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Around Town: March 23-24

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Spring has finally sprung (despite the temperatures that we have been experiencing), but stay warm and make some memories with these great opportunities happening with Catalogue nonprofits around town this weekend!

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Grocery Deliveries to Low-Income Seniors in Columbia Heights

We Are Family Senior Outreach Network
We Are Family will be delivering free grocery bags to over 250 low-income seniors in the Columbia Heights, Petworth, and Adams Morgan neighborhoods.
When: Saturday, March 23, 2013 (10:00 AM – 1:00 PM)
Where: Kelsey Apartments, 3322 14th St. NW, Washington, DC 20010
Fee: no
Volunteer Info: Volunteers will be needed to help assemble and deliver grocery bags. Although a car is not needed, it is helpful. Some of our delivery routes can be done on foot, while others require a car.
Contact: Mark Anderson, (202) 487-8698

TAKE Dance

Dance Place
Casting a spotlight on Japan’s collectivist business culture, New York based TAKE Dance’s Salaryman takes audiences through a day in the life of over-worked Japanese executives. East meets West with TAKE’s trademark elegance in an athletic display of passion and humor from choreographer Takehiro Ueyama.
When: Saturday, March 23, 2013 (8:00 PM)
Where: Dance Place, 3225 8th Street NE, Washington, DC 20017
Fee: Yes, $22 General Admission; $17 Members, Seniors, Teachers and Artists; $10 College Students; $8 Children (17 and under)
Contact: Carolyn Kamrath, (202) 269-1608

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Scrabble Scramble

Literacy Council of Montgomery County
The Literacy Council of Montgomery County will host a SCRABBLE (R) SCRAMBLE to raise funds for the organization’s adult literacy programs. Four-player teams will compete to achieve the highest total score. Players will be able to purchase extra letters, buy a peek at a dictionary, and play cooperatively with other team members. Prizes will be awarded to the three top scoring teams. Dinner is included, along with a cash bar.
When: Sunday, March 24, 2013 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM)
Where: Manor Country Club, 14901 Carrolton Road, Rockville, MD 20853
Fee: Yes, $250 for a table of four
Contact: Marty Stephens, (301) 610-0030 ext 202

Guest Post: Calvary Women’s Services

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Today, Calvary Women’s Services provides transitional housing and significant support for 35 women a year: healthy meals, education and job readiness programs, mental health and addiction recovery services, life skills classes, and a sisterhood of support. Some women go on to Sister Circle, a permanent housing facility for women with a history of addiction; 15 work toward independent living at Pathways, the only transitional housing program in the District for homeless women with mental illness. Follow-up services ensure that graduates stay healthy and on track in their transition to independent living.

The following post comes from Calvary’s blog – check it out and learn about a great way to give back to the community through financial support. This post was written by Megan Gamble, a Development Associate at Calvary who focuses on communications and events

Changes in GED Testing Create Barriers

The GED (General Education Development) test is going through a round of changes that aim to modernize and advance the testing process, but will ultimately create barriers for those most in need of its help.

The GED tests were first created in 1942 to help returning World War II veterans transition back into civilian life; the test was later updated in 1978, 1988 and 2002 and has been taken by more than 18 million people looking to receive their high school credentials. Now, an update scheduled to begin January 2, 2014 will have far-reaching consequences for those who aspire to earn their GED.

As announced at the end of last year, all GED tests are transitioning to computer only, and anyone who has started the test will lose any uncompleted sections and have to take them over again. In the District of Columbia, the cost for the test will also go up an estimated price of $120, increased from $50.

There has been a great effort to frame these changes as forward thinking and helpful to those taking the test, but this glosses over the point that many adults without adequate computer skills, who need their GED as the next step in life, will be intimidated and discouraged from taking the test. In fact, within the Message Guide that was put out by GED Testing Services themselves, there is the acknowledgment and warning that:

“if perceive finishing the GED test as a huge challenge, they will not pursue it.”

Women who come to Calvary Women’s Services have lost their housing, may not have consistent access to healthcare and likely have not had the same access to technology that others have. We were proud to open a computer lab within our program expansion to address the later, but technology skills don’t come naturally to everyone, and a period of learning and adjustment is to be expected. Not to mention the fact that learning an entirely new process of doing something is often not a top priority for someone who is focusing on making progress with her housing, her health or her income.

