Pikes Peak Community Foundation

Top ten bumper stickers we really don’t want for our city:

1. You’ve landed in the wrong place.
2. History? We don’t need no stinking history.
3. Ignoring General Palmer’s vision since 1871.
4. Bare dirt parks: Enjoy!
5. The buck doesn’t even slow down here.
6. Less than you’d expect.
7. It’s how we’re all disconnected.
8. We used to have a downtown.
9. We don’t care. We don’t have to.
10. Imagine a mediocre city.

Have we hit a “tipping point” as a city? Will these slogans describe our community in the future, or will we tweak one or two words in each one…changing the meaning in dramatically positive directions?

Time will tell.

However, as a practical optimist,  I realize there are two key elements that hamstring governments worldwide…1) whatever hits the fan will not be distributed evenly, and 2) it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you place the blame.

I guess I’d rather be out fixing problems than fixing blame. Anyone else?

Next week, after the City budget dust settles: a list of what PPCF is doing around our community to make our city a better place to live, and how you can help!

62,923 voted against 2C. 53,241 voted for Issue 300.

The message was clear. Shrink government and pay less taxes.

As a practical optimist, I figure this means that we have at least 62,923 volunteers–and donors!– to keep our parks in great shape, run after-school programs at community centers, volunteer as lifeguards at the pools, keep the Pioneer’s Museum and Rock Ledge Ranch open, plant and water the flowers and grass, pick up trash and scrub out graffiti, and more.

What good news.

I know the Friends of Cheyenne Canon, Friends of Garden of the Gods, Rock Ledge Ranch Living History Association, and all of the nonprofits that work closely with our city government to make Colorado Springs a good place to live, are already manning the phones, waiting for all those calls from 62,923 volunteers and donors.

What do you think will happen?

In the meantime, we can either wring our hands standing on the sidelines crying “Woe is me!” or we can roll up our sleeves, jump in, and make a difference.

I’ll finish my thoughts this morning with a short message from an ancient Tibetan proverb:

“Do not take lightly small good deeds,
Believing they can hardly help…
For drops of water,
One by one,
In time can fill a giant pond.”

I’ll be out dripping some drops today… hope you’ll join me.

just a quick post today, trying to get back into the mode of blogging…

In a conversation with one of my colleagues this morning, we talked about the lack of time just for thinking and planning…yes, just thinking and planning…imagining the future.

I was at the Rockies game with my son and some of his friends last night, arriving home at 2:30am after a chilling game with a numbing ninth inning. On the drive home, while the four college kids snored away, I started thinking about thinking… and my mind wandered to one of my dad’s favorite stories when we were kids.

“There’s a story about a man who came across a woodsman chopping wood for his family with a very dull, rusty old axe. After hours and hours of chopping, the woodsman had made almost no progress.
The man asked, “Why don’t you sharpen your axe?”
The woodsman replied, “I can’t stop now! I’m already way behind as it is!”

So i’m thinking that rusty thinking gets rusty results, eh?

And i’m thinking that i should be (to quote Bobby Sager)  “…practicing eyeball-to-eyeball philanthropy born of hands-on experience and on-the-ground understanding. Always looking for the most efficient and sustainable way to solve any issue.”

Well said. More soon.

Check it out:

http://ppcf.org/impact

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post!

Tough day today…so for a few minutes, I’m just sitting here thinking about the difference between productive and pointless work.

Just sitting here thinking that the work i do should encourage people to explore, discover, create, dream, seek, experiment, design…

Just sitting here thinking…and then I remember that my work should nurture me as well.

Just sitting here thinking, remembering a quote from Wm. Coperthwaite: “That which deprives another cannot be beautiful.”

And now, I’m just sitting.

Still trying to figure out this blog thing. 

Can’t you just see all the words from all the blogs and internet rants and twittering and facebooking and all the other electronic verbal diarrhea stacking up in some far corner of the galaxy? 

Why do I write this blog?

Why do I do the work i do?

How do I sustain my optimism in the face of a world that seems more and more to resonate with insanity than with genius?

And, each day, what’s best to do next?

I find one answer in the words of George Bernard Shaw….I find myself resonating with his eloquent words:

“This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.

Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which i have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

Well said, Mr. Shaw.

Now I just need to pay attention.

Last Monday night, we held the first of three “Starlight Dining at Venetucci Farm” dinner. (Important Note: i’m really sorry to announce that all three of this year’s dinners sold out quickly. We’ll try to add more next year!)

i can’t even begin to describe the evening…stunning menu from Ed Clark of Bon Appetit and Hilary of Pizzeria Rustica…yes, stunning menu! Nine courses…yes nine!…all created with produce and meat locally grown, mostly from the Farm itself.
My heart aches for this kind of food…chemical-free, locally grown, lovingly tended, beautifully prepared, and robustly eaten.

Yes, my heart (and stomach) aches for this kind of food.

Does yours?

Do you ever feel like Clare Boothe Luce was right?

