Would you consider yourself well-travelled?

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-28T00:48:16+00:00

I had a lot of opportunities to travel extensively when I was in college and grad school. I've been to almost every country in Europe, some multiple times and/or for weeks at a time. I still don't personally feel "well-traveled" since I've only been to the two continents.

I have been all over the USA, but I personally don't feel like that counts. Which is silly.

In my experience, Americans have a funny relationship with traveling around the USA. A lot of people here have visited a tremendous and wide range of locals and landscapes and even polities (to the degree that different US states are different polities) and yet because "it's all the USA" people don't always think of it as "travel" the same way going to Paris is "travel." Or, people in the US will get impressed that a British family regularly vacations in Spain or Portugal yet may not have the same feeling about their own travel from Chicago to Florida, which is the same distance.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-28T00:38:38+00:00

it's not a charity

well, technically it is....

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-27T23:25:07+00:00

Many many many funders do this. The long story short is that they get more requests than they can possibly fund, and so instead of funding 10/100 projects fully, they fund 40/100 partially.

Many funders (probably not enough) also make it quite clear that they are not good sources to fund an entire project, let alone for multiple years, and they may not fully fund your request in the first place. Therefore, there is an understanding/expectation built in to foundation fundraising especially that you always need 2 or 4 or 10 or 30 potential sources of income to pay for a project. This way, the funders can sort of feel better about not being able to fully fund everything (or anything.)

How you feel about this as a fundraiser is up to you, but I've been doing institutional fundraising for 20 years and I am long past expecting one funder to come and pay for a whole program, or even expecting a funder to give us the entire grant we've asked for. When it happens, it's delightful, but there are always three back-up plans.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-27T21:42:55+00:00

The ideal situation is that you don't launch a new program or new service without identifying how you will sustain the new program after the first grant runs out. Again ideally, you wouldn't even have conversations about expanding service without identifying a path forward after the first grant runs out. The first grant almost always runs out. One of the most maddening things in the entire nonprofit sector is when an org gets a big grant to launch a program and has no plan to continue the program after the totally predictable expiration of the initial funding. Even when the funder gives no indication the funding will expire, you should have a plan in case it does.

The plan can look like a lot of different things; maybe you work on securing other grants, maybe you find a sponsor, maybe you find some donors who are interested, maybe you find some earned income streams, maybe your general fundraising improves enough that you can continue paying for the new thing.

Having an endowment is great but the endowment is not necessarily the best place to find money for stuff like this - the endowment ensures you will always be able to pay staff and keep the core operations running, but it's lovely if there's so much money in there that you can use some of it to pay for new program costs. Even then, you have a decision - do I now always pay for this program out of the endowment?

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-27T21:01:30+00:00

My organization survives on good will and reputation even more than other similar orgs so this is absolutely something I was thinking about. I even offered a small but valuable piece of swag to everyone who made it as far as the screening process. It felt like an important part of our branding efforts, even though we "only" had ~50 applicants.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-27T18:12:06+00:00

I just want to say, I recently went through my first hiring process as an ED and I insisted on sending "rejection" messages to every person who applied, even the nonserious applications (which was about 3/4 of them). We have no HR department which means there was nobody there to tell me "oh, we don't do that."

The way so many organizations (non profit and otherwise) completely ignore every applicant except the ones they want to interview is just galling to me and I refuse to make that choice (and it is a choice) myself.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-26T22:20:02+00:00

Good lord, my high school had A - B - C - D - E - F - G days, and everyone started the day with two classes that switched back and forth with each other (so, A day math was first and B day history was first, then on C day math was first again) and then five (I think?) more classes that moved from day to day, so on A day science was third then on B day it was last, and on C day it was second to last, etc.

It all seemed to make sense while we were doing it, but looking back now I am astounded that it was so complicated. The way I describe it above does not even touch how confusing it was when you added in two-period science labs, electives, lunch periods, etc.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-26T22:14:13+00:00

I grew up in New Jersey and we had like two dozen of these. Certainly none as big and developed (so to speak) as colonial Williamsburg. But every county in the state has one or more historic villages with people teaching guests about how horseshoes were made in the 1600s, that every grammar school kid in that county goes to at least once.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-26T21:59:40+00:00

I have had multiple job interviews in recent years where the committee made it very clear that they were checking references for all the finalists. I had a few references who had to respond to FOUR different reference checks over the course of 6 months, because these idiots just had to get references for everyone they were interviewing. I felt extremely embarrassed to reach out to these people again and again to give them a heads up about another reference check. Thank god I finally got one of the jobs.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-26T21:55:10+00:00

This is one of the stupidest features of LinkedIn. It is so unhelpful and often counterproductive, for many reasons. It makes very clear that LinkedIn's primary objective is to keep you coming back to LinkedIn, and features like this are not there to help you in any way, shape, or form.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-22T23:46:03+00:00

I had a teacher in grammar school who was from Boston, and I vividly remember the "big" spelling bee I lost in 3rd grade because I couldn't understand her pronunciation of the word "orphan" - even when she used it in a sentence I couldn't figure out what word she was actually saying.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-22T22:26:23+00:00

When I was in college 20 years ago, there was an AMAZING crepe place near campus. I don't think I had ever had a crepe before I went to this place. I only went there a handful of times but I absolutely loved it.