When the women at Calvary set their personal goals and start to takes steps to achieve them, many of them aspire to earn their GED. Extra barriers between eager individuals and their chances for advancement will only discourage and hinder women’s opportunities to move forward and take control of their lives.

Thanks to Academy of Hope for providing resources on the GED testing changes.

Please join the conversation and share your stories of working with adult education and GED preparation, as well as your thoughts on the new changes to GED testing procedure. Will this have a positive / negative / neutral impact on the populations with whom you work?

 

Changing the Philanthropic Landscape

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Ever wonder exactly how the Catalogue got its start, how we’re related to the Harman Family Foundation, and what President Barbara Harman’s goal is for the Catalogue in the next five years? Last month, Harman sat down with the Association of Small Foundations’ CEO Henry Berman to talk about the Catalogue for Philanthropy — and the podcast was published on ASF’s website last week. Here are a few highlights of the interview, entitled “Creating a Piece of the Philanthropic Landscape”.

Barbara Harman started the Catalogue for Philanthropy back in 2003, after taking on a larger role at her family’s foundation. After spending more than 20 years teaching, researching, and writing as an English professor at Wellesley College, Harman felt the need to channel those talents in a new way — with a larger audience and a larger social impact. The foundation’s priorities revolved around the arts, and although the “big players” in the Washington region were easy to find (e.g. the Kennedy Center), Harman felt something was missing — as she calls it, the “landscape below the landscape”. It was difficult for the foundation to discover the cultural groups and arts-outreach organizations with a youth focus, serving under-served areas, or running programs in schools.

“For ordinary individuals wanting to be philanthropic, it was not so easy to find great community based nonprofits to whom they could give and a donation of any size could have an impact,” says Harman. And that was the seed for the Catalogue.

When it first began, the Catalogue for Philanthropy was a much different animal than it is today. Originally, the Catalogue was just catalogue — a print publication that focused on donors and lived under the umbrella of the Harman Family Foundation, with a few independent supporters. Harman soon learned that the nonprofits featured, while honored to be a part of the beautiful print publication, identified other needs that the Catalogue could meet. The initiative soon evolved into an independent organization, offering an ever-expanding array of workshops and marketing/communications resources to its network of nonprofits. One of the key benefits for the nonprofit community? The sense of community itself.

“The first group was excited to find themselves in the Catalogue and excited to find themselves in the company of others doing similar work to their own,” explained Harman — a welcome change of pace for the group of small, widespread, and typically isolated nonprofits and their staff.

Looking back now on her work over the past ten years, Harman says she “had no idea what a big deal it would turn out to be…I didn’t see myself as taking on a big leadership role at the time — I had an idea, the skills to implement it, and fell into it a little bit.” As the Catalogue and its reach began to grow, both Harman and her family foundation decided to make a commitment to the Catalogue and its growth. “We both decided that we’re up for this and want to continue to support this. We created something that we believe in and something with its own power and rate of speed with lots of community support, but the foundation still believes in it…When you’ve created something that you believe in, how do you step away from that? That’s not something I could ever do.”

Harman calls herself an “accidental leader”; Berman suggests that serendipitous might be a better descriptor. Either way, the Washington region is surely better off for the work that the Catalogue has done to increase the profile of small nonprofits in the area and highlight the importance of individual giving. And as for the future? Harman wants to fulfill the wishes of many Catalogue supporters who frequently tell her that there should be Catalogues across the country: “Within the next 3-5 years, I would like to see a Catalogue for Philanthropy in 3, 4, or 5 regions across the country.” Here’s to making that goal a reality.

Barefootin’

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You have to have faith to go barefooted — you don’t know what you might step on, what pain might come — but you keep on walking. And it makes you tough. Sometimes you skip and jump and run. Sometimes you get a thorn in your toe or trip over a limb, but there’s no turning back. Barefootin’ means getting mud between your toes and dancing on the water! Your spirit is in your feet, and your spirit can run free.

– American civil rights activist Unita Blackwell, born today in 1933. In 1976, Blackwell was the first African-American woman elected mayor in the state of Mississippi.

