Not-For-Profit Principles in the Home

I've been doing a lot of training seminars lately and I thought I would share some insights that I think carry over well from the non-profit workplace to your home.

• Have a Mission Statement

Seriously. Know what your family is about and what its goals and values are beyond keeping a roof over your head and food on your plate and shoes on their feet and so on... Is your family about having a positive impact on your community? Is it about each person being given the structure and support to achieve their full potential? Is it about creating a family that seeks a sustainable lifestyle that is friendly to the environment and not materiarly centered? Is it about raising an army of warriors who will usher in an epoch of benevolent tyranny under the rule of John Tesh? Whatever it is, writing it down can help focus the members of your family and provide a framework against which to judge family activities by asking the question, "Is this family game of Scrabble® helping us achieve the mission of John Tesh's thousand-year Reich?" Which brings us to the next point....

• Have a Strategic Plan

A Strategic Plan articulates how you plan to fulfill your mission statement. For instance, if your goal is sustainable living you may outline five benchmarks you wish to achieve that move your family closer to that ultimate goal. They can be as simple as "Start a garden to grow our own vegetables," to "A gradual weeding out of toys with corporate characters as marketing ploys," to the more long-term, "Cancel the credit cards, move to Montana, live of the grid." It's up to you. In my family part of our strategic plan is to subtly work in references to John Tesh while in casual conversation with friends, colleagues and relatives.

• Have The Proper Organizational Structure

Many non-profits suffer from poor or inefficient organizational structures because at their inception the focus was necessarily and properly on "getting the job done" and "accomplishing the mission." In many instances, the organization is so pre-occupied with generating the funds necessary to enable its very existence that responsibilities are doled out under triage type circumstances (very often centered on a controlling founding Executive Director who may be the only paid staff member initially). Hopefully though, over-time as the organization matures there can be a proper designation of roles -- beginning with the Board, the Board president and the necessary Board committees; the executive director, the CFO and the rest of the staff. In your family, you'll probably find that a single person usually occupies many of these roles. For instance, in my family I act as the Board President, responsible for raising the funds necessary to allow the organization (family) to pursue our mission (Tesh-a-topia) as articulated by our strategic plan (raise an army of millions). The MOWA is the executive director. This means it is her job to implement the strategic plan while still allowing me to think that I came up with the idea in the first place. Boy and Girl Twin are our loyal agents, using their guile and cuteness to lull the soft, stupid masses into a passive stupor where John Tesh can ascend to his throne.

• Evaluation

How do we know if we are achieving our mission through the strategic plan? By taking the time to determine the metrics of success and being open to a process of learning and restructuring based on what is learned. Retreats are often a good way to begin an evaluation process -- something fun that takes you out of your everyday surroundings. I can't stress the importance of good metrics. Again, using the example of sustainable living -- how much money was saved on vegetables thanks to the new garden? On the other hand, how much time and money was spent on gardening? Is the garden a good project to continue or could energy be better spent by building a lean-to in the Montana plains and learning how to make snares out of dental floss? All excellent questions. Perhaps after a thorough evaluation process you decide that changes need to be made to the mission statement -- this should only be done after careful consideration. But it is possible that after a study of the metrics and a discussion between board, exec and staff, that the mission might be altered to achieving not sustainable living, but a blissful existence under the awesome rule of a terrible and fearsome blond deity? Just a thought.

I hope you've found this brief seminar helpful and that it will enable you to run your own families with heart and purpose.

Waiting to Exhale

I’m not the kind of parent to develop Munchausen’s-By-Proxy but this article in yesterday’s Washington Post got my heart beating a little faster. It is about sleep apnea in toddlers and it got me so panicked that I had to call the MOWA right away and have her read it and reassure me. Boy Twin snores from time to time and there’s nothing I enjoy more than walking into the kids’ room at night and seeing the two of them splayed in various positions while he saws away. The very thought that it might be an indicator of a health problem just made me quake. The MOWA, after reading the article assured me that while our son does snore, he doesn’t really exhibit any of the other symptoms that indicate that this might be a problem. So, I started breathing again.

My New Favorite TV Show

Okay. The MOWA and I don't watch much television. Most of what I know about pop culture I get from reading back issues of People courtesy of the MOWA-In-Law. I could list the shows I watch with any kind of regularity on one hand and two of those would be shows my wife watches and I do the crossword puzzle in bed with her. But this is a show I can truly love. I stumbled across it while channel surfing the other night and I promise that so long as it is on the air I won't miss a single episode. Where else can you get 100% proof that you are not in fact THE WORST PARENT ON EARTH (AND EVEN IF YOU ARE, WITH THESE BOZOS ON TV WHO'LL EVER BOTHER TRYING TO EXPOSE YOU?)! This show is like mainlining schadenfreude.