If you’ve actually read this far, you’re either wondering “Who the heck was Clare Boothe Luce?” or you’ve mentally tracked her down and have connected her with the famous statement: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Over the past few months—twice just today!— I’ve heard this quote uttered by people around our community…people who are trying to do good things, folks who have, as their inspiration, the betterment of our community. Yet, from time to time, they get squashed by someone, somehow, for some reason. Perhaps this has happened to you, and your inner altruistic electrons are resonating right now…”Yes! that’s how I feel sometimes, too!”

When this happens to me, I try to remember that for every myopic, cynical, squelching, pessimistic, grumpy person in a community, there must also exist a visionary, trusting, active, optimistic, cheerful person as a counterbalance. Amazingly, sometimes this can be the same person…

Kind of like an eighth grader. My wife is a middle school teacher and sometimes I am fortunate enough to help her with science field trips, interacting with six, seventh, and eighth graders. (My dad used to say: “Eighth grade is about the nothingest you ever are.”) Field trips with middle schoolers are definitely “interesting” experiences, and they trigger my thoughts about how our overall community functions…

Our community is a bit like an eighth grader…we don’t really know what we want to be when we grow up, but we’re pretty darn sure we don’t want to be what we’ve been. Full of conflicting feelings and attitudes, full of charm and disaster on alternate days, eventually we all grow up. However, we need to remember that communities are like kids…I believe that all kids are gifted, but they open their gifts at different times.

I also believe in this community. Let’s work together to help our community “open their gifts” so that good deeds are celebrated, refuting Ms. Luce (ever so gently) once and for all.

I’m ticked off…

The lead story today in our weekly newspaper is about the corruption of the word “local.”

It seems that in America today someone can “define” words loudly, over and over–even if their definition is misleading, wrong, inaccurate, insane, or wildly exaggerated–and people will eventually believe them. Consider the corruption of these words: fresh, natural, organic, local. (I’ll leave the debate over the meaning of these words to others: conservative, liberal, red, blue!)

And, I’m realizing that most of us don’t really pay a lot of attention to where our dollars go when they leave our hands… that the choices we make, and the businesses we patronize with those dollars, really do make an impact.

I keep thinking about what author George Orwell said about the misuse of language:

“Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different… The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Yow.

So, instead of remaining ticked off, and at the risk of offending someone somewhere, let me try to provide a bit of context for the word “local”…

The Story of a Dollar.

To understand how a “local” economy works, it’s useful to follow three fictional pathways a dollar might take through our community. Consider these stories:

A big box dollar.

Joe walks into a MassiveMart and buys stuff. Before he even leaves the store, about 85% of his dollar has fled our community electronically to the headquarters of MassiveMart far away. It does not matter whether MassiveMart has hung huge banners over their food aisles announcing “Local!” or that perhaps MassiveMart hopes that Joe won’t recognize that that banner is a carefully crafted but manipulative marketing message…Joe’s dollar is gone anyway!

A charitable gift dollar.

In the business world of philanthropy, community foundations such as PPCF (often defined by local geography!) offer similar services (e.g. donor-advised funds) as the giant charitable gift funds (Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, etc.) that have sprung up nationwide. But what happens to those dollars??? Here’s what: John and Mary send a dollar to the Big Honking Charitable Gift Fund. Part of that dollar gets siphoned off to whoever it is who owns Big Honking (often, John and Mary won’t even know…!). Most of that dollar is stuck in a giant “holding tank” for dollars…far, far away…in Boston or New York or LA?
Until that dollar is released from the “holding tank,” it can’t do anything for our “local” community.
Not surprisingly, Big Honking is very proud of how huge the “holding tank” is…they’re make lots of money keeping those dollars idle.  In contrast, a dollar sent to a community foundation generally stays in the community for a long time, and gets used over and over again for positive results.

But how about a typical dollar?

Bob buys a cup of coffee at Pikes Perk. Rick, the owner, takes that dollar and uses it to pay Sarah her salary. Sarah needs to get a birthday present for a friend, so walks up Tejon Street to Terra Verde, where she uses that dollar to buy something cool and useful. Chris, the owner, takes that dollar and, needing a new pair of skis, walks up the street to Mountain Chalet, where she uses that dollar for their purchase. Dan, the owner, realizes it’s time he treated his staff to ice cream at Josh and John’s, so he spends that dollar on mint chocolate chip. John, the owner, takes his family to the Peak Theatre for a movie, and turns that dollar over to Kimball, the owner. Kimball eats lunch down at King Chef that day and spends that dollar on a great chili cheeseburger, turning the dollar over to Gary, the owner. Gary stops by Old Town Bike Shop that afternoon, needing a part for his bike, and turns the dollar over to John, the owner. John heads up Tejon St. to join me for lunch at Wooglins Deli, where we send that dollar along to Damon, one of the owners. Damon stops on his way home to buy a cup of coffee at Pikes Perk, and on and on.

Hmmmmm…sounds good, and local, to me.

The strength of our local economy depends on bringing dollars into our community and then keeping those dollars working hard every day…right here at home…creating a dramatic impact on the quality of life in our community.

Get to know your truly local business owners. And remember: they’re your dollars. Put ‘em to work for your family and friends here at home.