Around Town March 15-17

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Here are some fun ideas to brighten up your weekend:

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Educational Theatre Company
Educational Theatre Company’s Main Stage Residency Program in conjunction with long-time partner, McKinley Elementary School, presents the Pied Piper of Hamelin, toe tapping, musical journey. The play is an original musical production created and performed by children in grades 2-5 over the course of eight weeks.
When: Friday March 15, 2013 (7:00 PM)
Where: 1030 N. McKinley Road, Arlington, VA 22205
Fee: no

Grocery Deliveries to Low-Income Seniors in North Capitol/Shaw

We Are Family Senior Outreach Network
We Are Family will be delivering groceries to over 250 low-income seniors in the North Capitol and Shaw neighborhoods.
When: Sat March 16, 2013 (10:00 AM – 2:00 PM)
Where: Metropolitan Community Church, 474 Ridge St. NW, Washington, DC 20001
Fee: No
Volunteer Info: Volunteers will help assemble and deliver grocery bags to low-income seniors. Although a car is not needed, it is helpful.
Contact: Mark Andersen, (202) 487-8698

Dance Exchange

Dance Place
Under Cassie Meador’s artistic direction, Dance Exchange’s multimedia performance How To Lose a Mountain channels stories of collaborators and communities to reveal the distance between our resources and their sources. More than 500 miles in the making, from Washington, DC, to West Virginia, a trip to the mountains becomes an exploration of self and a shedding of presumptions. Funded in part by the NEA and the NPN.
When: Sun March 17, 2013 (7:00 PM)
Where: Dance Place, 3225 8th Street NE, Was, DC 20017
Fee: yes $22 General Admission; $17 Members, Seniors, Teachers and Artists; $10 College Students; $8 Children (17 and under)
Contact: Carolyn Kamrath, (202) 269-1608

The Cultural Data Project

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This week, I came across an interesting blog post on the Cultural Data Project. We first learned of the CDP when conducting our own network wide Impact Survey last fall, and several of our Culture Nonprofits mentioned the CDP as another data collection and tracking tool commonly used by arts organizations in DC. The CDP is a “unique system that enables arts and cultural organizations to enter financial, programmatic and operational data into a standardized online form. Organizations can then use the CDP to produce a variety of reports designed to help increase management capacity, identify strengths and challenges and inform decision-making. They can also generate reports to be included as part of the application processes to participating grantmakers.” The District of Columbia is one of thirteen states that currently takes part in the CDP.

Talis Gibas and Amanda Keil, writing for Createquity, discussed the background of the CDP, its impact to date on both sector-wide research and arts organizations, as well as potential future expansions. Their article highlights opportunities and challenges for CDP as it transitions in 2013 to an independent entity after operating under the Pew Charitable Trusts. To date, it seems as though the project has proved of greater use and benefit to researchers and advocates for the arts instead of arts organizations themselves:

“Cultural organizations themselves don’t always hear about work, or take full advantage of the CDP’s resources. In 2012, the CDP conducted a survey of over 1,800 arts organizations charged with filling out a Data Profile every year …68 percent of respondents had never read a report that includes CDP data. This implies that researchers, and the CDP itself, need to close the feedback loop between research and the constituents being studied. In addition, the survey revealed that more than 40% of participating organizations have never run an annual, trend, or comparison report. The same survey that found nearly half of organizations don’t use CDP reporting tools also found that 45% of participants understood their own finances better as a result of completing the Profile. Of those respondents that did use CDP reports, 40% said it resulted in better transparency, 45% said they had a better sense of their progress and goals, and 56% said they had a better sense of their organization over time. These relatively low percentages suggest that even organizations taking full advantage of CDP reports do not always find them of substantial benefit.”

This is not entirely surprising to the Catalogue, as we work with small (arts) nonprofits regularly who struggle with the capacity to accomplish many routine administrative duties, not including additional data tracking and reporting. As a project like the Cultural Data Project gains traction, and as the post suggests, becomes a more routine and common tool for arts grant-makers, perhaps more nonprofits will ‘buy in’ and find the process worthwhile.

As far as I can tell, the CDP primarily partners with larger foundation funders. Our sweet spot is individual and smaller family foundation donors, and it will be interesting to see if and how projects like the CDP will reach out to this donor community — at least with ways to access their data and research to inform individual philanthropy as well as foundation giving.

