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I have been thinking about kindness a lot this season, partly because it’s a season for thinking about such things and mostly because my dear dad who was 98 died peacefully in his sleep on December 18^th.  My dad was the kindest man I know, unflinchingly so.  I described him to friends as a ‘salt of the earth’ kind of guy, and they all agreed.  I know my dad did not have an easy life.  At 98 he experienced the great depression, and great recession, and lost buddies in World War II as the commander of a ship (at the age of 24 which itself is shocking).  As a testament to his leadership he continued to get together annually with a group of guys from his ship for over 50 years while the group dwindled from 60 to two guys who were alive and could travel.  It would certainly have been the appropriate context for ‘command and control’ leadership and yet having been to more than a few of the tin can (the type of ship) reunions, I saw the deep affection among the men of all ranks and races and learned that my dad understood a lot about connected and adaptive leadership. I wish I had asked him more about that now and hope that I will continue to grow and be influenced by his leadership, and his kindness. 

As a tribute to my dad I would like to share one of my favorite poems about kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye:

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Many of you followed with interest the joint series that Natalia and I published monthly about her promotion and our discussions about whether we should attempt a co-leadership model as part of our efforts to experiment with how to redistribute executive responsibility in ways that would be more personally sustainable for non-profit Executive Directors.  As the year closes, I have spent time looking back, and most important of all…learning! I thought I would share my reflections on our joint venture, and I hope that Natalia will add her thoughts now that she has had the time to settle into her new job in Los Angeles.
 

What Happened in 2014 and Lessons Learned

Context:

For those of you who may not have followed our earlier blogs, I thought it would be helpful to provide some context. In 2014, Natalia was promoted from her position as Communications Director to Managing Director in an attempt to create a new model that better distributes operations and program capacity that often both fall to the ED, creating a pretty unsustainable workload and expectations of an unusual combination of skill sets all wrapped up in one person. During the same period we decided to take advantage of the transitions of two of our long-term employees along with obtaining a number of big consulting opportunities to bring on 5 new, mostly junior staff, in a relatively short period of time. That is a lot of change to manage!

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The past two days with Within Our Lifetime have been incredible. I cannot describe how inspiring it is to be sitting in a room with over 50 people and organizations committed to living, breathing, creating social justice. The goal of the convening was to “elect” the next phase of leadership. Thus far, the network grew from the volunteered energy of an interim core leadership team. The amount of work and impact they’ve made to the field has been to bring implicit bias to the fore-front of the work and all in a short amount of time (4 years).
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This was originally posted on Nonprofit With Balls Blog and republished with Vu Le's permision. We share it for it's fun nature and because the tips are very useful with the holidays around the corner. - LLC
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Hi everyone. Happy Thanksgiving this week! You are a sexy and awesome unicorn. I’m thankful for you and all you do to make our community better. I hope that you take a well-deserved break. One that is unencumbered with the thought that while you’re spending time with your family, there are hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox, and they multiply by the minute, each one important, and yet you continue to neglect them because you are a terrible human being and your colleagues are probably spitting in your direction when you pass them.

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