NOTES FROM THE

REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER by Paul Pribbenow, Ph.D.

Volume Five, Number Two (December 2003)

"What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how."

–W. Wordsworth, from "The Prelude"

NOTES FROM READERS

What you think

Happy December – and merry days all around to my faithful readers.

Former senator and fellow bowtie aficionado Paul Simon died earlier this week and I was reminded of the time he visited Wabash College while I was there. As we planned for his talk, we thought a fine way to show our thanks would be to give him a Wabash bowtie (how groundbreaking!). And given that I was one of very few on campus who owned such a tie, I was asked to give him mine, which I proudly did. I imagine a large room in the Simon home where bowties lined the walls, and I further imagine that every once in a while my tie would catch his eye (it was bright red with Wabash written all over it!) Those are happy imaginings because they recall with great respect and admiration the way Paul Simon led his life – with great courage, resolve, and integrity. A rare combination in our public lives today.

Two recent moments remind me of the part of the philanthropic project that I find most intriguing and compelling. First, I was with one of our undergraduates on a long auto ride and she told me about her passion for the canvassing work she did in the summer for a statewide citizen action organization. She could not stop exclaiming about how exciting it was to knock on someone’s front door and engage them in conversation about pressing political issues in the state, and then to solicit the person’s support for the cause. The second moment was my volunteer turn at ringing bells for the Salvation Army outside a popular local hardware store on the day after Thanksgiving. What a thrill to engage fellow citizens face to face in the act of asking and receiving. Two pure forms of philanthropic activity – messy, replete with excuses and awkward dynamics, but ultimately at the heart of what I believe philanthropy means: our capacity to engage each other in the midst of our daily lives with a call to action on behalf of people and causes we are passionate about. Wow!

Occasionally, I (or my colleagues) refer to items from previous issues of Notes.   If you have not been a subscriber previously, and wish to review our conversations, past issues of Notes are available online at www.jgacounsel.com. The website version of Notes also includes helpful hyperlinks to sources for purchasing or subscribing to the various publications mentioned in Notes.   I thank my friends at Johnson, Grossnickle & Associates for their abiding support for our reflective practice.

REFLECT ON THIS

The new year

I mark out my days in a variety of ways – on an academic calendar, a fiscal year, another birthday, and so forth. Most meaningfully, though, I find my rhythm in the liturgical calendar of the Christian church. It is a calendar that begins its year just about now – in late November or early December – with the season of Advent. As I reflect on the beginning of the new liturgical year, I am reminded of the themes that are lifted up for Christians during the season of Advent. And I find in those themes glimpses of meaning and resonance for all of us.

There is a common thread that runs through the themes of the new year. It is the call to a new discipline, to a way of life. This seems instructive because all of our new years offer us fresh starts and though many of us often consider the resolutions we might make to change this or that – eat less, exercise more, spend more time with our family, less time at work, and so forth – we are less likely to see how our resolutions fit in a larger pattern of our character, our virtues, how we live a good life. That larger pattern requires a discipline that frames what we do in pursuit of the sort of person we want to be, the sort of world we want to help create.

The initial aspect of the call to discipline is not, then, to resolve a long list of behavioral modifications. Instead it is to turn away – to repent, if you will – from all that keeps us and distracts us from the life we want to live. This, of course, is much more difficult than it sounds. To turn away involves both a personal and a social dynamic. We must look inside to consider all of the ways in which our decisions and actions may not be worthy of our aspirations. And we also must recognize how much our repentance requires that others acknowledge our conversion. In both cases – the personal and the social – it is about the need for forgiveness. We must recognize our need to turn away and then be able to forgive ourselves for a past of which we are not proud. We must ask others to see our conversion and then forgive us for how we have hurt them. Forgiveness, then, is the gift that sets the stage for a new life.

A second theme in our discipline has to do with seeing in the mundane moments of our lives the possibility of meaning and even redemption. At this time of the year, as the winter comes upon us here in the upper Midwest , I am always struck by how much more I can see because the leaves are gone from the trees. In the barrenness of creation, I receive the gift of foresight. My three year old son, Thomas, has recently begun making faces to match emotions. His sad face, his angry face, and his confused face all conjure up images that I feel deep inside. That is sadness and anger and confusion. But perhaps most evocative for me is his surprise face. At this time of the year, I am surprised by the glimpses of grace that I find in acts of kindness and generosity, in renewing family ties, in meeting the needs of strangers. Surprise, in this ordinary moment you have been blessed. And that is something worth making a face about!

