I say it a lot in this space – and in every space I can. If we are creating the future with everything we do,  and if that means we can create the future we want, then it is simple logic – community benefit organizations can create dramatic improvement to the quality of life in our communities.

So what will it take for every organization’s work to create healthy, vibrant, humane communities?

For starters, it will take knowing the answer to that question, rather than shrugging shoulders and wistfully trailing off, saying, “If only we had the answer to that question…”

Seriously, the only way organizations can create more significant change is to learn how to create that change.

Taking that one step further, if we want big, huge, amazing change to happen, it will take everyone in every organization knowing how to do that.

• Executive Directors knowing how to align their day-to-day work with the community improvement they want to see.
• Boards knowing how to govern towards those ends.
• Consultants who work with those groups knowing how to aim their clients at that kind of change.

Because that is actually the mission at Creating the Future – that visionary change become the norm for community benefit work, rather than the exception – we are in the process of creating a scholarship fund, so more people can learn how to embed that level of change into their work.

But here’s the thing: we have never administered a scholarship fund. And so we could really use your help in figuring out some critical questions. Like how to decide who qualifies, and what to ask, and…

First, for some background, here is what we posted at StartSomeGood.com - the crowdfunding site that is hosting the creation of this fund.

Imagine adding rocket fuel to all social change efforts. Instead of slow, incremental change, imagine communities taking dramatic leaps forward, in a way that feels logical and natural. That is the reality for graduates of Creating the Future’s immersion program – the only program of its kind.

For 5 days, change agents learn from instructors and from each other, practicing methods for creating dramatic outcomes in their communities.

The scholarship fund offsets tuition (currently $1,750), making the course accessible to more people. Given the results students create immediately upon leaving the course, the fund is critical to achieving our mission: making visionary change this sector’s norm rather than the exception.

Donations are already coming into the fund, which is very exciting. But once the fund is set up, how do we decide who qualifies? That is where we can use your ideas.

1. What has been your experience with scholarships like this?
2. How do other scholarships work (to individual workshops, classes, conferences, etc.)?
3. What questions should we be asking of applicants for scholarships?
4. And especially, what questions would fit with our values and our vision – a world operating from its highest potential for kindness and humanity?
5. What questions should we be asking of ourselves as an organization, to figure out what questions to ask applicants?

One last note, and this is a personal one. Alex and Tom at Start Some Good have won our hearts, as a shining example that funding doesn’t have to be competitive – that there is enough for everyone.

Watching small gifts accumulate in that fund, I can’t shake the image of Stone Soup, the image of a community gathering to support itself.  Knowing that a change agent will be supported in his/her learning, and will be able to effect huge change, all because a lot of people gave $5 and $10 apiece – that image is so powerful.

It is all of us collectively being the change we want to see. And how cool is that?

To add your bit to the Stone Soup that is funding this scholarship, please head to Start Some Good. And check out the video to see the change you will be creating!

The video may not display if you are viewing this post via email or a reader. Please click through to the site to watch it.

Photo: Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s GreenGrocer, via Wikimedia Commons

I am SO excited about this week! Our first official Pollyanna Principled Immersion Course for Consultants. Wow. WOW!

I’ve spent the past month delving into the big questions of learning and teaching. If people learn by what we model in the class, what do we want to model, and how? If people learn by breaking through to their own wisdom, how can we best facilitate that?

The old adage tells us, “Those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach.” As I have learned every time we have crafted a new learning experience, that adage is simply hogwash – at least it is if we want our teaching to make a difference…

Whether I’ve been teaching consultants how to be catalysts for changing the world, teaching gardening to preschoolers, or teaching Spanish to 10 year olds, I have always been inspired by the people I have taught. I know this week will only ratchet that inspiration up a notch or two.

I promise to share with you how the week proceeds. (And if you are a consultant, I hope you will consider joining us for our June immersion course – there are still a few seats left.)