My new worst nightmare is not that Mike Wallace comes knocking on my office door wanting to ask a few questions, but this Lorraine Bracco look-a-like showing up on our front stoop with a camera crew and an exercise regime for my flabby white ass.

Story Time

The MOWA took me along this morning with the kids to their weekly Friday rendezvous at our local public library for story-hour. Now the Friday 10:15am gig is a hot ticket. Apparently you have to sign-up several days in-advance and if you don't show without calling to cancel you are "banned." Likewise, even calling and cancelling only buys you one more such absenteeism before you too are "banned." There are airlines with more lenient cancellation policies. It would not be putting the point too lightly that any potential Friday plans revolve around either commiting to attending or passing on story time at the library.

We got there just in time, because before we left we had to make the dough for our Friday night challah that the MOWA bakes each week with the kids. I've never been home when they've done this and it was amazing as Girl Twin announced each of the ingredients as they were poured into the bowl -- FLOUR! SALT! YEAST! BUTTER! EGGS! She's been going through a speech explosion recently and everday the MOWA and I do a double-take when she comes out with a new word like "meatball."

So, as we raced into the library parking lot at 10:16 and dashed up the stairs to the children's section, it felt a little like I was back in high school and late for homeroom. To my great relief we were not even lightly chastised, although the librarian did do a double take when I registered the twins at check-in.

"Oh, you're with them today?" she asked.
"Well, yes. Their mother's over there with Girl Twin looking through the CDs."

The librarian had confessed to the MOWA that she was in-fact one of her favorite story time moms because she was so active with the kids as opposed to seeing the hour as an opportunity to have someone else entertain the twins. I think in her mind's eye she had a differen't image of who this uber-mom's husband would be and I didn't quite match what she was expecting. She also seems to really like our kids -- which may have something to do with the fact that Girl Twin starts shouting out "SHAKY EGG!" as soon as the library comes into sight. There's a part of story time where they play a song about shaking bean-filled-plastic-eggs and tambourines and Girl Twin LOVES this song. Really. Or more exactly she LOVES THE SHAKY EGG. After the song is over, it usually takes her awhile to relinquish her egg, the MOWA reports. The one time they went to story time and the Shaky Egg song was not played was so traumatic that the librarian promised it would be on the set list for next time and reassures the MOWA every time she calls into reserve their spot, that eggs will indeed be shaking.

Turns out story hour isn't quite an hour long. I was also the only dad there, but the MOWA says there are usually one or two -- and that this was the exception. Since I have never been there before, I guess I can't be too judgemental. The room was probably evenly split between nannies and moms, with the odd grandmother thrown in for flavor. The stories were cute -- lots of singing with puppets and the aforementioned shaky egg. They also used a felt board to tell one of the stories which I found refreshingly retro in this technological era.

My main discovery of the whole trip was the insight it gave me into the part of my children's life that they spend out of my presence. The relationship with the librarian, their interactions with other kids and their parents -- it was all something that I intellectually understood was happening but it was something else to witness it. I guess because our lives with the kids were so isolated at first because of health concerns that I'm still adjusting to the fact that there is an increasing portion of the outside world that they come into contact with and have relationships unmediated by me. It also made me sadly aware that this is the majority of their lives... things that happen while dad is at work.

We've got to pay the bills some way, and don't get me wrong, I get a whole lot more out of my job than just money -- but I sometimes wish there were another way.

Not Too Cool To Admit...

To All The Girls I've Loved Before just started playing on the Party Mix option on my iTunes. I tell you, if you can't love this song, you don't have a soul.

God I miss blogging.

Garbo Speaks

First, let me say thank you (again) to all of you who wrote and asked where I was, if I was okay, when would I be returning to the blogosphere, had anyone chopped off my fingers? I'm fine. Really. But it did make me think, what if I wasn't? How would you know? By my non-response? How many different ways could that silence be interpreted? What would you do even if you could deduce that I was not "okay?" Am I under some sort of obligation to post here that I'm not okay? Not to be morbid, but if my Saturn had an unfortunate run-in with a GMC Denali should I have something in my will authorizing someone to post to the blog in-case of my untimely demise? How would you react to that post? Do you leave a "i'm so sorry" in the comments? Do you try and contact the MOWA? Do you plant a tree in Israel for me and take me off your RSS? Is this very dilemma part of what we mean by an online community? Have I been a bad friend by disappearing without so much as a "peace-out"?

