What's your Motto?

In the last few weeks I have met with a number of fabulous people that I really admire and a common theme of those conversations has been that those people have a life motto. "Do Good Better" has been my motto for the last few years but I didn't realize that having a personal motto was a relatively common thing. I believe that having a motto is a grounding point that helps you become your aspirational self (uh huh, I got all Oprah on you, what do you think would happen after I've been on a staycation for a week?). Here are a few that I have recently heard:

Do or do not, there is no try- Yoda

It's only hubris if you fail-Julius Caesar

It's better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission

Go big or go home

All in

What's your motto?

The Price of Inaction

Last week I was driving my kids to school and noticed a chunk of ice near the lane where I was driving, as I got closer I realized that it wasn't ice, it was a white bunny. It was covered with dirt and was unable to hop over the small wall of ice that the snowplow had left on the side of the road. So it was trapped between a wall of ice and four lanes of morning traffic. I was running late and kept going but thought that someone behind me would stop or maybe I could go back after dropping off the kids and put it over the snowbank. After I dropped the kids off at school, I checked my phone and saw a message about an event that the foundation was hosting later that day, that needed some attention. I quickly went to work, forgeting that I had planned to go back.

The next day as we were driving to school, I noticed a fuzzy body by the side of the road and realized that the bunny had been hit by a car. I got that sick feeling in my stomach (that I get when I realize I screwed up). I could have done something and I didn't because it would be a slight inconvenience.

There are real consequences when we decide not to act. Schools close, people die because they don't have health insurance, neighborhoods get stuck with a toxic waste dump, and little bunnies get hit by cars.  We can't do everything, especially for those of us who have chosen to work in the nonprofit sector and can see so many places that need our help. But I wish that morning, I had taken the extra two minutes and made the difference for that bunny because you don't always get a second chance.

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World

The South Asian Philanthropy Project has a great interview up with Michael Edwards, Demos researcher and author. Some excerpts are below:

We are delighted to have Michael Edwards as a guest at the South Asian Philanthropy Project.  Michael and I chatted recently about his new book, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, and the field of philanthropy in general.

Michael is an independent writer and activist who is affiliated with the New York-based think-tank Demos, the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, and the Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester University in the UK. From 1999 to 2008, he was Director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society Program, and previously worked for the World Bank, OxFam, and Save the Children.

Welcome, Michael!  We’re honored to have you with us.

First off, can you tell us a little bit about your new book, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World?

Thanks Archana, and thanks for hosting this Q and A on your excellent site. I’m looking forward to interacting with your readers.

“Small Change” was written out of my frustration that debates about the purpose and direction of philanthropy were becoming so one-sided – dominated by the idea that business has all the answers, that the super-rich are the new ‘super-heroes’, and that philanthropy is essentially a technical exercise of selecting the ‘best’ organizations to support based on quantifiable data and criteria for ‘investment.’

I come from a background in civil society and international development, so for me the most entrenched social problems like poverty and inequality, violence and discrimination, are always the most complicated and political to solve. And, while new ideas and methods are always welcome in philanthropy, they need to be questioned and carefully- evaluated to see if they really do work in these areas, and I didn’t think that was happening. Instead, questions of deep social transformation and of democracy versus plutocracy were being buried under an increasing wave of hype and adulation.

“Small Change” is a wake-up call, if you like – a deliberate provocation designed to foster more debate, bring in different perspectives, and ensure that older but still-valuable traditions of social movements, community organizing, and bottom-up philanthropy are not forgotten or discarded. I think we will all be better placed to make decisions about philanthropy from a platform like that.

Read the full Q and A here.