This week, in whatever you are doing, get out there and be a teacher. Show how change happens by creating it. And be inspired by the people who learn by your side.

Have a great Monday and a great week, all!

Energize your week with this brief transcript of our live conversation on Pollyanna Principled Consulting!

It is Grandma Rose’s 85th birthday! And so I thought I’d take a moment to thank my mom for some of the big lessons I have learned from her.

Those of us who are parents know that our kids don’t learn near as much from what we say as what we do, how we act. As a “grown kid,” I’m no exception. I am quite sure Grandma Rose doesn’t even realize she has taught me some of the bigger things on the list.

And so here are my top 3 things I’ve learned from my mom, Grandma Rose. (You might as well go get some tissues now, Mom.)

Old Dogs and New Tricks
Every day I learn from my mom that learning happens for as long as we let it. And I’m not just talking about Grandma learning about Twitter!

When Rose graduated high school in 1939, she did what was expected – she became a secretary to help support the family, then married my dad, then had kids. But all that time, she longed to go to college.

It wasn’t until age 70 that Rose finally enrolled in our local community college, graduating at age 72.

From there, Rose has kept on learning, attending classes almost every day at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Arizona.

But the bigger thing is that she started teaching. First she tutored ESL students in conversational English. Then she taught blind people to knit. From there, she started not only attending classes at OLLI – she began teaching there as well.

And for the past few years, Rose has been helping to teach diagnosis and bedside manner to medical students, through a role-playing program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

My mom didn’t do any of this when we were growing up. She was a wife and mother. She helped my dad out in his store, and was home by the time my brother and I got home from school.

My mom’s burning desire to learn and most importantly to teach all began after the age of 70. It’s why she won the 2006 Ageless Heroes Award for her “love of learning” (note in the photo – she had just won and was 100% deer-in-the-headlights shocked!)

Every time I wonder where my “just dive in and do it” comes from, I realize it is one of the lessons my mom has taught me – it is never too late to learn something entirely new (and yes, that includes Twitter!) or to start entirely over.

Courage
When my mom and dad were first married, they had a daughter, Susie. One June evening after dinner, my mom took Susie outside to play in the warm evening air. Susie ran into the street and…

After Susie’s death, my parents kept trying to have another baby. It wasn’t until they moved out of the Bronx and were preoccupied with fixing up their new house in the suburbs that I came along, followed by my brother.

It took until I was a mom myself to understand the full impact of something that had been just one of those unspoken things in our house.

First, I couldn’t imagine having the courage to keep living, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Then I couldn’t imagine having the courage to have another baby – to take a chance on giving your heart to another child. And I couldn’t imagine having the courage to ever ever ever let us cross the street alone (still not easy for her, and I’m 51 years old!).

Every time I matter-of-factly and enthusiastically encourage my own daughter as she leaps into some new abyss (she’s 23, after all – the age for ongoing abyss-leaping!), I thank my mom for teaching me courage.

Rules? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules!

Our house never operated from the same rule book as most other middle-American homes. We could discuss anything. We never presumed that any group of people was better than anyone else (except, of course, the Rubinsteins – my dad’s mom’s side of the family, who know as simple fact that they are the smartest people who have ever been alive – seriously). We laughed all the time. Fowl language was not shocking – ok, it was the norm (I didn’t know my mom’s mother well, but my dad’s mom swore like a 4’8″ Russian Jewish sailor to the day she died at age 93.)

I had no idea I had learned all that – that it wasn’t just how things are. But it was indeed “learned.” I learned to be open-minded, and to find life’s funny bone. I learned that family should be about joy. I learned that if there is a God, he or she also enjoys a good laugh (don’t even ask about the potholders at holiday time!).

So Happy Birthday, Grandma Rose. I look forward to our learning together and from each other. And I look forward to lots more laughing.

Please send your wishes to Grandma Rose in the comments below!

And as you look at the strong men and women who made you the person you are, are there lessons you learned from them, that they probably don’t even know they taught you?

