stewardship : mackenzian

October 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Resisting conventional waste

Imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race!

“These are counter-cultural priorities, yes. But they yield innovative, financial, and relational results that are far better long-term than living small-hearted, grasping, isolated, and suspicious.” —Me, in June

I’m preparing to move a few states north (details soon, I promise). So I spent several hours this weekend walking around my next work city, reviewing housing options, and learning more than I ever expected about urban apartments.

I also had thoughts how this culture structures itself around plenty, but in so doing, often produces wastefulness.

The first all-you-can-eat buffet I went to in this country was a chain diner in Texas. For so many dollars per meal, one could have as many entrees as one had fingers, and as many different kinds of food as one had toes.

That first time, I piled plates as high as I wanted, and it seemed cost effective until I realized that my wide eyes weren’t soundly judging my actual hunger. The structure of the restaurant made it easy to overestimate how much fuel I could spoon into my body and how much value an all-I-could-eat meal ticket could reasonably give me. I eventually grew disgusted about the meal scraps that restaurant staffers later threw away.

I thought of that diner recently while exploring a 60 year old high-rise with a mandatory heating plan. The building’s management company administers the heat. Residents automatically receive central heat, but can’t customize or modulate it. So, physics being what it is, the top of the building swelters, only the mid-level floors get reasonable temperatures, and no one can opt out.

This sort of plan is attractive to people trying to save cash: how sweet not to have to worry about heat. But I balked quite hard when our tour guide recommended opening windows to let excess heat out. It assumes that waste is normal. Energy conservation, apparently, is not.

Focusing on the micro picture, i.e. how an apartment’s chosen approach allows individuals to rebalance their budget, can sometimes undermine the macro picture: that we are where we are because of both individual and collective choices, that we can stand to be more careful with each other, that we can be more conscious of how whatever works for some of us might nevertheless impact others of us downstream.

“I’m having a really strong reaction to this heat,” I said, sweating.

But the macro picture of collective wastefulness remains whatever I do or don’t do. There’s a structure operating in this and other complex scenarios that is much greater than my own scruples. That structure doesn’t bend because of individual components. We have to learn to deal well anyway.

June 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Enough

Two ceramic turtles viewed from above a dark brown wooden surface. On the left is red clay in the shape of a turtle, etched, and glazed in black. To the right is white with black horsehair pattern and rainbow-glazed etchings for the shell. — Pottery turtles by Navajo artists Tommy Vail, Jr. and Johnny Williams. Image (c) Keisha E. McKenzie

This coming week includes an annual educational intensive on the campus of the congregation I work for. It also includes me sitting in a class on the philosophy of prosperity.

Ever since I began learning about fundraising, I’ve noticed the way that handling money and resources triggers people’s latent scripts about finances, value, and lessons about abundance and scarcity that we’ve all learned from our families of origin and wider culture. I’ve also felt drawn to fundraising approaches that aren’t about guilt, shame, fear, or loss. All of those motivators, effective though they might be, seem to be limiting, small-hearted, and poor bricks to build a new world with.

So it has been interesting to read the experiences of Lynne Twist, a former fundraiser and non-profit executive affiliated with the Fetzer Institute, the Pachamama Alliance, and the Hunger Project. In The Soul of Money, Twist and Teresa Barker share their belief that fundraising and resource-sharing should connect with or flow from a community’s core values. Only through that values connection, which Twist refers to as integrity with one’s soul, does fundraising transcend the fine art of begging and the shock, sadness, guilt, or shaming that successful begging depends on (pp. xvii-26).

Next time you receive a fundraising letter in the mail, take a few extra minutes to read it closely. Does it rely on shock, sadness, guilt, or shaming? Does the case for support require you to fear a person, a group, or the writers’ vision of the future?

I’ve collected print fundraising artifacts on and off for the last decade, partly to see the techniques professional fundraisers use, and partly to note how often their content is based on inspiring people to give out of gratitude or to invest in an attractive outcome. My collection suggests that inspirational abundance-centered fundraising is still a minority strategy.

When environmentalists talk about sustainability, eventually they have to consider the meaning of enough. So to in the context of philanthropy and stewardship, we each get to settle on what’s enough for us: enough to pay for necessities, enough to meet our wants, enough to fulfill our satisfaction tank. What’s enough, and how does enough vary depending on where we live and the life stage we’re in?

