David La Piana

Boarding a plane at Washington Dulles we were held aside while 50 WWII veterans, filed past to board first. Even in high-pressure D.C. no one complained. In fact I, like others, felt honored to stand aside and offer a kind of friendly honor guard as they boarded.

As their line slowly passed mine I talked to several guys. One remarkably spry fellow told me he was 94, and that the man behind him was his baby brother. The younger man, only 85, told me there were four brothers, all of whom had gone to war – and come back alive. I thought of their mother and father, long dead now, and the years of agony they must have experienced with all four of their sons in a war.  I heard there were two Pearl Harbor survivors in the group but never met them. I did however talk to a man who proudly announced that he was the youngest of the whole bunch, at only 81. I quickly did the math and said “Wait a minute, you must have been a kid!” “Yep,” he answered, “I enlisted at 16.”

A woman in line behind me googled “World War II veterans Washington DC” on her cell phone and relayed to us that a nonprofit had been formed in recent years, called Honor Flight Network, to bring groups of veterans to DC to see the WWII Memorial on the National Mall.  The whole experience made me feel good. Good that these men are alive, and that after the horrors of the largest war in human history they had lived long and I hope peaceful lives. But I also felt good that the nonprofit sector had provided a vehicle for a group of volunteers to organize, raise funds, and give these men some small measure of the boundless thanks they deserve.

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After working all weekend in New York I arrived around noon Monday at National Airport. I still can’t call it Reagan. After checking into my hotel, I headed to The Mall – think Washington Monument, not American Eagle.

The Smithsonian has totally renovated the National Museum of American History building. In addition to an impressive display on the history of America’s wars I went to the actual Julia Child Kitchen from her TV show, which they have installed right in the museum. They also have a prominent display of an original Dumbo car from the Disneyland ride. I think I must have sat in that car as a kid, growing up in LA.

The most amazing experience I had in the museum, however, was not the collection itself, but something I witnessed on the way out. I passed a door marked “Staff only.” It popped open a crack and a black Labrador Retriever came out, on a leash, but I couldn’t see the owner on the other side of the door. On my side of the door, someone had tied a rope to the door handle. As the lab grabbed the rope in his mouth and pulled the door the rest of the way open, out came a woman in a wheelchair. Then she told the dog to “drop it,” he let the door close, and off they went!

I went next to the National Art Museum to escape the busloads of school kids, who tend to prefer the more fun museums (as do I). It is a beautiful, quiet space with wonderful pieces. Then I walked to the Washington Monument.

Near the Monument, there was an NRA gun rights rally in full swing, and coming from California, I have never seen how passionate (and a little scary) some of these gun advocates are. There were whole families walking around wearing pro-gun stickers, even the littlest kids. I also saw someone carrying a toddler with a t-shirt that read “Guns Save Lives,” and older guys with hats and flags that had pictures of AK-47’s on them. The following day the national NORML march to legalize marijuana is scheduled to take place. As I headed back to the hotel I wondered how many people came for the gun rally, but will then stay for the pot rally?

It is one of those moments when you just have to say “ain’t America great?”

I wholeheartedly support Barbara Kibbe’s recent suggestion to make the next GEO meeting in two years more interactive. I want to emphasize this: let’s make it radically more interactive.

I have been to dozens of conferences, including every GEO meeting since 1998. GEO is great because of the people, some of my favorite people in the field seem to attend. Still, and this is no knock on GEO, it is the sad state of conferences these days that, just as in the 1970′s, and probably back to the Pleistocene, they alternate between plenary sessions and panels, and “interactive” means a 10 minute Q&A at the end. We can do better.

Next time let’s do GEO as a three day Open Space session. We could invite people to consider some big topic in philanthropy, to just come at noon the first day and make it happen. There will be no conference planning committee. There will be no proposals for workshops. There will be no agenda. There will be no celebrity plenary speaker at lunch. There will be no break out rooms. We just need one room large enough to hold all of us with lots of space to move around. We need a bank of laptops we can all use to capture our “proceedings.” And we also need a flexible caterer who can provide food throughout the day so there are no meal breaks per se. People will be having too much fun to break for meals all at once.