Today I had the good fortune to provide the luncheon keynote address for the School Leaders awards lunch, sponsored by the American School Board Journal – part of the National School Boards Association huge annual conference.

I was going to share with you what I talked about today, which was energizing.  And I was going to share with you information about the group, which is also energizing – winners of the Magna Awards for innovation in school district leadership.

Instead, I find I keep writing the words, “Thank you.”

And so here’s what I’ll do.  I will link you to a recording of my talk here. It’s the whole 20 minute keynote, fresh out of the oven.

And for the rest of this post, I will tell the tale of how I happened to be speaking here today, and how I happen to have an article in this month’s American School Boards Journal.  And most importantly, I will give thanks.

It all started two years ago. It was then that I learned that, through no fault of their own, the ASBJ had published an article of mine (Why Boards Micromanage) that had been plagiarized by someone else.  The article had been taken word-for-word from our site – including a story that happened to me.  The plagiarist simply plastered his name on the piece, changed MY story to HIS story, and signed a statement swearing the work was his.

Those were the circumstances under which I met Glenn Cook, editor-in-chief of the American School Board Journal.

Rather than let the lawyers rule what happened next, Glenn did something few people do anymore – something that created the future that has become the present for me, for Glenn, and for the 200 school leaders I encouraged to create the future of their communities today.

Glenn picked up the phone and called me.

After the initial shock wore off for us both, Glenn was gracious beyond my wildest imaginings, offering to do all the heavy lifting.  “Let me go after this guy,” he said.  “Then let me write an editorial, telling our readers what happened. I’ll link to your site.  I’ll tell people to read your stuff.  And when this is all over, I want you to write for us – this time under your own name!”

From that very first phone call – a phone call that could have been adversarial and ugly – something unexpected happened for us both.  Glenn and I became friends.  Since that day, just hearing his Texas lilt on the phone, I prepare myself to laugh at stories of his family’s adventures.

When we finally met in person last fall during Dimitri and my first Community-Driven tour, the three of us spent over 3 hours at lunch.  It was then that Glenn suggested that I address the school leaders during today’s event.

And so, to the gentleman who plagiarized my work in the first place, I want to thank you.

If it weren’t for you, I would not have spoken today to some of the most inspired leaders a community can wish to have.  I would not have an article on “School Boards as Catalysts for Community Change” in the latest edition of the American School Board Journal.

And most of all, I would not have met my friend Glenn.

You can hear my keynote for the Magna Awards here - “Your School Board as a Catalyst for Success.”  Please let me know if you would like me to keynote your event next!

This morning I offer you Part 2 of that story.

I called Rose last night to see how her day was.  “I have to tell you a story,” she told me.

I should mention here that my mom is very active for her age. Ok, she’s active for any age. She volunteers as an usher at Arizona Theater Company. She works with the University of Arizona College of Medicine doing role play as a “patient,” to provide med students with real life exam room experience.  And she attends classes several days a week at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute – a nationwide university-based program for seniors who have the treat of getting the equivalent of an ongoing undergrad education without the worries of silly things like tests and degrees.

“It was during a break in class,” she tells me. “And I was talking with my sociology teacher and a classmate who is a retired surgeon. My teacher was complaining because his email has been down, and we got to talking about the internet. And the other guy says, ‘All I hear about lately is Twitter. What is Twitter?’ “

Yup – you know where this is going. Grandma Rose explained Twitter to them all!

“Hil, you won’t believe it! These guys are so brilliant – PhD’s and doctors – and there I am explaining Twitter to them! And I told them, ‘You can only use 140 characters because it’s like a text message!’ I couldn’t believe it – I was teaching them about Twitter!”

Well I was just as proud as any teacher could be. I know one of the best ways to reinforce learning is to teach, and this proved it so heartily.

In my excitement, I began thinking about the work all of us do every day. We are all teachers. Whether we are teaching a young person to appreciate art, teaching a single mom how to get food for her family, or teaching an employee how to get the job done well, we are all teachers all the time.

