Author Archive: Paige
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Best Memories of Boot Camp
Check out these photos from past Boot Camps – find yourself, your friends and your most inspirational moments.
Share Your Boot Camp Ideas
We’re getting ready for Boot Camp 2012 (and will share the date with you very soon!!) already, and we’re excited to involve you in the process.
We loved the results of our crowdsourcing game from last year so much, we’re offering two games this year – two (more) ways for you to shape what happens at Boot Camp.
The first game asks you to vote on one “the most important issues facing your local community” and will help shape topics of sessions at Boot Camp. The second one asks “what would you like to experience, participate in or learn at Boot Camp?” and will directly impact the specific sessions, presenters and themes explored at Boot Camp.
Update: Voting is now closed. Thank you.
Ready to play? Jump right in with the two games below, powered by All Our Ideas:
You can vote as many times as you like, and the tool will put new issues side by side. If you can’t decide between two issues, click “I can’t decide.” If you would like to add your own issue, please keep it very brief, and it can’t be longer than 140 characters! Thanks for playing.
Storytelling Skills: Interactive Call on Oct 5
You asked us for more time with the leaders and innovators who spoke at Boot Camp. We listened.
Join a one-hour interactive conference call on Storytelling Skills on Wednesday, October 5, at 12 pm PST.
Campfire Conversations are conference calls where you can help shape the agenda, hear more from your favorite presenters, explore topics you may have missed at Boot Camp, and more. Joe Lambert, founder and director of the Center for Digital Storytelling, has led standing-room-only sessions at the last two Boot Camps. Spend more time with Joe and deepen your storytelling skills.
Joe will discuss why discovering your storytelling voice is a cornerstone of your professional and personal development. Discussing the lessons of three decades of community-based storywork, he will demonstrate the power of story through prompts, exchanges, and powerful digital stories.
As a boot camper, the call is free! Everyone else pays a nominal fee that helps us defray the cost of the conference call recording and helps us keep our educational content affordable.
Before the conference call, you will receive access to a shared document where you can pose questions you want Joe to address on the call and join in group notetaking and resource sharing during the call.
Campfire Conversations are made possible by American Express. Registration is sponsored by Eventbrite.
New Resources: “Top 10 Fundraising Tips” & “Someone’s Done That…”
As promised, we’ll be adding new resources to our library weekly. This week we have two new Boot Camp 2011 sessions for you to discover, enjoy and learn from.
photograph by David Lim
Top Ten Fundraising Tips, led by Darian Rodriguez Heyman and Nicci Noble, was one of the most popular sessions at Boot Camp (and the slides are already a hit at slideshare.net!) We have video, podcast and slides of the full session available.
Someone’s Done That Already: The Best Practices of Sharing Best Practices, was presented by our own Arthur Coddington, WiserEarth’s Peggy Duvette and Leo Romero of OurBlocks. A thorough report of the Boot Camp discussion is available, and here are the observations of our Conference Publishers reporter, as well:
Community knowledge is most useful when it’s shared widely and constantly evolving, Arthur Coddington, director of online programs at the Craigslist Foundation, told a breakout session on the best practice of using best practices.
Best practices “are the result of our collective wisdom about the best way to go about things,” he said, but “they’re not the final answer. They’re always evolving,” and that process depends on organizations’ willingness to share their experience.
“If you’re keeping it as a trade secret, it’s probably not going to be a best practice, because best practices thrive through community input and sharing,” he said. “It can’t be the best unless it has the experience of the whole community. So if you’re hoarding, not participating, your systems are probably not going to be best practices, because other peoples’ solutions haven’t been added to yours.”
Peggy Duvette, CEO of Wise Earth, said there has been some controversy about how organizations share solutions, who decides what constitutes a best practice, and whether a success story can serve as a wider solution if it is only applicable in one location.
Leo Romero, Regional Manager with The John Stewart Company, said some community practitioners believe the discussion about best practices just encourages over-bureaucratization, and it might be more useful to learn from organizations’ worst practices. Session participants said funding arrangements sometimes make it hard for organizations to acknowledge projects that fall short of their objectives.