Open Space begins with people self-organizing an agenda. Now, that sounds hard to do on the fly with a group of several hundred people, and it does take a different type of pre-planning, as well as a cracker jack support team on site, but in the end it always works. I have never facilitated, or participated in, a failed Open Space meeting. In my experience, Open Space meetings have been by far the most meaningful.  Given the right structure and support on site, people make it work.

The GEO crowd is a great, smart, creative group of people. Let’s give them the conference they deserve – a conference they make for themselves.

Writing from the biennial gathering of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference in Pittsburgh, I have to say there is a really upbeat attitude among the participants, mostly foundation staff and trustees. I ascribe this optimism to the Dow hitting 11,000, a height fondly remembered but not seen for a long time. As the market picks up, foundation assets rebuild from their 28% decline and things get much more positive in the foundation community. Which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.

But on the other hand most nonprofits rely on sources other than foundations for the bulk of their support. Giving from individuals is still being pressed by high unemployment and uncertainty, some of which may also ease as the market rises. And the largest source of revenue for nonprofits is state and local government programs, and here we see no light at the end of the tunnel, only a precipice as the states try to balance their 2010-2011budgets.

So, as the foundation community regains some of its capacity to help nonprofits, let us not forget that the public sector funding in many cases is much more critical, day in day out, to the survival of most nonprofits, and it will not be rebounding any time soon.

I opened the Times (London not NY) to find that David Cameron, the Conservative party’s candidate for Prime Minister, is about to become a father again. This led to the cute headline that his wife, Samantha, known as SamCam, is “moving toward Labour,” which of course is the British liberal party. Nice pun.

But the really interesting piece was a serious discussion of whether, if elected in the fall polls, David will take paid paternity pay, which is his right. Apparently, even Tony Blair took a paltry (by British standards) two weeks paid leave when he was prime minister, appointing someone else to hold the fort while he bonded with his family.

Can you imagine an American politician taking paternity leave – paid no less – right after winning the White House? “Sorry folks, I have to take the 4AM feeding, the world will have to wait.” The UK seems just a little bit more civilized than my own nation every day I am here, as things which would be anathema at home are a matter of course in Britain.

In another article, lauding Obama’s health reform success and trying to explain to a British reader just how strong opposition to it is, the paper writes “Europeans may struggle to grasp how health insurance subsidies could be seen as an assault on freedom. . .but they are part of a battle for the soul of America.”

As I continue my sojourn in the UK, I learned an interesting fact about the nonprofit sector here: There is a national government department devoted to “third sector affairs.” Even more amazing, this entity has created a multi-million pound fund to support capacity building among the nation’s 200,000 charities.

When I heard this today, from colleagues at a meeting, the only thing I could think to say was, “My God, it sounds like socialism!” When the laughter died down, I discovered that my work here, with UK organizations ACEVO and Capacity Builders, is being financed out of this fund. I always did love socialism.

Seriously, it is inconceivable that America would allow its government to take such an active role in supporting a large portion of the nonprofit sector economy, or is it? Until recently, it was equally inconceivable that our government would bail out the private sector’s financial institutions.

The closest thing the US has to this arrangement is the IRS oversight function. But that is really a policing responsibility, ensuring our sector is obeying the law. There is no unified federal (or state for that matter) effort to ensure the health of our nonprofits.

I am in London to offer a series of workshops on strategic restructuring for UK nonprofits leaders. While riding into town in a traditional London black cab and chatting with the driver, the topic of US health reform came up (he raised it). The cabbie had expressed fairly conservative views on other topics in our hour-long, traffic clogged, drive. But when it came to health care he just could not understand how the US tolerates our current health care “system.”

I couldn’t help him, there is no defense. In the UK, health care is a right, and is not generally the political football we use it for in the US. Brits across the political spectrum support their national health insurance arrangement as the only sane manner to address a nation’s health needs. Everyone here is covered, and everyone pays in, along with their contributions to the UK equivalent of Social Security, charmingly referred to as Old Age Pensions. Premium amounts vary with income and circumstances, not age, gender and health condition.

