White Courtesy Telephone

The First-Ever Virtual Giving Circle

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On November 15th, the Greater New Orleans Foundation, in collaboration with four community partners,* will launch the first-ever, 100% online giving circle.  Dubbed “The Neutral Ground,” members of this giving circle will explore issues relating to race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—and their intersections.

The twenty-five giving circle members will contribute $200 each, and these contributions will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Greater New Orleans Foundation to create a pooled fund of $10,000 from which giving circle members will award grants.

Members will meet, engage in intergroup dialogue, and discuss potential grantees on The Neutral Ground website. (To see a mockup of the site, click here.)  Topics explored will likely include immigration, gay/straight issues, the special multicultural character of New Orleans, black/brown issues, and race in the age of Barack Obama.

Non-New Orleanians and New Orleanians in the diaspora are welcome to participate!  If you’re interested in joining the giving circle, please e-mail [email protected].  The time commitment is November 15, 2010, through Cinco de Mayo, 2011.  This is a virtual giving circle, so members will meet online rather than in person.  Members of the public are welcome to participate in the online discussions.

For those of you wondering about the name of the initiative, in New Orleans the “neutral ground” is the broad strip of grass dividing the opposing lanes of any street or avenue.  The Neutral Ground giving circle is based on an idea originally conceived by Diana Campoamor, President of Hispanics in Philanthropy.

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* The Human Rights Campaign (New Orleans chapter), Puentes, VAYLA, and the Urban League.  Full disclosure: The author of this post is the President & CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

Join the Interplanetary WCT Team

Have you always admired the jet-setting lifestyle of civil society bloggers, but didn’t know how to start?  Have you always wanted to blog, but didn’t want the hassle of starting and maintaining your own site?  We’re looking for a few good writers interested in opining about nonprofits, philanthropy, and civil society.  Send an e-mail to courtesy_telephone (at) yahoo.com and we’ll start you on a glamorous blogging career.  We’ll help you develop post ideas and give you feedback that will set your writing skills back many years.  We can scrupulously preserve your anonymity or tell the whole world where you live—your choice.  We welcome guest bloggers.  Drop us a line.  This is no joke! 

Heartache at O’Hare

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You’re already tired from a brutal red-eye and you’re waiting for a connecting flight to nowhere.  You begin to hear angels.  Mr. Tarkovski, Mr. Alfred Tarkovski, please pick up the white courtesy telephone.  This one’s a million miles away.  Speaks like the Goddess Valium reclining on a gossamer bed.  Mr. Tarkovski.  She almost hums the name, all black keys, simple figure floating like a mote above the tarmac.  She’s a jazz singer from another planet.  She once fell to earth and was wounded in love.  So she retreated to a far, far place beyond any reach to call out the names at this airport, knowing that sooner or later he’d pass through and she’d have one last chance to beckon him to the white courtesy telephone …

Vote for THRONGZ and Support Your Local Blogger

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A good friend (Charles Forsythe) and I have been working on a project called Throngz to help social activists more readily connect with one another online.  Although we had nonprofit advocates in mind when we created it, Throngz can be used by any community of people.

Throngz is a web-based tool that calls people together for discussion from different parts of the Internet in real time.  Once they’re brought together into a single “cyber-salon,” they can discuss topics of mutual interest or simply shoot the cyber-breeze.  You can read more about Throngz by clicking here.

We submitted Throngz to the NetSquared Innovation Award competition, and we very much need your support.

Part of the competition involves a get-out-the-vote effort, so we’re asking White Courtesy Telephone readers and supporters to visit the Netsquared site and vote for Throngz.

Here’s how to do it:

1.  Please take a minute to visit the NetSquared site and register.  You’ll need to enter a valid e-mail address (this is where they’ll send your password).  You can go to the registration page by clicking here.

2.  Go to the e-mail account you gave when you registered and retrieve the password the NetSquared folks e-mailed to you.

3.  Next, go the Netsquared login page.  Enter your username and password to login to the NetSquared site.

4.  Finally (you’re almost finished!), go to your ballot (click here) and enter your choices.

Please, PLEASE for the love of God let one of those choices be THRONGZ: The Online Discussion Space That Comes And Gets You.

Please note that you’ll need to vote for a minimum of five projects for any of your votes to count.  Fellow blogger Sean Stannard-Stockton gives us his favorite picks here.  You can read about all the other projects by clicking here.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my blogger colleague Holden also submitted his GiveWell project to the competition.  Twenty projects will be chosen from around the world, so we both have a shot at the prize.*

This sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.  If I’ve made a hash of explaining this, you can review the voting instructions here.  If you get stuck, please send me an e-mail.

VOTING CLOSES ON MONDAY, APRIL 16, SO PLEASE TAKE A MINUTE TO CAST YOUR VOTE!

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After you’ve voted, please let your cyber-buddies know about Throngz.  You and they will be invited to a no-holds-barred, online party here at WCT.  The Countess Apraxina will distribute signed photographs; Chickpea will model the season’s latest bonnets; and Miss Dixie Moline will entertain us with her throaty rendition of Embraceable You .

As you might have already guessed, the motivation for Throngz came from my own experiences on the Internet.  The Story of Joe Sector has in many ways been my story.  My nonprofit colleagues and I have often just missed one another in cyberspace.  Like Joe, I’ve frequently squandered my time on the web in search of that perfect online discussion in real-time.

I realize there’s much more to building social change movements than simply facilitating discussion on the Internet.  As my colleague Sally mentioned in an earlier post, we bring to the Web all the deficits, all the bad habits of our lives offline.  How can we possibly make a good omelette out of bad eggs?

These themes have been picked up here and here.

Nevertheless I’m hopeful that, over time, all our Web exchanges— penetrating political analyses offered free of charge to all comers, the lessons from our contemporary mad Socrates, the younger voices gleefully shouting down the old—will dissuade us of the view that “humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

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* Winners will be flown to the NetSquared conference at the end of May where they’ll get a chance to pitch their projects to funders.  The top three projects will also get the lion’s share of a $100K kitty.  If my partner Charles and I are lucky enough to win, we’ll use our prize money to hire a Java programmer.

WCT Deemed “Not Unfunny”

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A shout out to the blogger at Gonzojournalismus im Netz who wrote, “WCT succeeds with Fear and Loathing in Philanthropy.  With very beautiful design and not unfunny.”*

This makes all of us contributors at WCT not unhappy.  Thanks GIN.  Here’s Google’s translation of your site’s raison d’être:

Media?  We shank enterprises with new values, editorships and ethics.  To do not forget political guidelines, reader connection and other conformalisms.  We do not swim also.  The journalism is dead.  It lives the journalism!

Shankalicious!

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* “WCT reüssiert über Fear and Loathing in Philanthropy. Mit sehr schöner Zeichnung und nicht unwitzig.”

WCT Posts Now Appearing at SSIR Online

Spores from White Courtesy Telephone have started rooting at the Stanford Social Innovation Review Opinion Blog.  Wrote one satisfied reader, “I applaud [editor] Perla Ni’s appalling lapse in editorial judgment.”