The Resource library on Craigslist Foundation’s website has been made possible by a generous grant from American Express Foundation. Bringing all our reports, podcasts, video and slides under one virtual “roof” allows you to discover related resources and discover new leadership topics you’d like to learn about by subject, presenter or title. Resources from 2007-2010 will be fully added by the end of the year.
New resources: Aimee Allison & Code for America
It’s a big week – we’re launching the new resources section of our website and we’re kicking it off by sharing two Boot Camp 2011 session resources with you.
“The New Normal” Boot Camp 2011 Keynote by Aimee Allison is now online. View video of Aimee’s presentation, download or stream the podcast and view her slides.
Read highlights of the Cross-Sector Collaboration session presented by Code for America.
Craigslist Foundation Resources
The resources section is designed to help you quickly find new and classic community building information in one place. Find podcasts, video, presentations and reports from Boot Camps past on subjects ranging from social media to fundraising to best practice sharing, and more.
Browse by subject, presenter or year. From one resource, find recommended other resources in similar subjects, as well.
In the coming weeks we’ll be adding lots of resources – two a week from Boot Camp 2011, plus the numerous workshops we have already available in our podcast library, now easier to explore, download, view and share.
Click resources on the top menu to check it out. While your at it, subscribe to our podcasts to automatically get new sessions in your iTunes library.
“The New Normal” with Aimee Allison, a Craigslist Foundation Campfire Conversation
You asked us for more time with the leaders and innovators who spoke at Boot Camp. We listened.
Campfire Conversations are conference calls where you can help shape the agenda, hear more from your favorite presenters, explore topics you may have missed at Boot Camp, and more.
Aimee Allison, former host of KPFA’s morning show and founder of Oakland Seen, was our Boot Camp keynote presenter on June 2. If you attended, you know how inspiring Aimee can be and how transformational her thinking is.
Now we are offering a chance for you to spend more time with Aimee, exploring how we can reject and change the common narrative that our cities are in decline, hope is lost and leadership is absent. Join a one-hour conference call where you’ll get to hear more from Aimee and talk with her about your own perspective on “The New Normal.”
2011 boot campers participate free! Everyone else pays a nominal fee that helps us defray the cost of the conference call recording and helps us keep our educational content affordable. Follow us on facebook or twitter for codes for free passes. Register now.
Before the conference call, you will receive a call-in number and instructions, as well as access to a shared document where you can pose question you want Aimee to address and see who else is participating in the call.
These conference calls are made possible by American Express. Registration is sponsored by Eventbrite.
Change Begins With Community Storytelling, Allison Says
Communities must tell their own stories and citizens must rediscover their optimism if cities are to recover and heal from the “bang-ups and hang-ups” of the last four years, said keynote speaker Aimee Allison, former host and producer of the KPFA morning show.
The notion of The New Normal is “shorthand for a bleak American future,” Allison told the opening plenary of the Craigslist Foundation’s 8th Annual Boot Camp June 2. Citing a recent Pew research study, she noted that more than half of American workers have dealt with unemployment, pay cuts, or reduced hours, or been forced to work part-time. Collapsing share and housing prices have destroyed one-fifth of the wealth in the average household, and fewer than half of American adults expect their children’s standard of living to be better than their own.
But community leadership is rising up to create a new narrative, and to tell neighborhood stories that are often much more positive than the standard media story about cities like Oakland, where Allison lives. She contrasted the Fox News version of her city as a hotbed of racial violence with the positive change and creativity going on at the grassroots.
“We need to think new thoughts, to create a new American dream where we help take care of our human needs and our children, and at the same time address in an effective way the world’s biggest problems,” like economic inequalities, climate change, war, and militarism.
“We know the old story about Oakland, but I have a new story,” she said. “Oakland is one of the greatest cities in our nation. It is my personal mission to continue to change hearts and minds about people who live in the largest city in the East Bay,” and show how cultural, food security, and local economy projects in Oakland point to new strategies for other cities.