As Twist notes, fundraisers working with these question in organizational contexts need to be as self-aware as the person designing a private household budget because the same basic issues apply. Each of us, at some level, is walking alongside those who have resources in order to connect those resources with people who need them to achieve a given goal.

For some people, “those who have resources” are the employers who pay bimonthly checks that allow them to maintain their food, shelter, and lifestyle. For other people, “those who have resources” are the grant-makers whose foundation budgets drip down the funding pyramid so that grassroots organizations can directly support vulnerable populations. Sometimes, we’re “those who have resources” and demonstrate that through the cash donations we give. Sometimes we’re “those who need resources,” and receive scholarship or disbursements from funds.

In each case, it’s worth mapping out the resources that we have. Twist argues that no matter what our circumstances, we need to ask ourselves:

Who do I need to be to fulfill on the commitment [to the well-being of the world] I’ve made?

What kind of human being do I need to forge myself into to make this happen?

What resources do I need to be willing to bring to bear in myself and my colleagues and in my world?

…Rather than feeling that fundraising was a matter of twisting arms for a donation or playing on emotions to manipulate money from contributors, it became for me an arena in which I was able to create an opportunity for people to engage in their greatness.” —Lynne Twist

I’ve come to agree that any fundraising case that fails to call people into their greatness and into a larger, more equitable vision of the world doesn’t deserve to thrive!

This sets quite a high standard for the fundraising I do and encourage others to do, but I suspect that as more and more of us adjust in this direction, the field of philanthropy will become much less misanthropic, and that’ll be a good thing for us all.

As people in the United States have learned, one can’t run marathons on panic. One can only sprint. And, for changing the world, panic-fueled sprints will never be enough.

June 5, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Keeping a precious thing alive

Back in November, I visited Muir Woods, a natural monument of coastal redwood trees near San Francisco, CA.

The trophy I brought back with me was a giant sequoia tree in a can: a germination kit with starter soil, potting polystyrene, a plastic mini-greenhouse, and about seven seeds.

Two seeds sprouted and grew about two inches by February. Then nothing seemed to be happening and I’d begun to wonder whether I’d killed them.

I am proud to report that they are still alive. One has just grown past the top of the greenhouse, and the other is about an inch behind its sibling. I’ll be transplanting them into larger pots soon.

Two small sequoia sprouts in a three-inch plastic tube-greenhouse. The tube sits on a wood-like surface. — Look at my baby sequoias surviving! Photo © Keisha E. McKenzie

Stewarding living things is terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. I don’t know how parents of human babies stand it.

Here am I, acutely aware of the temperature in the room where the sequoia sprouts live, the light that streams into the window and the clouds that overshadow the space, the guilt I feel when I check the soil and realize I’ve forgotten to water it, the incredible smugness of passing through the room and finding that for yet another day a living thing is still alive despite me.

A few months ago I wrote that beautiful things sometimes take thousands of years to grow, and I still find that true. A small slice of the Church reinforced the lesson for me this weekend.

I felt warmth from those who, though states away from Chicago, followed along by hashtag and stood in solidarity with us. I froze slowly in an auditorium with an air conditioning default based, like most, on the resting metabolic rate of a 155-pound man in a suit. I lit up in the presence of change-makers convicted about the value of 104-year-old Syrians as well as teenage American students; and I watched exclusivism descend on the room, throwing welcome into doubt and threatening furtive attempts to build community.

So many people have watered spaces like The Justice Conference in its first few years: so many nourishing the space with their presence, their gifts, and their time. Unlike me and my tree, if The Justice Conference doesn’t mature, it won’t be through a lack of engaged stewards.

A group of us invited the organizers to pray with us after the morning session on Saturday. We prayed for the healing of our wounds and those who’d wounded us. We affirmed that the breach in fellowship need not be permanent. We prayed that the group would grow to acknowledge and nourish all of the people in its rooms. We held space for the rest of the event and left our circle open-hearted.

What if, when I transplant the tree sprouts into bigger pots, they get too much air and fail to thrive?

What if, as The Justice Conference expands and attracts ever more attention from professional agenda-setters, it stalls at “hosted conversation” and never develops genuine community?

What will be, will be. We’ll become what we are: all of us will.

Today, though, as I recovered from my weekend, two sequoia sprouts coaxed a happy dance out of me. They reminded me that only 30% of walking with precious living things is competent care, and 20% of the journey is being willing to persist despite an uncertain pace.

The rest, I’m learning, is staying in relationship long enough to discover what those living things are made of, what logics took root within them, and how receptive they’ll be to new environments and caretakers.