If “Strength builds upon our strengths,” what better way to build upon the strength of our “students” than to encourage them to learn by teaching others?

We are always wondering how to spread our missions, to “get the word out” about the work we do. Our clients and patrons could be our best missionaries. We just need to empower them with knowledge and encourage them to share that knowledge with others.

“Ricky, now that you have learned about the Art Museum, will you have your parents bring you and a friend, and you can teach your friend what you’ve learned?”

“Mrs. Johnson, now that you have learned about our senior center, will you bring a friend and show them around?”

“Maria, now that you have your food box, will you let a neighbor know how we can help them, too?”

Who will you have the opportunity to teach today? How can you encourage them to teach others? Right now, before you move away from this page, will you take a moment to teach us all, right here? How will you build on someone else’s strength by asking them to teach others?

“Strength builds upon our strengths” is Pollyanna Principle #5.  Please read the rest of the Principles, and then teach them!

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2009/04/03/learning-by-teaching/feed/ 2 http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/11/06/i-heart-pittsburg-part-3/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/11/06/i-heart-pittsburg-part-3/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:26:03 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/?p=186

(Part 5: Community-Driven Tour 2008. To read these posts from the beginning of this 2+ month tour, click here.)

Thursday, October 23

It is Thursday. We are scheduled to spend some time before lunch with Dorothy Bassett, the dean of Duquesne University’s School of Leadership, with whom we worked to re-craft the Masters in Community Leadership program.

I like Dorothy a lot. She is warm and direct and genuine, and I appreciate all of that. Our first phone conversation almost 2 years ago was prior to our planning work with the School of Leadership. I remember being nervous about that first call, and that Dorothy’s complete lack of pretense immediately replaced my nerves with honest enthusiasm for the opportunity to work with her energy and intellectual curiosity.

Working with Dorothy during our planning sessions with the School of Leadership had been awe-inspiring, if for no other reason than she was entirely present and fully participating after having arrived, sleepless and jet-lagged, from Duquesne’s Rome campus – yes, that’s Rome, Italy – just hours before!

And so now, as we fast forward to this day almost 2 years later, I am looking forward to what we have been told will be a short meeting, as Dorothy has other appointments. After that brief meeting, we will enjoy lunch and after-lunch discussions with the Nonprofit Leadership Institute team. It will be a full day.

Since our planning work, the School of Leadership has added an assistant dean, Michael Forlenza (another Michael – how confusing!), and Dorothy has asked him to join the discussion. As we all focus on what is possible for the school to move to the next level, the conversation quickly catches fire. 30 minutes into that meeting, Dorothy and Michael F. both rearrange their afternoon plans. The next thing we know, we are all heading to lunch together.

The conversation moves back and forth – from envisioning what education can be at its transformational best (and how Leadership Education is certainly about nothing less than transformation – of individuals, of organizations, of communities), to the nitty-gritty realities of trying to make such a program a success within the bureaucratic layers of a university structure.

How to give the program’s infrastructure the time it needs to build and grow?

How to teach instructors to teach via distance learning, to take full advantage of all this new medium is capable of achieving for their students?

How to build strength into the program from the inside out?  How to engage the students themselves in building the program to be extraordinary?

By the time we part after lunch, it is almost 3pm. We know none of us will be able to tame the myriad possibilities floating in the ether around each of our brains.

The day has gone in a direction we never imagined, and so we spend what little time remains with our friend Michael (Kumer), discussing the ultimate conversion of the Nonprofit Leadership Institute into a fully Community-Driven Management Support Organization.

How can a management support organization / “nonprofit” resource center teach only what aligns with Community-Driven principles, and refrain from teaching classes that go counter to such principles (cooperative vs. competitive resource development approaches, for example – or governance aimed at community results, vs. governance aimed at the means – or community engagement vs. marketing…)?

