Introductions.

Hello everyone, my name is Emily.

I have started in this blog with the intention of fulfilling a requirement to blog for my PPPM course on nonprofits at the UO, and I am hoping that it is something that I am able to update regularly with tidbits from my studies, and on my general musings as a postbaccalaureate student. Posts for PPPM280: The Nonprofit Sector will arrive weekly on Tuesdays, while other posts will be more sporadic.

My background in the nonprofit sector, and the reason I am drawn to working with nonprofits is mixed. On a personal note, I have relied on the charity of others for support my entire life. Without the opportunities of free-lunch programs, and of grants for students from income-poor families, I would never have been able to think of attending university level courses. I want to give back to the community around me, the world, because I know what it is like to receive the help you need, and what it is like to not have it. This is my personal connection to nonprofits. I am grateful for everything that I have been able to do in my life, and I want to help people achieve more than they statistically ought to, in any way I can.

I am a postbaccalaureate student at the UO in large part because of an experience I had during my study abroad in Oslo, Norway. Prior to my abroad period, I had completed a degree in Medieval Studies and a minor in Fine Art, but I was still feeling unfulfilled. I had nothing more compelling or defined than a desire to give back, and a general interest in all types of learning, but a disregard for the aloofness that comes with academia. I was lost as to what my career WOULD be, despite all the things I knew I WANTED it to be. I wanted to help people, I wanted to use my leadership and analytical skills, and I wanted to do tangible work that would spread and empower others.

Unable to work in Norway due to the language barrier, I started looking for ways to get involved locally. I ended up as the President of the International Students' Union at my university, working to advocate for international students' rights to housing, English translations of policy and curricula, and organizing social events to bridge the friendship gap for all those in a new world. I also learned what sorts of problems an organization can run into when even one person mismanages records, and got to work with leaders of the Norwegian student body to try and make our organization more "Norwegian" in order to integrate with their systems.

During the time that I was on the Executive Board for the ISU, we received an email from an organization under the umbrella Norske Folkehjelp (Norwegian Peoples' Assoc.) requesting volunteer teachers of English, and I jumped to the call with a friend, and we suddenly became teachers for a group of immigrants and refugees to Norway who had already demonstrated Norwegian proficiency. It was challenging work, and we weekly had to make up our own curriculum for the class, resources were scarce, and the larger problems of teaching a mixed group of adult immigrants, from different countries and different backgrounds came to light. Things that native speakers of English take for granted can be beyond difficult to explain, and there is a general lack of focus on how adult learners with emergent needs can be taught. Some women were illiterate when they arrived in Norway. Others were university-educated. Some worked together and could practice, and some lived far away and couldn't come regularly. Regardless, the rewards of teaching outweighed the difficulties, and the challenges gave me a source of solvable problems to tackle that had weight in the real world, something that lacks in academia. Academia is the backbone, but the "real world" is the flesh of a society, and I enjoy getting my hands dirty streamlining exchange of information between the two. We got flowers and thank yous from our students, and it was palpable how much more confident many of them got with their English skills. This was the greatest reward. For our last class, we had brownies, a typical "American dessert," and some of our students shared plans for continued study. The realization that I have a skill set that directly aids other people in being able to achieve things they thought they could not was new for me, and I decided firmly to continue my education.

My current focus is linguistics, second language acquisition and teaching, and nonprofit administration, and I have the long-term goal of working to develop programs that are modable cross-linguistically for language teachers who need to work with adults of emergent need. Though I enjoy working with students and will do it in the future, I feel like there is a need I can address developing teacher-training tools and classroom aids. Language is primary to having the ability to join a social group and build a network of support, and as the world becomes more globalized, the need for learning languages will not decrease. Whether English is the current lingua franca or not, there will never be a point where everyone on earth speaks the exact same way, at least not in this century. I hope to work to get people the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty, out of obscurity, and into a place where they can do anything that they'd like to do. A profound reality is that all choices are not real. Whether a person is free to go to college or not is not simply determinate of their legal permission to go, but of their actual financial and intellectual ability to do so.

Giving people training and tools opens up some of the barriers keeping them from moving upwards, and this is one aspect that I will focus on when looking at readings: Is choice real? I'm hoping to learn a bit this term about how to give people REAL choices and of the history of philanthropic philosophy. So far in the course, we have been learning about people and organizations who are changing or who ave changed the game for their time and place. I am interested in the new face of philanthropy, and in development for the 21st century, integrating technology with assistance and learning. A huge motivator for me is the scale on which the nonprofit sector has the capacity to affect lives. With US nonprofits existing as the 7th largest economy on EARTH, good work is done everywhere. Being part of the large and powerful nonprofit sector means making my positive mark on the world.

Considering again my question of choice and of , is it a real choice for the gov't to pull back tax breaks on donations to non-profits? Is it reasonable to expect people to donate when they are doing so out of the pure goodness of their heart any more than it is reasonable to expect non-profit workers to take lower wage jobs and work for less, again, out of the goodness of their hearts? When we are looking at the notion of institutional efficiancy, I feel like it is almost the nonprofits that should be making more. The level of accountability is higher, and consequently, wouldn't it be fair to pay theses people a market wage? It's topsy turvy almost that people who work for profit make more than those who work to help others. There's some amount of injustice in making people who care pay for that compassion. And the realty is that there is good work not being done because at a certain point, working at most non-profit salary levels isn't enough, and can't be enough to support a reasonable standard of living, especially for people with student debt and families. Another choice that's not really real sometimes--working for nonprofits.

So with that lofty prelude, I'm pleased to meet you all, and I welcome any criticisms, remarks, questions, or comments about me and my work.

Let the games begin.