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the future of food banks
and the people who serve themselves first
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tipping the scale
This post is narrated! Listen below… Nothing can inspire fear in a project manager like these six little words: “How soon can we scale this?” Or, worse: “Let’s triple the number of sites.” I spent several years working as a grants manager. In theory, we start with a plan
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time for introductions
This post is narrated! Listen below… Every month I join an affinity group for BIPOC folks that’s hosted by my faves SeattleWorks. My pal Clara told me about them a couple years ago. This year, with my business secure and time less frantic, I started attending more often. They’
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gentlemen's disagreements
Throughout his term, Barack Obama had a call for the activists agitating for change. He recalled what Franklin Roosevelt told his activists pushing for their own reforms. FDR said, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Then-President Obama met with members of the
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what does it mean to put community first?
Some articles get my goat and don’t let go. Last year I read an interview with a roundtable of CEOs at major food banks around the country. The headline quote was, “we have power, let’s use it wisely.” I want to unpack that! The panelists, well-meaning or well-intentioned,
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getting started
“Hooray! Our non-profit organization is ready to use its power for change. The status quo won’t stand a chance against us. Let’s see, we’ve got ourselves a fifteen-point plan to end racism. We’ve got our diagrams, our power analyses, and our group agreements. We’ve got
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whatever pops up
During the covid pandemic, service providers had to be in a lot of places, fast. We couldn’t rely on traditional models if we wanted to reach the people hardest hit by the virus. We needed to send covid-19 vaccines to places where there might not be an established health
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things to read: october
No new post this week. Instead, here are a few things I’ve read recently that I want to share with you. There’s short teaser excerpt from each article. This was really difficult! All of these articles, in their entirety, are worth your time. Your Land Acknowledgment Is Not
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taking other paths: advice for job seekers
Most of us need money—and by extension, an income—to live. I’ve written a few times about the great resignation, why you should stay, and why you should move on. While it may be easy to leave an employer, it’s not always clear-cut where we should go
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get out and rise
this is a collaborative post: concepts and words by Christina Chan and josh martinez. My friend Christina and I are no stranger to complicated workplaces. We worked together for a while before we both moved on to better pastures. We collaborated on this post, as people who’ve been there,
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blow up the dam
Out near Port Angeles, Washington, the Elwha river winds through the Olympic peninsula. The river meets the ocean where the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has lived since time immemorial. More than 80% of the river exists within the Olympic National Park, one of my favorite parks in the country. For
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the andon cord
I heard a story years ago about a strange partnership struck between Toyota and GM. In 1984 they came together to create a factory called NUMMI. This factory ran under the Toyota Production System, whose principles by now are world-famous as Lean Six Sigma. (Emphasis here that I’m suspicious