How can such an organization avoid measuring success by tallying workshop attendance figures (the same “output” indicators they teach other organizations to avoid), and instead begin asking the critical questions that will lead to real indicators of systemic change?

On the heels of the invigorating discussion at lunch, our brains are too tired to focus much on these topics so late in the afternoon. Instead, Dimitri and I head back to the hotel to rest up a bit, after which we will head out into rush hour traffic to meet the NLI’s Allison Jones and her husband Kevin for dinner.

Allison and Kevin adopted us during our first visit to Pittsburgh several years ago. Allison runs the Boards by Design program at the Nonprofit Leadership Institute. She is young and alive and pure delight – a 40 Under 40 winner, and one of the most charming individuals one can hope to meet. Her husband, Kevin, is sweet and brilliant – a computer guy who loves bicycling (talk about a kindred spirit with Dimitri!). Allison and Kevin  are both choir singers, which is how they met. One cannot help but love being with them – not to mention that they find the BEST places to eat! (This time we are devouring a feast at Legume, which we cannot recommend highly enough!)

We hate to cut the evening short – after how huge this day has been, it feels overwhelming to think that it is actually tomorrow that is the BIG day – two workshops with a convened lunch discussion in between. In addition to the normal cold I have been enduring all this time, I now have no voice. To top it all off, by the time I crawl into bed, I realize I will have 5 hours sleep at best.

No sleep, no voice, and now I am coughing. What a way to head into a double-header…

(For the next post in the series on the mad adventure that is the Community-Driven Tour 2008, click here.)

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/11/06/i-heart-pittsburg-part-3/feed/ 2 http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/03/09/republicans-and-debt/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/03/09/republicans-and-debt/#comments Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:05:21 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/2008/03/09/republicans-and-debt/ Ben Stein is no liberal. A speechwriter and attorney for Nixon and Ford, a devout believer in the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Stein writes a column in the Business Section of the NY Times as a Republican economist.

And that is why you will absolutely want to read this column, and send it to everyone you know.

Here is just a smidge of his amazing advice to John McCain re: tax cuts:

To put it even more starkly, the government – which is us – needs the money to keep old people alive, to pay for their dialysis, to build fighter jets and to pay our troops and pay interest on the debt. We can get it by indenturing our children, selling ourselves into peonage to foreigners, making ourselves a colony again, generating inflation – or we can have some integrity and levy taxes equal to what we spend.

Thank you, Mr. Stein, for sharing what no candidate will ever share – the Tax Cut Emperor has no clothes.

Anymore, news stories all seem to run into each other in my mind, all sporting the same theme: We accomplish what we focus on, what we hold ourselves accountable for.

We can focus on building a healthy, vibrant world, and all that would bring in the long term and the short term.

Or we can focus on making ourselves comfortable today, ignoring the fact that everything we do now is indeed creating the future, even as we ignore that fact!

Reading the newspaper is therefore never a quiet time in my house. No matter the issue, my musings all tend to circle back to the same thoughts: Why must we always weigh the future against the present as an either/or? And in that preposterous battle, why must the present always win?

For me, the issue never stays on global warming (or the war, or whichever topic is above the fold that day). Because we are spending most of our professional time these days in the fields of Healthcare and Education, usually that is where my thoughts end up.

Healthcare and Education: Problem-Solving Today or Creating the Future?
The same questions that haunt me as I read the newspaper also drive our work with leaders in both the Healthcare and Education arenas. Whose future are we creating? And how can we stop focusing solely on today’s issues, and begin to instead focus today’s efforts on the tomorrow we want to create for our communities?

As a species, wherever we live on this globe, humans tend to dismiss the fact that the present is merely the sum of all the causes and effects that have come before us, both manmade and natural. And from that, we dismiss the power that gives us to create the future. It is an immense power. If we can dream it, we can create it.

That is the difference between problem-solving approaches and approaches that aim at creating an incredible future. Problem-solving approaches assume that the best future we can aim for is “today minus our problems.” Approaches that aim at creating the future, however, assume that the best future we can aim for is the best future we can imagine.