And a final theme I find in my new year discipline focuses my attention on what it means to live with hope. The message of the new year truly is a tension – between the unredeemed and the redeemed, between nature and salvation, between caring and not caring. When the world gets too scary and it seems that more life is taken away than is given, we may have only hope to show us the way – and that is a remarkable gift that is never depleted in human experience. Sometimes there are brilliant anthems to call us to hope – like angels hovering over a field – but more often there are fragile moments in which the tensions of our lives seem irresolvable and somehow we find a way to go on. There is hope there and it inspires us to lives of discipline, courage, and faithfulness.

May your new year, whenever it commences, be filled with the gifts of forgiveness, the grace of the ordinary, and the vision of hope for a better world.

Citizen Jane – crafting a civic biography

Commenting in a recent issue of The Christian Century, publisher John Buchanan described his metaphor of life as a house, in which various rooms come to stand for important aspects of your upbringing, values, and experiences. He especially lifted up the place of the balcony above the front porch in his house. It was on this balcony that the saints of his life hung out, looking down on the goings-on of his daily life and work, reminding him of the lessons he had learned from them and that guided him.

It is a wonderful image and caused me to think again about the saints in my life, those who are never far away in their challenge and comfort and example. I am struck by the ways in which one of my saints has become a regular aspect of my daily existence. Given that her most famous portrait hangs over my desk, it is hard for me to escape the gaze and influence of Jane Addams. I don’t take her influence for granted and I continue to delve deeper and deeper into her life so that I might learn from her example, that I might live up to her legacy for myself and for our college.

To that end, I’ve recently finished a paper in which I explore the life and work of Jane Addams specifically as it relates to understanding citizenship and philanthropy. I’ve shared sections of the paper here before – and the themes will be familiar to those of you who know my position on these issues. While responding to some reader comments on an earlier draft of the paper, I’ve added a fairly substantial section to the final draft that addresses the issue of how Jane Addams came to take on the life she led at Hull-House and as a citizen of the world. This was my effort to consider the vocation or calling of Citizen Jane to the life she chose to lead.

Here are some excerpts from the paper (I’ve excluded footnotes!):

The vocation of Citizen Jane: The building blocks of a civic life

“. . . Most of us know Jane Addams as the founder in 1889 (along with Ellen Gates Starr), of Hull-House, a settlement house on Chicago ’s west side. I want to argue, though, that to understand why Jane Addams founded Hull-House, we must first understand the citizen she was becoming and the social ethic that she came to value as the basis for her work as a citizen.

I am particularly interested in the notion of “vocation,” defined by theologian Frederick Buechner as that place where our deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest need. Four “moments” in the first thirty years of Addams’ life seem relevant as she came to understand her vocation: the gladness she found as a citizen meeting needs in our democracy.

The eyes of a child

In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, Miss Addams recounts an incident that occurred when she was perhaps seven years old, when she visited the small city of Freeport , Illinois , near Cedarville, with her father on a business trip. She writes:

On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets.   I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together . . . .

With the eyes of a child – and with “that curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world’s affairs which little children often exhibit” – Jane Addams sees and names the inequity that she would fight against throughout her life. At the same time, however, she illustrates through her “pertinent inquiry” the actions of a citizen who sought both to understand unfair distinctions between peoples and to resolve to make the world fairer.

Seeking the heroic

Jane Addams devotes an entire chapter in Twenty Years at Hull-House to a man she never met and who died when she was but four years old – that man is Abraham Lincoln. There is, however, a clear connection between young Jane’s visit to Freeport , where she first recognized an unjust class system in America , and her great love for the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, her father’s colleague and friend.

Lincoln is one of the great heroes of Jane Addams’ life. “Is it not Abraham Lincoln,” she writes, “who has cleared the title to our democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world”.

