<< previous article | table of contents | next article >>
Monolog: Sharron Rush
This is the second of a new series of mini-interviews in which we ask one person to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with socially-focused organizations.
Name: Sharron Rush
Title: Executive Director
Organization: Knowbility, Inc. (http://www.knowbility.org/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: Outside the box. I find that phrase is most often used as an excuse for fuzzy thinking, lack of understanding, or inability to plan. I will generally agree to think outside the box only after we also agree to think inside the box for at least a few minutes. <grin>
Favorite Web Site: http://www.coyotecom.com/
Jayne Craven's Web site is very simple and straightforward with useful technology information for nonprofits. She updates the site regularly with technology tip sheets that are easy to follow and include applications from the most basic to the quite sophisticated. Like us at Knowbility, Jayne is a passionate advocate for inclusive technology. From her post as Online Volunteer Manager at the United Nations office in Bonn, Germany, Jayne promotes innovative programs that bring the benefits of technology to the most underserved. She is a pioneer in including people with disabilities as online volunteers and shares her knowledge generously and effectively. In fact, I fantasize a world ruled by the Principles of Jayne, called either Jaynia or Jaynatopia. And if you ever get the chance to hear her speak, do it!
Favorite Quotation: "Live with one hand held by the ancestors and the other hand reaching to the descendants." --Bessie Jones, a primary bearer of African-American traditions and folklore
This quotation is the best encapsulation I know of the responsibility that we have in life to both respect what has come before and spend our time improving the world that we pass on to future generations.
Recommended Reading: A book that I like to recommend, because it is a departure from most books about nonprofits and so-called "charity" work, has the unfortunate title What's Love Got to Do With It? by David Wagner. Despite the misnomer, this book is a hard, well-researched look at the history and the very assumptions that underlie nonprofit work. The author questions the motivations of philanthropy and how and why our society depends on charity to solve some of its most intransigent problems. Although I can't agree with all of his premises, it made me think about the work of the nonprofit sector in a constructively critical way. The book reminds me to continue to question, which I believe is a necessary component of learning and of useful service.
Prediction for the Sector: I am afraid that a decade or so of admonitions to "operate like a business" has had a debilitating effect on the real mission-driven work of many nonprofit groups. Corporate and private foundations have driven much of this trend, and it seems to me like a course that requires less analysis and is therefore more appealing to bureaucrats. Although I am in complete agreement with the fact that basic budgeting and accounting principles must be applied to any organization with responsibilities to donors and constituents, nonprofit organizations cannot and should not operate like businesses; they have an entirely different reason for existing. I have seen many organizations move resources from programs that serve real constituent needs to other less effective programs because those programs are also less problematic, less costly, easier to measure for success, and so easier to fund and to justify. As Enron, WorldCom, and other business scandals continue to undermine the idealization of the corporate model of social organization, my hope is that the nonprofit sector will remember to manage for the mission. The Drucker Foundation (http://www.pfdf.org/) publishes several useful workbooks that can help nonprofit organizations align their actions to their missions rather than strictly to the bottom-line of their financial statements.
Hedgehog or Fox?* I like to think I have one central vision of justice and equity that relates to all of my activities. So, even though the variety of those activities and my love of laughter and the absurd may seem fox-like, and I don't much care for the fanaticism implied in the "single central vision," I will sigh at the need to choose and cast my lot with the hedgehog.
* This alludes to Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which he uses a line from the Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") as the basis for dividing writers and thinkers into one of two categories: the hedgehogs "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance" and the foxes "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause…seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision." Berlin says Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, and Joyce are foxes.
<< previous article | table of contents | next article >>
© 2002 Isoph | sophist@isoph.com