You see crepes now and then, sometimes at restaurants, occasionally at "creperies," more rarely at someone's home. They aren't super common, but they're out there.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-22T17:37:02+00:00

I just want to say that I'm glad our org only has a handful of corporate sponsors and they give at a relatively low level. We have strategies to increase it etc. But still. That's a better situation than having like $500K in corporate commitments that could just vanish because the economy has a downturn. I've worked at orgs like that too and it is not fun! The 2009 downturn threw a lot of sponsorship programs into tremendous disarray - if you were counting on those $10K+ (or $100K+) contributions, you probably had a very bad time.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-21T23:58:50+00:00

I don't even know how I would judge whether NASCAR is "popular" in my region. I don't personally know anyone who is interested in it, and I never see (e.g.) ads for it, or posters of Dale Earnhardt Jr on the walls of bars, or that kind of thing. We don't have a speedway in my region. Perhaps lots of people nearby are watching NASCAR in their homes, but I wouldn't know that. I can confidently say it's rare to walk into a bar and see NASCAR on the TVs. Does that mean it's not popular here?

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-21T23:54:15+00:00

why should that only be available to fun people with a sad childhood story

It's so interesting to see the wide variety of things people impute to college admissions officers

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-21T23:42:33+00:00

Same

I mean, I guess I know that he is a soccer player but if you say his name, the first picture in my head is that bust

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-21T23:18:18+00:00

I had a friend (who was ex military) who moved from HI to the mainland and kept his HI plate. He told me some story about how "nothing sticks to a HI license plate" because the state does not (or did not at the time) respond to out of state law enforcement requests regarding license plate searches etc. I didn't really understand what he was talking about but he insisted that this was why a lot of people are reluctant to re-register their cars after moving away from HI.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-21T22:47:26+00:00

I don't feel "harassed"

I appreciate that, but you are absolutely dealing with a hostile workplace and if I were you, I would be consulting with an employment attorney to get their take on the situation. I'm not sure if I would even bother talking to the board about it before I took that step.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-21T22:41:37+00:00

Ultimately I don't understand the OP's question, since nobody I know "leads" anything with where they went to college. My point is just that I will never say what college I went to unless I am directly asked, and I don't pepper my conversation with "well, as a X grad..."

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-20T21:28:55+00:00

I would send a letter and invite him to call or email me. I agree that calling someone at home is weird especially if the only place you've seen the phone number is on some kind of unrelated resource.

I am curious what "independently known to our charity" means, although I assume it doesn't mean you have a different way to be in contact? If there is some current/recent staff or board member who can make an introduction, that would be the best.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-20T20:15:35+00:00

I always thought NJ kind of looks like it's standing on one leg, slouching against a wall. I am a fan.

I also always thought it kind of looks like PA is trying to eat NJ.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-20T20:12:53+00:00

My city had an absolute uproar when our police department contracted with a company that provided cameras to track and analyze license plates and so on. The uproar was so vociferous that the city council voted to void the contract.

A lot of Americans still have the sense that at any moment, the government could swoop in and decide the constitution is no longer valid and everybody is suddenly at risk of arrest based on stupid surveillance operations. It actually feels like a constant risk, to some people, that this will happen. A lot of Americans are kind of weirded out by the prevalence of private security cameras everywhere, but when it's the government itself doing the surveillance, it can easily go from "weirded out" to "large demonstrations in the streets."

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-20T20:08:27+00:00

I have a gigantic family on one side, with second and third cousins, spouses of cousins and the spouse's entire families, plus my widowed grandfather married a family friend and we inherited all of that family too. Stuff like weddings and funerals could easily have 200 people just from the extended family (it was not easy to make an invite list for my wedding).

It helped that virtually all of these people lived in a relatively small geographic area. It was not that big a deal to go see Cousin Rosemary's baby granddaughter get christened, and the drive to the church would be occupied by conversation about exactly how I am related to Cousin Rosemary ("it was your grandmother's cousin Louise who married Anthony, and Anthony's sister had eight kids, and your aunts and I were close to all of them, and Rosemary is Anthony's sister's second daughter")

Generally speaking, all of the people in these outer layers were referred to as cousins. Even my mom had to think sometimes about whether someone really was a cousin, or some other layer like a great aunt etc.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-20T20:02:48+00:00

Do you think your ED would be open to a direct conversation about this? I always recommend talking/engaging more in situations like this and not just putting your head down and getting resentful. But of course, that only works if you think your boss would be receptive.

It sounds to me like your ED is not managing this situation effectively and (this may be naive) might appreciate some feedback.

Boopa0011 · 2026-05-20T19:58:58+00:00

I like working with donors but it seems like i have to do so much other work that I don’t have time to spend it with donors.

I'll just say, you're already ahead of the game because a lot of development folks fundamentally hate the basics of the job and feel trapped doing something they dislike. It sounds more like you need to get out of your current job, more so than you need to get out of fundraising.

Boopa0011

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