Jane Addams came to understand her life and work as the pursuit of the heroic. In her graduation essay at Rockford Female Seminary, Addams wrote of Cassandra, tragic heroine of Greek myth, and challenged her classmates to find in the example of the heroic Cassandra the resolve to understand their own calling in the world…

Socialized education

The experiences and heroes of young Jane Addams’ life were the foundation for the education that she received at Rockford Female Seminary. It was an education guided by a fairly rigorous and classical liberal arts curriculum… Jane Addams also would form life-long bonds with classmates and other faculty members while at Rockford . She would hone her oratorical skills. She would struggle with institutional pressures to respond to the evangelical appeal so prevalent at Rockford, where it was assumed that women were best suited for Christian missionary work…We might also surmise that Miss Addams took up some of the missionary zeal of the college as she pursued her work as a citizen at Hull-House.

Perhaps the most important factor of Addams’ own education for her later life was her growing belief that education is the basis of a strong democracy. In the final chapter of Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams argues that “the educational activities of a Settlement…are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement itself”. In other words, education (understood in its broadest sense) is at the heart of the civic biography…

The world calls

Now grown and graduated from college, Jane Addams set off into the world still looking for the final aspects of her vocation that would lead her to a civic life. What would she do to make sense of her early life experiences, her heroic aspirations, and her education….Two trips to Europe --one in 1883 and another in 1887--helped to integrate the aspects of Miss Addams’ evolving civic biography. She spent nearly two years in her first trip (a fairly common duration for a young woman of her social class) involved in intensive academic study and reflection…What difference would it all make, she asked?

At the end of the second trip to Europe, Addams and her companion, Ellen Gates Starr, visited London…It was here…that she first learned of the settlement house movement by visiting Toynbee Hall in London’s east end. Founded and led by Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, Toynbee Hall became Addams’ graduate education…

The mission of Toynbee Hall was grounded in the belief in the possibility of “human transformation through human relations”. Idealistic, yes – but ideals were at the heart of Jane Addams’ civic biography. The eyes of the child, the heroes who inspire us, an education that sets a path of expectation and aspiration, and now a world that calls for activism and social reform in a particular place, at a particular time, for particular people. Call it applied idealism, the settlement philosophy became for Jane Addams the integrating theory for her work as a citizen….

Jane Addams herself seized her opportunity to put theory into action when she founded Hull-House in Chicago in 1889. Citizen Jane thus finds the path for her civic life – and the world has never been the same.”

Take some time to greet the saints on your balcony!

PRACTICE THIS

Character exams

A recent issue of Fast Company (November 2003) included this test of character and suggested that companies might do well to include it in hiring decisions – alongside reviewing credentials for other requisite skills.

These five parts of the test come from Chuck Pappalardo, managing director of Trilogy Venture Search:

(1)    Conduct an internal audit to assess your company’s values. How does your culture support doing the right thing? The point is to determine how a person of character would fit in.

(2)    Profile the behaviors that your organization associates with character. Three categories of these behaviors include: integrity, inspiring others, and humility.

(3)    Test for integrity by probing how someone confronts problems. Offer a tough situation – a personnel dilemma or financial crisis – and ask the candidate to say how he/she would respond.

(4)    Test for ability to inspire by exploring how the person handles bad news or builds consensus. Tell me about the last team you built. What worked and what was least successful?

(5)    Test for humility by listening for unsubstantiated claims of accomplishment. Test for self-awareness: “What’s the biggest misperception of you?” The trick is, of course, that there are no misperceptions and thus we learn something important about the candidate’s reflective capacities.

Philanthropic accountability trends

I write a column, as many of you know, for Contributions magazine, about trends and issues in philanthropy. I have rather wide latitude in my topics for the column, but I do try and keep an eye on issues that pop up in the literature and in our work that deserve attention. In recent months, I didn’t have to look far to find countless examples of good thinkers and practitioners lifting up the thorny issue of philanthropic accountability. It is on our minds and in our hearts.

