Guest Speaker - Brittany Sandbergen

I really enjoyed Brittany's presentation on PASA. She talked about her role at PASA and how her role and her colleagues roles intersect due to the over powering demand of responsibility. One part Brittany talked about was when she was talking about what makes a quality program. She mentioned how there are staff on different levels of experience and knowledge and she said that in order to have a quality program those staff that are on different levels need to be given custom support so all staff can work towards excellence.

I also like how she mapped out what goes into a nonprofit like PASA, 46% personnel, 34% programming, 12% other (printing, celebrations, supplies, etc.), and 8% transportation. Last school year I had the opportunity to go to PASA and learn about who they are. At the time I didn’t think about working with a nonprofit that gears towards teenagers and middle schoolers. Now that Brittany came to the class and spoke about it, I have been thinking about it since and have been doing light research into different nonprofits that work with middle school and teenage youth. 

Brittany brought up what it takes to be a good CFO and she said that a good CFO is good at developing and sustaining funds/resources and that they question everything. I feel like the CFO role often gets overlooked during class and in everyday settings, the CFO is never brought up. For her to mention that made me realize how much of a staple and important person the CFO is in an organization and nonprofit.

Against Philanthropy

The central argument of Against Philanthropy is that major corporations are putting millions of dollars towards stopping world crises while also putting even more money in companies that make items that help cause said world crises. For example, Jenny Price says that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has put millions of dollars towards making the AIDS crisis their top priority while also investing "millions in pharmaceutical companies that refuse to make AIDS drugs affordable." This article also touches on the subject of spreading out their earnings fairly amongst the organization. Price talks about how corporations withhold ~90% of their assets while putting ~5% towards funding programs and then writing that 5% off on tax breaks. Price also makes that argument that companies could put more money towards paying "workers fairly for the wealth they help you accumulate."

To my knowledge, my internship does not have a lot of money to just go around and put in different areas. Since the minimum wage went up in January of 2018, the front line staffs pay went up but because of the organization having very little money, no one else was able to get a raise. Also, the fundraising budget for 2017 was $63,000 which was barely met by December 2017. The executive director for the organization raised that fundraising budget to a whopping $200,000 so we can make improvements to the building and get everyone the raises that they need. This is an unrealistic budget, but that's a different story. I have talked with my mentor before about which programs we are funding and she said that there aren't really any due to the lack of funding. If this article explained ways that these companies get their money to put millions in foundations then I think it would be beneficial for struggling nonprofits to get their funding up.

Playbox Activity - The Human Knot

The theme for the playbox I did with Alyssa was called Learning Through Movement. The planning process of this was quite difficult because we didn't have a clear idea as to what the theme meant and we eventually took our own spin on the theme. We knew going in that people were going to make comments beforehand about getting up and moving and being active at 5:00 at night, so that is what brought up the idea of doing a movement activity without doing the typical movements that people would think of. Our original idea was to do a musical chair game, but with silent cues and no music type of thing. We chose not to do that because of the giant pole in the center of the room.

The human knot idea was created because we looked at the weather and because it was going to be nice out we decided that we were going to do the activity outside and make the class even complain more. I think the activity went great and we got across the ideas that we wanted to get across. We wanted to get across verbal cues and nonverbal cues, as well as team building skills. If I was to do this activity again I would probably make it more clear to not start until we gave the okay to. I feel that some of the instructions got lost amongst some people because they went into the untying before actually hearing the instructions and what changes there were between the rounds.

Overall, I think it went very well and I believe we got our message across and it was a fun way to start the evening and gave a good energy towards our guest speaker for the night.