At this summer’s CTCnet Conference the thing I most took away–or rather, repeated to the most number of people–was something said by the keynote speaker, Ami Dar, the creator of Idealist.org.

He was asked by someone in the crowd something along the lines of “In what areas do you want to see nonprofits develop into the future?”

Ami Dar responded that an area that he saw as important was acknowledgement of nonprofit competition. His brilliant reasoning was this:

In for-profit companies, everyone accepts that competition takes place; it’s a given. Businesses identify the areas in which they compete, and from this, also gain an understanding of the areas in which they don’t compete. In the areas in which they don’t compete, businesses can cooperate. Nonprofits, in general, are not aware of, or acknowledge that they compete (and they do), and because of this, they cannot collabrate as efficiently or as effectively as possible.

My own example of this is the Detroit automakers. Ford and GM are incredibly competitive in car production, features, pricing, dealerships, etc. But at the same time, they have an incredibly strong combined lobby for setting safety and emission standards, things that affect the entire industry. They know where they compete and therefore know where they can work together.

So this has been rattling around in my head until I read two things:

This first was “Learning How to Learn” by Joseph D. Novak, D. Bob Gowin, and Jane Butler Kahle, which lays out some very interesting models and heuristics for visualizing information.

The second was A Typology of Nonprofit Competition: Insights for Social Marketers by Robin J. Ritchie and Charles B. Weinberg.

Putting them together, I made this using OmniGraffle:

Download the PDF

Robert Frost and me

I was passing through Somerville last night and in Powderhouse Square I ran across photographer-stranger Tia taking some large format photos. Powder House Square was the focal point of 1774’s Powder Alarm during which British Soldiers took possession of potential militia firearms and supplies. The subsequent mobilization of militia forces “essentially provided a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Battle of Lexington and Concord seven months later.” ( Wikipedia: Powder Alarm).

A week and $300 I barely had later, I got my MacBook back with most of my files (including last week’s comic) intact. Dead hard-drive. So this comic was originally #2, now it’s #3. I hope you enjoyed last week’s low-tech make-do.

The hard drive on my two-month-old MacBook up and kicked the bucket and the whole darn thing is at the shop. So this week’s comic is done with a borrowed Sharpie and some watercolor paints I found on trash-day. 7-10 days they say. 7-10 days…

I was lucky enough to be invited on Talking Out Loud this morning with wonderful hosts Felicia Sullivan and Charlotte Crockford. The live show was aired on UMass Lowell’s radio station, WUML. I mostly discussed AmeriCorps*VISTA and the CTC VISTA Project and had a blast.
Click here to listen to interview!
Fellow VISTA Leader Danielle was awesome to make this recording for me. We made one from the soundboard, but our recording device accidently had its internal mic on as well, so there was lots of extraneous noise; though Danielle’s was made by putting a microphone up to the computer speakers. Danielle also made me the picture below.

It’s a little late to write about, but I spent Labor Day weekend in Rhode Island.

It turns out that Rhode Island is the largest producer of turf grass in the North East: more than 4,000 acres of turf. That’s a lot of sod.

It rained all day Sunday, so there was nothing else to do but take pictures of delicious wine grapes and eat them too.

Despite the fact that one of these days the whole darn school is going crumble into Boston Harbor, serving at UMass Boston isn’t so bad; I have lots of opportunities to ride around the harbor in the university’s vessels.

Santa Barbara, California is a beautiful town. I went to school there and when I can, try to visit…though now I live in Boston, which makes it difficult.