Build Your Own Frankenmentor

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Thanks to Dunechaser at Flickr for the image"][/caption] If you looked at my list of mentors you would probably be shocked. On that list you would see a couple egotistical jerks, someone that overshares to a degree that makes you cringe, some bad parents, terrible bosses, a self-promoting lunatic, and a lot of selfish spouses. These people aren't my mentors because I have bad taste in mentors. They are my mentors because they have other amazing redeeming qualities and I only look to them for advice in the areas that they excel.

Penelope Trunk gives great advice about how to move ahead in your career, she's also a great blogger that shows her personality in her writing. I once sent her an email asking for advice and she wrote back and told me that she loved the language in the blog header that you see above. I got so giddy, I felt like a blog groupie. "OMG, she knows I'm alive!!!!" I love all of these things about Penelope and turn to her blog for advice when I need a kick in the butt when it comes to my career but Penelope as a wife and then ex-wife make me cringe. My biggest fear as a career-focused person is that I'll alienate the people that I care most about, so I don't go to her for marriage advice.

Tim Ferriss is another mentor from afar that has been so useful as I have been figuring out my career path. He wrote the 4-Hour Workweek and taught me a lot about getting to the most important part of my workday and even more about figuring out what I am working for. He is a shameless self-promoter and it's been working pretty well for him. I don't go to his blog for advice about modesty.

I also have a wide-range of more traditional mentors that I actually have met in person, of all crazy things. I usually ask them for more in-depth advice about a problem I am facing because I've seen them handle the same thing expertly or because I have heard people talk about them and that issue is something that always comes up as a strength. Most of them are older and have more experience in philanthropy or some other field. Some are younger and are just naturally gifted in that area or have been become an expert on negotiation or networking through pure will. Those are the people I like to talk to the most because they give me hope that I can learn those skills too.

Don't sit around waiting for you fairy godmentor. Find people around you and far away that have skills that you want to cultivate and ignore the parts of them that you don't want to emulate. You'll get more out of the experience and you won't be disappointed because you can't find that perfect match.

Who has been a helpful mentor for you and what skills do they have that you want to develop?

Big Picture vs Self Interest

One of my pet peeves is when people and organizations shoot themselves in the foot because the lack the vision to see the big picture. This is especially obvious when it comes to many in the nonprofit sector fighing against a change in the charitable tax deductions of our wealthiest donors to help pay for health reform.

Many of our organizations are serving the uninsured and underinsured. We deal with school children who misbehave because they have an undiagnosed hearing problem or a cavity that hasn't been filled, we serve families that have gone bankrupt because they have an emergency room bill that they can't pay, and we suffer the effects of a  weaker economy because people can't afford the health insurance costs if they left their job to start a small business. We are already paying the price without the benefit of universal care.

I will get off my soapbox now and let E.J. Dionne from the Washington Post say this much more eloquently.  From E.J.

If the uninsured can't count on the do-gooders to help them, where else can they turn?

The question arises because certain leaders of the sector of our society devoted to civic endeavors moved this week to block a perfectly reasonable way of raising some money to extend health coverage to those who don't have it.

At issue is a proposal by a number of senators, including Jay Rockefeller and John Kerry, to cap tax deductions taken by the well-to-do. Their suggestion wouldn't even unsettle existing deductions, and it is far more limited than a sensible idea along the same lines put forward earlier by President Obama.

With the Bush-era tax cuts set to expire in 2011, the marginal rate on the top income bracket is scheduled to rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. This affects only families with taxable incomes of roughly $370,000 a year or more.

To help pay for expanded coverage, the senators are proposing that the itemized deductions taken by those with high incomes be capped where they are now. So beginning in 2011, people in the top bracket who made charitable contributions would have them offset against taxes by 35 cents on the dollar, not 39.6 cents. People in the next bracket down, $210,000 to $370,000, would still get a bigger deduction than they do now. The plan is estimated to raise about $90 billion over a decade.

At the beginning of the year, Obama proposed limiting the deduction to 28 cents on the dollar, which would have raised more than $300 billion and solved much of the health-care financing problem. But Obama's idea was shot down, and now, a group of charitable leaders -- including representatives from the Council on Foundations, the American Association of Museums and, shockingly, the American Institute for Cancer Research -- wants to kill the new proposal, too.

Read the rest here.

When good things happen to great people

Ever since my son was 4 months old, he has been going to the best daycare in the world. I know most parents think their daycare is the best but mine really is and ABC agrees because they just selected our daycare provider for an Extreme Home Makeover! Philanthropy isn't always about what you can do on your own. I would have love to build her a new house but I don't have the resources but by all of the parents banding together and sending in many heartfelt entries to ABC we were still able to have the same result (OK a much, much better result that if we tried to build her a house ourselves).

In the past I have been very skeptical of these type of shows. I worried about drop in philanthropy, where a camera crew drops in, changes a families life in unknowable ways, and then disappears. What I didn't understand, until we started this process, is that families don't get on this show unless there is a strong community behind them that wants to see them succeed.

This has been a lifechanging experience for Tia's family and for the community that she serves and I am excited to see it unfold.

PS watch out for all the daycare kids on Good Morning America, Monday at 7am (my two will be there as well)

Update: Here is a link to the video from that segment

Social Media 101 for Conference Planners

One of my pet peeves is the lost opportunity at many conference to connect with people who are interested but couldn't attend. Some conference planners think of this lack of connection as an air of exclusivity, when really it is just a missed chance to build buzz and fill more seats next year. James Walker at Brazen Careerist talks about this lost opportunity at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference: From James: If you were out and about in the DC area over the past weekend, I would expect you to know that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) just hosted their 2009 Annual Legislative Conference, but I wouldn’t expect you to know what happened there.

Why? I don’t think the CBC used social media as much as they could have to promote the conference, the people in attendance, the issues being discussed and the solutions created.

Only a small group of people can attend conferences like these, but to create the change that needs to occur, many more people need to be informed and engaged. Social media can help achieve that goal.

Though I could not attend, I tried my best to catch up on what was discussed, but it was not particularly easy. Honestly, if I wanted to party, I would have had no problem gathering that info on Twitter, but for some reason, the pure content or true substance of the meeting was hard to find.

Okay, so I’ve pointed out the social media #FAIL. Now I’d like to give a quick list of my PR Prescriptions on how the CBC could have better utilized social media to connect with people to provide more real time coverage.

* Official Tweeters

* Official Bloggers

* Media Partnerships

* Create a site to Build on the Discussion

Read the rest of the details of how social media could be better harnessed here.

I (Heart) Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

I have been going through some of the videos from the Momentum Conference that the Tides Foundation put on earlier this month and I have been completely blown away. They have pulled together some amazing thinkers and so far Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins has been my favorite. She is the new Director of Green For All, the organization that Van Jones started, and she has an amazing understanding of how to make change happen. Her full video is here but I also love the short clip above from Green for All that shows why green jobs are important in a visceral way. Each of our organizations has a powerful story to tell, we just need to be creative about how to get those messages out there.