The simple answer to why I haven't been blogging is that I've found that being a husband and father of twins scraping out a living in the not-for-profits has left precious little time for blogging about being a husband and father of twins scraping out a living blah-blah-blah. And I know that's lame, but really, it seemed that any time I had an opportunity to blog were the times where I could make the decision to spend a half-hour with my very real kids before they went to bed or post my blatherings to my virtual community. And I opted for my kids because that's how I roll. I could say it was for their benefit, but really it was for mine.

With that I throw myself on the mercy of the court and move on to other things.

Emerging...

Back on planet earth. I took a long trip around the moon and back. Still having a little bit of a hard time getting my legs used to this gravity thing. It could take awhile. More later. But for now let me just say, "I've missed everyone."

DC Commuter Tax

Let me preface everything I am about to say with this:

I lived in the District for many years. I moved there at the very nadir of the Barry Administration when they brought in the control board and took away democratic home-rule. I lived through the winter where when Marion Barry was asked about his strategy for snow removal he replied, "Spring." I lived on U Street in a basement apartment and a homeless guy would come and take a dump on my front stoop every now and then. And I was always in favor of a commuter tax to help the District get the funds it needed to provide adequate services and a minimum of safety. Why should these rich slobs in Northern Virginia and Maryland drive on our streets, bitch about our potholes, work at businesses and agencies that benefited from District services and not contribute a dime out of their taxes to help pay for any of it?

Well, the District has come a long way and now the economy is booming, real estate prices are soaring, crime is down (unless you have the misfortune of living east of the river), and if the schools still suck -- well, at least DC spends more per student than any other city in the Union. And I can't afford to live in the District anymore. Or in close-in Chevy Chase, Bethesda or the rejuvenated downtown Silver Spring. No, I live further out, because that's what we could afford. I take the metro when I can, but the hours of my work usually demand that I have access to my car.

My place of employ is in an area zoned for residential parking and it used to be that as long as you were careful on street cleaning days, you could get away with only receiving one or two tickets a month for violating the limit of two-hours of in-zone parking. Recently, DC parking violations officers seemed to have made it their life's mission to slap as many parking tickets on that lovely Saturn with the two car seats as they can fit under the windshield wipers. I've gotten probably three-hundred dollars worth of tickets in the last month and a half.

If you check the title of this blog, you'll understand that is a hefty chunk of my take-home pay. I'm left with the dilemma of deciding to pay for equally unaffordable garage parking, take my chances on the streets or take metro and severely curtail my effectiveness and flexibility at work.

So here's the deal District. You want to pass a commuter tax? Fine. But I want something in return: the right to park my damn car on the street and have a job that doesn't cost me $30/day in tickets. Whatever tax you pass it has to cost me less than that. Those lobbyists and lawyers on K Street already have garages so they don't give a shit*, but help-out the working slobs whom you have driven from the bosom of the city they truly love with your high price of living. Welcome us back, at least during business hours.

Save the true gouging for the tourists.


* I know. I know. The lawyers and lobbyists aren't really on K Street anymore. Sheesh.

Oh, and henceforth, the MOWA is the KVM and vice-versa. It's kind of like a Chekov play where someone can be both Alex, Sasha and Alex Andronovitch. You'll get used to it.

Touch My Golden Egg

Nothing screams "drinking game" more than the Harry Potter films, and we're happy to report that the latest installment does not disappoint. The game goes something like this:

Players try to beat each other in calling out the vaguely sexual references within the films with all remaining players drinking. An example--"I'm playing with my wand beneath the sheets" is one of our favourites, and whoever calls it out first wins while the remaining players drink deeply. Of course, the problem with this game is that the losers tend to get progressively more drunk, therefore impeding their ability to play the game at all. It's all a little microcosm for the capitalistic way of the rich getting richer. Or in this case, the drunk getting drunker.

The winner from the current film (which was whispered to each other throughout the entire 2 1/2 hour long film in an incredibly hot theater) is the mantra: "touch my golden egg" which comes after Harry wins the first task and returns to their commons room with the aforementioned golden egg. Having worked with middle schoolers and high schoolers for many years, I can tell you with some certainty that in the real world, no one would have been carrying Harry on their shoulders. And that the golden egg itself would probably prompt a drinking game similar to the one that should be used when viewing all Harry Potter films. Or some guilty groping that would be regretted a few hours later. Oh the innocence.

On a side note, the kids and I have started our own blog at www.twokidsandacopperpot.blogspot.com. Please join us in reading about our self-led cooking school created out of my own low self-esteem and my burning need to be doing something that appears "productive" to the outside world. The kids are ready to tackle On Cooking (our cooking textbook) and learn the proper techniques for braising meat.