As a part-time semi-retired cabbie, my new friend pays the equivalent of $20 a month for his coverage. As an American, it was both refreshing and embarrassing to compare health care systems. If health reform dies, it won’t get easier.

Without a doubt our nation, and the nonprofit sector that serves it, have both gone through a very tough time over the past couple of years. The crisis brought a barely averted financial collapse, from which Wall Street has recovered quite nicely. Profits are way up, and our biggest bankers seem to have learned – well, nothing actually. The head of Goldman Sachs described the whole near-catastrophe as practically an act of God that mere mortals could neither have foreseen nor prevented.  Regardless, Wall Street is back in the money, big time.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of us. Unemployment is stuck at record levels, which means, among other things, that nonprofit human service providers are stretched to the limit in many parts of the country, with less revenue and many more demands on their services. The nonprofit economy has continued to languish while the financial markets have begun to recover.  Where nonprofits are concerned, unfortunately, there is little hope for a rapid turnaround.

The largest source of income for many nonprofits is state and local government. The recession, while technically over, is still in full swing in most state legislatures. Higher unemployment means both lower tax revenues coming in and more benefits paid out. In places like California, where “dysfunctional” doesn’t begin to describe our pre-recession political system, each budget brings even more draconian cuts.

What can organized philanthropy do about all of this? Foundation funding has in the past been a highly strategic part of the sector’s sustainability.  It needs to play that role again today. Foundations are loathe to “play God,” deciding which nonprofits will live and which will die, but the time has come to place some bets.

As the sector continues to witness the financial collapse of not just marginal performers but important nonprofits, funders can ask “Which groups are too important for us to lose?”  Foundations should identify their top picks, the organizations their communities and fields cannot live without, and invest in strengthening those groups. This does not necessarily mean picking up the tab for government funding cutbacks, but helping these essential groups to rethink their business model, restructure their management and service delivery, and perhaps even join forces with others to withstand the storm.

A few foundations have launched initiatives to help key grantees rethink their models. It is time for the foundation community at large to jump in.

I recently saw two news stories on kids and computers that caused conflicting reactions.

The first was a research study reported in the New York Times last month. It found that American teens basically spend every waking hour when they are not in school either texting, tweeting, surfing, or on their cell phones. They are connected 24/7. And my mom used to complain that I watched too much TV (around 3 hours a night)!

The second article, also from the Times, appeared on February 11. It described a wired school bus in Tucson Arizona. The story claims that boisterous and rowdy kids were tamed by the installation of a wifi connection so they can now do their homework on the way to school.  But I wonder how much time these kids are spending sending emails, surfing the web and otherwise doing their thing, rather than editing History essays or submitting their Biology homework, as the story claims.

So here is the part where I am conflicted. I worry that so much time spent online reduces opportunities for creative thought, friendships in the flesh, and exercise. Is this worry justified or is it just the 21^st century version of my mother’s concern that I was watching too much TV?

The opportunities to access information that teens and even younger kids have today are amazing, and whether they are ready for it or not, it is here. I recently read that a school somewhere was offering an online safety class for kindergarteners. Where does it end? Preschoolers lined up at baby Macs? Newborns lying in their cribs pushing their feet up to touch screen Internet-enabled virtual mobiles?

The most salient fact about all of this is our apparent helplessness to effect any change in our interaction with technology. We are, by mutual agreement, powerless. As soon as some new thing is created, we all flock to use it, whether we know how and why, or not. Will we someday make rational judgments about which technologies to embrace and conscious choices about how we spend our time, or are we simply consumers mesmerized by the next cool thing? And what does all of this mean or society?

Last week, I was slated to fly to New York for a series of client meetings.  Alas, the great Snowageddon of 2010 arrived first and all flights were canceled. Thankfully, and very uncharacteristically, United sent the cancellation email, a day ahead of time. Unprecedented prescience, I say. My daughter Marisa, is at college in Philadelphia, texted pictures of kids using dining hall trays as makeshift sleds, while school was canceled for two blessed days. My client and I rescheduled, and my wife Mary and I headed to Tahoe for a different type of snow experience, and a welcome one. Sometimes Mother Nature calls the shots and all we can do is follow her orders.