Thanksgiving Tradition

I may or may not participate in Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Giving Tuesday. But Thanksgiving means that I process all the yearly giving receipts for The Ember Cast. It is my personal way of reflecting and considering all the people that financially give so that we can do what we do. Just like every year, this habit resets my thinking. You cannot be ungrateful as you write, address and fold that stack of receipts for people that gave their hard earned money.

This year, that stack of letters represents just under 250 donations, around $27K, with over 95% spent directly on student missions projects. The majority of those donations funded our summer Italy team and the summer Poland interns, meaning over 1,400 hours of service, culture and leadership for 10 people in two countries.

That's Thanksgiving in NovEmber.

The Skill of Curation

Curation is a skill that you should get good at. Because it will help you make better leaders.

It's Perspectives teaching season around here because I teach some of the later lessons, mostly lesson 12 which is 4 weeks from the end of the class. Perspectives is still one of the best tools to get people involved in global missions and if you are interested in this kind of stuff, go sign up for a class in the Spring.

On the right in this picture is Pastor D, who helped coordinate a class last week and is a local and global missions pastor. The class was held at his church and most of the students in the class were people from there. I loved what he did near the end of our time - he engaged the class with two very specific, contextual questions about the material and how it related to their church and their global efforts. It could have been a talk show he was moderating. Or a panel discussion. Or a really good dinner party conversation. In essence, he curated a discussion.

In today's tech culture of constant news and noise, if you can help the people you lead concentrate, dig and learn, to converse over a specific topic, to help them uncover wisdom from others in a conversation, you will have achieved a difficult and great feat.

ProtoGuide 17-18

One of our best core competencies is the ProtoGuide Experience, an experience designed for high school seniors where they work with The Ember Cast at a Guide level, participating in as much as they can. This year's ProtoGuide is Meghan B and, although it took a little time, she's getting into the blogging thing. Check it out [scroll down], or even better, follow it from your favorite RSS reader.

I am a firm believer that this is still a unique, niche experience for the emerging global student leader and it's our joy for Ember to offer this kind of experience.

Friday Burn

::: The Most Successful Kids Have Parents Who Do These 9 Things
Link


::: Syrias Students Going to School in a War Zone
Link


::: You Are What You Carry
Link

::: "To BE the church, you're gonna have to stop doin' so much church stuff.” ~Bob Roberts Jr.

Photo: Bilingual bulletin. Oct 2017.

The Well

We have started a new experiment this year as part of some Ember staff development: a monthly staff dinner with special guests. The goal of this is to gather our staff to hear from some of the most creative, missionally imaginative and innovative people we know.
This month's guest was Mandy Memmel [sorry for the bad pic Mandy] and her daughter Jolie. Mandy is the founder and executive director of The Well in Curtis Bay, which originally started as a vehicle for womens mentoring but has flourished into community development for all of Curtis Bay. We've conspired with The Well a few times and have loved it. [here and here and here]

Our conversation was fascinating and included topics such as:
Food desert - grocery stores won't come into Curtis Bay because it isn't profitable.
Social enterprise - The Well is starting to develop a series of micro businesses that will provide a locally sourced product and also employ local women from the area.
High school kids love slime - yeah I don't even know.
Workforce development - The Well has also started some workforce development, meaning they teach local women job skills and employ them.
Gentrification - Port Covington is a huge city development that will impact long term residents of Curtis Bay, possibly raising housing costs and price these residents out of their community.

Mandy is a leader you would follow.

Ember BOD - Nov 2017

Some thoughts and themes from the last Ember Board of Directors meeting, last weekend. Maybe these will help you in the areas of organizational clarity, missions mobilization or working with volunteer teams:

+ Ember direction - Would be helpful to the board to get a feel for this consistently once a month.
+ Re-articulate Ember mission statement. We do a lot of things surrounding our core mission. Good to articulate that again.
+ Expectations for participation - We need to be clearer on the expectations of people that participate in our experiences.
+ We've been exploring the idea of doing some re-imagination with some of our team training competencies. Small discussion on key volunteers who would be engaged around this idea.

Friday Burn

::: Measles Vaccine has Saved more than 20M Lives Since 2000
Link via Future Crunch


::: Saline Soil Rice Experiment a Success
Link


::: Is France Reached?
Link

::: If a leader can't ever be questioned, he's not a leader. He's a bully who just happens to have a job. - @edstetzer via @willmancini

Photo: Sicily. July 2016.

Board Prep

Prepping for the Ember Board of Directors meeting the past few days. Mostly, it's recapping stories from this past year and looking to the future. It also includes some 'business development' and some financial details.

The people on this team are my biggest advocates. And their support catalyzes teams, churches, communities and decades if not centuries. I'm fortunate for their insight and wisdom.

You don't have to run an organization to have one of these. Maybe it's time you gathered a personal board of directors.

Giving Away Money is a Complicated Business

Giving away money is a complicated business, as I appreciate more and more all the time. I have met so many decent, optimistic, generous people who want to make a difference, but they become disillusioned with the difficulty of finding the right fit for their philanthropic interests. Almost by definition, the causes that need the support the most often do not have the infrastructure, management talent, or strategic plan needed to deploy large amounts of capital efficiently. It's tempting to pick projects that are straightforward and "doable." There is nothing diabolical about that. The problem is that those kinds of projects are one-offs. The gains may not be sustainable, and the impact tends to be local or limited. Meanwhile, there are other global organizations that do good work, but they have grown to a size that limits their ability to innovate, and administrative costs and approaches seem to produce produce fewer and fewer returns.

- Forty Chances - Finding Hope in a Hungry World by Howard G. Buffett

Friday Burn

::: As Caterpillar Inc goes, so goes the world's economy.
Link


::: China's Millennials - the World's Most Important Consumer
318 million consumers between the ages of 15-29 - roughly the population of the US.
Link


::: Saudi Arabia becomes first country to grant citizenship to a robot
Link


::: "Can a person maintain a relationship with Jesus apart from the Church?
Possibly.
But their children will not." - @BrianZahnd

Photo: Belpasso, July 2017.

One of the Best Tools to Grow Global Kids

The question I get asked most is something along the lines of: how do we grow kids with a vision for the world? And the best answer is: get them to travel. Traveling breaks down barriers, it gives a new a larger perspective, it promotes divergent thinking. Your plan A almost always fails when you travel, you meet people different from you, you experience new places and sometimes even see old places with new insight. Obviously, we are big fans of dragging your kids around the world.

Travel can be expensive - but not always. In today's global world, traveling across your city is as important as flying overseas somewhere. You can experience lots of culture shifts in your own city. And as people serving a world in need, it's your imperative to care about those that live near you as well as those far off. It is not over here OR over there.

The best tool related to travel is travel hacking. This is what can help make travel very affordable and it's what we have been doing for a few years now. Case in point, a trip to Sydney next year that was purchased solely with points [this trip probably represents over 1 million points we have redeemed since early 2016]. If you are new to this idea, google it. Then get the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Reserve card. Make the minimum spend to get the bonus points. Then use the Chase portal to either exchange points to their travel partners or book travel through the portal.

Going places is the best way to grow global kids.

Summer 1991

1990 Nissan Pathfinder. Shenandoah Springs, Madison, VA. July 1991.