A few quick examples:

Former colleagues Ted Grossnickle and Jeff Lozer, with whom I worked at Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates a few years back, have both weighed in on this issue in recent weeks. Grossnickle writes about the challenge of “pursuing accountability” in an issue of CommonWork (November 2003), the JGA client newsletter: “Accountability is really just a longer word for being honest . . . It’s a trust issue . . . Actually pursuing accountability may go against the grain for many of us, but the benefit to our organizations and society can be great. This pursuit means that we will ask ourselves questions that are as tough as those we’re expected to answer. The result for our profession . . . will be to make philanthropy vastly more significant that it is today.”

Lozer, writing in a letter to the editor of The Indianapolis Star, says that “Nonprofits should anticipate and respond to the rapidly changing environment in the private sector in the area of accountability . . . . Nonprofits . . . must continue to focus on evaluating outcomes, promoting successes, learning from mistakes, and adapting to “investor” expectations . . . . Our nonprofit sector can lead the way by voluntarily adopting best practices based on reforms targeted toward public companies . . .”

An article in Philanthropy Matters (13:1, 2003), from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, proclaims “Operation Accountability” in describing a major research study on the issues of reporting fundraising and overhead costs in a consistent and transparent way. “Whether intentional or not, inconsistent reporting of overhead costs…has the potential to damage the credibility of the entire nonprofit sector.” Commenting on the study, Center executive director Eugene Tempel says “The information and tools generated by this project will give nonprofits better ways to show the true costs of operating and average fundraising and administrative costs for organizations like theirs, and we’ll show why donors who want quality programs should support reasonable costs needed to sustain them.”

In a supplement to the Nonprofit Times, entitled “Making Nonprofits Successful,” the authors offer advice to accounting professionals who work in the nonprofit sector. The lead article, “The Right Role of Accounting,” suggests that “Transparency (on the accounting side) makes certain that people on the program side know how decisions are made, how things get done, and when their opinions are welcomed…Make sure the answers the accounting department gives entail what the mission side person wants to know—not esoteric accounting details…The accounting team helps set ethical tone and should work in an environment where they can express when something is wrong.”

The special “Giving” section in the November 17, 2003 edition of The New York Times has several articles related to accountability. Robert Strauss, in “They’re Mad as Hell, and They’re Not Making Donations Anymore,” recounts the many reasons that donors choose not to renew philanthropic support. Sometimes it’s a policy dispute concerning how the nonprofit chooses to use its philanthropic support. Sometimes it’s a public scandal involving the nonprofit. Certainly economic factors play a role, but when there is downturn, donors may look even more carefully at how organizations ask for gifts and the attention they pay to cultivating relationships. William Gray III, head of the United Negro College Fund, concludes, “…you learn to apologize and, more important, do not let it happen again.” The heart of accountability.

Dr. Susan Raymond, writing in the October 17, 2003 e-issue of “Observations in Philanthropy” focuses attention on issues of organizational governance and accountability. “…it is difficult not to conclude that storm clouds are gathering.” Her wise response: “Accept the validity of the concern and develop a metric. Nonprofit leadership…should develop an explicit set of measures of governance and accountability. They then should have the courage to apply these measures…and publish the results.” Though some may find her recommendations controversial, the alternatives, she argues, “are riskier still. Continued problems of trust…will erode nonprofit support. Moreover, under conditions of widespread skepticism, measurement of relative trustworthiness and governance will take place eventually anyway.” In other words, pursue accountability – or it will be imposed!

PAY ATTENTION TO THIS

Resources for your reflective practice

Just a couple of ideas this issue:

I’m thinking a good bit about public education these days. Here are two books worth considering on the topic: Is There a Public for Public Schools? (Kettering Foundation, 1997) by David Mathews, and the classic Democracy and Education (Free Press, Reprinted in 1997) by John Dewey. The issue is public engagement on education. What is it that we want for our children and their education? How will we make it happen? Where is our common purpose and who will lead the way?

As for higher education, a wonderful new resource, The Living Arts: Comparative and Historical Reflections on Liberal Education (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2003) by Sheldon Rothblatt, has just appeared and is a fine guide to our continuing dialogue about the liberal arts and democracy.

Prophesy

My words of poetry for this issue come from the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, who speaks with wonder of the spirit and our call.

“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”

(Isaiah 61: 1-2)

May it be so.

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Topics for the next issue (February 2004)

A commonplace on learning
The work of civic prosperity
Spontaneity and serendipity in our lives