I aim to write once a month, sharing tips, tools, and insights at the intersection of adult learning and nonprofits. I apologize that I missed February. I’ll explain in a moment, but mostly I’ve been busy teaching and working on instructional design projects on such interesting topics: philanthropy, drug and alcohol recovery, fiscal sponsorship, and advocacy.
If I may, I would like to share what else is on my mind and lessons I’ve been reflecting on these past few weeks.
My mother passed away in January. I spent two weeks by her side, and she left us peacefully. We weren’t close (I’m okay), and yet my life had been lived until then with a next generation buffer between me and the inevitable. I was the lox in the everything bagel sandwich, between parents and children. Shifting into open-faced sandwich status brought a melancholy I wasn’t expecting.
I’ve been thinking a lot about place and how it shapes people. My mother was tremendously proud of her heritage as the great-granddaughter of the first settlers of South Dennis, a village on Cape Cod. She grew up, as I did, on the banks of Bass River. She had sand between her toes, she so often said.
This deep love of place is something I learned from her and appreciate about people in the nonprofit space. When you love a place, you seek to protect it, improve it, promote it—all of the things nonprofits do. So many people we meet in trainings or conferences give up so much to start or volunteer for organizations because they love a place so deeply. In many ways, nonprofits allow community members to act on their love of place as they volunteer or donate.
And a love of place can become one’s legacy. Like many Americans, my mother didn’t have a will, and she hadn’t thought in practical terms about her legacy. A recent study concluded that inviting conversations about a person’s legacy could increase the amount they pledge to good causes, and that was exactly my experience. We started by talking about movements and causes she cared about. We moved into organizations doing good work. We landed in a far more generous place than we would have been without talking about cares and concerns.
I know large nonprofits have planned giving departments. Small organizations can share websites like Freewill.com. Talking about dying can be awkward, and yet my mother wanted to discuss her legacy. These were some of the best conversations I ever had with her. I just wrote a newsletter article about our process for one of the organizations we decided to support to help convince others to (1) have a will, and (2) include nonprofits in it.
I spent two weeks in Copenhagen and Rome in early March. It was pouring rain as I stood at the top of Palatine Hill overlooking the Roman Forum—one of those tropical rains that scatters people to hide under bushes and overhangs. I stepped out enough to capture the moment (17 second video).
I’ve replayed the video at my desk a few times since because it reminds me of how truly awe-some our world is. It reminds me that the past is connected to the present to the future. It reminds me how grateful I am to be living the life I am in community with you.
Life and death and everything in between