The article also mentions a similar tool that’s been developed for the community and economic development sector called Success Measures — “an outcome evaluation resource for community development organizations, intermediaries and funders.” The emergence of multiple similar tools for tracking trends and outcomes just goes to show the growing importance of impact measurement within the nonprofit and funder communities.

I applaud this trend and look forward to seeing how projects like CDP will help not only individual organizations better track their own data, trends, and outcomes but help provide a better picture of trends across the sector — and see where and how the needles are moving on key social issues. This is potentially more relevant for moving needles like poverty rates, educational achievement levels, and adult literacy, but also may also be key in securing support for the arts as sequestration and other government cuts start to hit.

Fears and Successes

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“My books have, in a way, made me a parent. Peter and his friends grow, have fun, problems, fears, and successes, and I’ve been with them through it all. I love these children, and it’s been one of the greatest pleasures of my life to raise them and see them off into the world.”

– children’s author Ezra Jack Keats, born today in 1906; The Snowy Day appeared on the Adventure Theatre stage in January 2012

Around Town: March 9-10

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Where are you heading this weekend, friends? Might we suggest …

We Are Family Senior Outreach Network (at Metropolitan Community Church, 474 Ridge Street NW)

On Saturday at 10:00 AM, volunteers will receive a brief orientation and then go out in pairs or groups to visit with seniors in their homes. You can sign up right here.

Volunteer Fairfax (at The Greene Turtle Fairfax, 3950 University Drive #209 Fairfax, VA)

Compete for prizes at VolunTrivia this Saturday at 1:00 PM!

Play solo, form a team, or join a team; sign up right this way.

Samaritan Ministry of Greater Washington (St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church 4700 Whitehaven Parkway NW)

The Spring Gala, coming up on Saturday evening, features both a live and silent auction and will honor the legacy of the late Rt. Rev. Jane Holmes Dixon. All details right here.

Dance Place (3225 8th Street NE)

On Saturday at 8:00 PM and Sunday at 7:00 PM, ClancyWorks Dance Company will combine physically demanding, powerful movement with the sensitive portrayal of cultural nuances and personal emotions. You can nab tickets this way.

Washington Bach Consort (at National Presbyterian Church, 4101 Nebraska Avenue NW)

Rich sonority, sublime harmony, and complex instrumentation characterize this Sunday’s “Honor and Remembrance” program (3:00 PM), which features choral and orchestral music by Schutz and Bach. Buy tickets right here.

In The News…

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This week’s news brief looks at a group of stories that hit the media this week about homelessness in the Greater Washington region. A special thanks to all Catalogue nonprofits that support those experiencing homelessness in the DC region, especially during the winter months.

Finding homes for the homeless in Fairfax County (Washington Post) “Although building the database is foremost about getting chronically homeless people into housing, the information also will help guide the county and nonprofit groups as they expand and improve their services, says Amanda Andere, the executive director of Facets. Part of the reason they must prioritize people is that the county lacks the resources to house everyone. The aim is to get at least 150 chronically homeless people into permanent housing within three years.”

D.C. Homeless Families Face Difficult Obstacles When Seeking Shelter (HuffPost: DC Impact) “The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, which provides legal representation for low- and no-income clients, compiled numerous complaints from clients and other relevant data to present major inefficiencies and inadequacies in the District’s current handling of homeless shelter accessibility. Focusing primarily on homeless families, the report identifies specific errors, including: altering the homeless of upcoming hypothermic conditions too late, failing to place qualifying families in shelters on nights where temperatures did not drop below freezing, wrongfully denying eligible families shelter placement and wrongfully threatening to expel families from shelters.”

D.C.’s main shelter crowded with large families (Washington Post) “A shortage of affordable housing for larger families with four or more children is a big factor behind crowded conditions at the District’s main family homeless shelter in Southeast Washington. The shelter has been filled to capacity this winter, with more than 900 people, including a record 600 children some nights. Rising poverty, unemployment and a lack of housing options among single parents who are heads of households are driving the city’s problem, experts say. The vast majority of parents living in D.C. General are single and female, according to the Department of Human Services.”