of talent in all children. Need to reorganize our schools and our expectations.
* need to honestly ask how strong a predictor race and socioeconomic status are on academic success (in the current paradigm)?
* what happens to kids who have no adult advocates in schools? The kids who don’t know they have rights?
* confidence + competence = resilience. kids need the chance to actually get good at things (this means we have to give them space to be bad at things at first, and then get better)
* discipline needs to mean cultivating character, not weeding out bad kids (because now “discipline and punish” happens due to unmet needs and we don’t acknowledge that)
* ASCD Commission for the Whole Child (“ASCD”…can never remember what that stands for”) — seems like a common sense idea, but “common sense isn’t all that common”
* how do we challenge the conventional wisdom of the old paradigm?
* PS 138 in the Bronx has the only museum of the history of the Bronx — striking that historical artifacts are within reach of children who could destroy them, but students have pride and ownership over the museum so it would never occur to them to do anything but respect it — school culture is one of respect and leadership
* if you let race and class be predictors of student success, that is the school’s problem, not the kids”.
* for most gifted children in urban environments, their “gift” is having parents who advocate for them and make sure they”re prepped to pass the tests that get them into gifted programs.
* one way to close the achievement gap is to speak out against the known ways that students are prevented from learning, and against the underlying conditions of inequity.