And when it comes to looking at the future we want to create for our communities, what better places to focus that thinking than in Healthcare and Education?

Our work in these two arenas has been far more encouraging / exhilarating / exciting than the gloom and doom of the newspapers. That is because that work has moved away from problem-solving questions, and on towards the questions of the future these groups want to create.

Changing the Question Changes Everything
What would it look like if our communities were really healthy? What would a strong, vibrant, resilient, alive community look like? And how do we begin to create that future?

What would the world look like if our education system were 100% effective? If we were 100% successful at educating people, young and old, what future might that create? And how do we begin to create that future?

These are not the questions Healthcare and Education leaders are used to asking – or answering!

In Healthcare, one foundation we worked with realized they had not been funding healthcare at all – they had been funding “sick” care. And our ongoing conversations with hospital leaders bear this out. While the IRS’s emphasis on nonprofit hospitals living up to their Community Benefit missions has certainly struck a chord, few hospitals are asking questions beyond the problem-solving “sick care” questions in their Community Benefit deliberations. And while many of those hospitals are seeing this as a great opportunity to develop large-scale prevention programs, even those prevention efforts are problem-solving in nature, rather than vision-reaching.

There is a vast difference between the question, “What might an effective diabetes prevention program look like?” and the question, “What would it take to create such a healthy community that we don’t have to consider a diabetes prevention program? What would such a community look like, and what might our role be in creating that?”

We find the same sorts of stories in the Education arena. We have stopped being stunned in our conversations with education leaders – stunned at their answers when we ask, “What would success look like?”

The answers we repeatedly receive have nothing to do with the world, the community, the students – the real end result for successful education efforts. The answers instead relate to increased attendance, decreased drop-out rates, increased funding. Colleges tell us success equals enrollment, the quality of students they are able to attract. Me me me. Success is about our school, our enrollment, our status.

YET, with both Healthcare groups and Education groups, when we open up the discussion to, “What is our highest potential? And how can we reach for that?” it is amazing how the conversation changes. The room lights up. The energy is palpable, because those questions are at the heart of why we all got into this work in the first place!

Healthy communities, where everyone is participating actively in their own well-being, and all the infrastructure to support that.

Bright, curious, capable communities, where students are excited about learning, not just while they are in school, but engaged in learning after they graduate, becoming lifelong learners and teachers and leaders.

Through these conversations, people start talking about all the “non-health” and “non education” factors that indeed contribute to both Health and Education – topics they typically don’t have time to discuss when they are narrowly focusing on today’s bottom line issues. They talk about all the contributing factors; they talk about the reality of cause and effect, and how perhaps we can influence some of those causes, to aim at the future we want to create for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

What these Healthcare and Education groups quickly realize is that aiming at creating the future does not in any way limit their ability to do today’s work in a conscious, practical, effective and yes, even efficient way – quite the contrary. What they find instead is that a larger, more visionary context actually enhances the effectiveness of today’s work! They see that it is, in fact, infinitely practical to put today’s work in the context of that bigger future we are all part of, and that yes, it is also infinitely impractical to do that work in any other way.

So when I read about the report from the UN Panel on Climate Change, and I see that the Bush administration is asking us to focus NOT on the future we are creating, but on the micro-focus of today’s economy, I come back to the watchword that is at the very top of this blog page: We are creating the future, every day, whether we do so consciously or not.

How silly we are to think we can ignore the future we are creating for our heirs. How self-centered we are, when we are shown two paths, and we deliberately choose the one that makes me ok at the expense of my children and their children.

But more to the point, how depressing. Creating a brilliant, healthy, inquisitive, compassionate, resilient, vibrant world is entirely possible, simply because it is not impossible. How very sad and frustrated and scared we must be to choose to do anything but that!

“Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” I never much cared for Led Zeppelin, but the answer is right there. And we get to make that choice every minute of every day.

What future are you creating right now? Which path will you choose?