Craigslist Foundation is grateful to The Conference Publishers for this Boot Camp report. The Conference Publishers is a world leader in capturing and repackaging conference content. The firm has worked with local writers in more than 200 communities across North America and beyond, helping organizations get better results from the conferences they host and the knowledge participants share onsite.
Community Links Help San Francisco Build While Other Cities Cut Back
While other communities in the Bay Area are cutting jobs and closing libraries, San Francisco’s $6.83-billion budget calls for the city to renovate some libraries and open new ones, Mayor Edward Lee told the opening session of the Craigslist Foundation’s 8th Annual Boot Camp June 2.
“The safest place a kid can be today is in a library,“ he said. The San Francisco administration protected libraries and other city infrastructure by working with the entire community, looking for ways to sustain the services that people and neighborhoods need.
“It’s interesting to find out that there are governments around our Bay Area that still don’t talk to their communities or labor organizations, that preach what they want to do and hope it happens,” he said. “I’ve found it pretty easy to engage our communities, bring them into how we do our budget, and make sure everything is transparent.”
As a result, “we’re kind of on a roll, because we’ve opened up our doors and made sure we’re listening to people.”
Lee said the city’s ability to balance the budget and protect services was “ bound directly with non-profits talking with us about how their capacity over a five-year financial planning program could be built.” Those organizations “can help us deliver a better health care system, provide nutrients to seniors, make sure we have shelters for our homeless and supportive services around those shelters, make sure we have all kinds of effective programs that are community-based.”
By the same token, he acknowledged that non-profits “are extremely challenged coming out of these very hard economic times.” Governments can play a crucial role by supporting community partners and helping them build capacity.
Craigslist Foundation is grateful to The Conference Publishers for this Boot Camp report. The Conference Publishers is a world leader in capturing and repackaging conference content. The firm has worked with local writers in more than 200 communities across North America and beyond, helping organizations get better results from the conferences they host and the knowledge participants share onsite.
Polish your pitch at Boot Camp and earn a chance at $1,000 and prizes
Mastering your “elevator pitch” is the first step to building collaborations, motivating volunteers and raising funds. Successfully and succinctly capturing attention with your story of community transformation is a skill worth honing.
We’re hosting a “pitchathon” workshop at Boot Camp. If you’d like to be one of just five finalists who’ll compete live during the workshop before our American Idol-style judge’s panel, all you have to do is email pitch@craigslistfoundation.org a 150-word or shorter written pitch that includes:
- What your cause, neighborhood, vision or dream is all about
- How $1,000 could make a difference
- Your name, organization and email address
- Your web address, if applicable
Submit your application by May 18. Five finalists will be chosen by Boot Camp staff and judges and notified before Boot Camp. All finalists must be registered for Boot Camp to attend and compete. Two winners will be chosen — First prize is $1,000 and second prize is a FlipCam and both winners will receive copies of the new book Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals.
Get Coached!
One of the best – and one of my favorite – parts of Boot Camp has just been announced:
CTI® will once again offer free half-hour coaching sessions to all boot campers.
I’ve been working with a CTI-trained coach for several years now, and I’ve been through their coaching fundamentals course, so I can personally attest to the numerous benefits of experiencing coaching. Use this opportunity to:
- overcome personal and professional road blocks (my coaching work led me directly to my current job at Craigslist Foundation!)
- build and manage collaborative relationships and teams
- strengthen your business or organization
- get unstuck from cycles of behavior
- unlock the potential within you to achieve your community-building dreams
Beyond your coaching session, experience how you co-active coaching skills can help you as a community leader by participating in the breakout session “The Transformative Power of the Co-Active Approach” from 2:45-3:45 pm.
This really is a special chance for all boot campers, and I hope you can join us on June 2 to harness the power of coaching for yourself.
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- Best Memories of Boot Camp
- Share Your Boot Camp Ideas
- Engaging for Impact: A Report from Independent Sector
- Get Pro about Pro Bono in a Campfire Conversation with Taproot Foundation
- Storytelling Skills: Interactive Call on Oct 5
- Playborhood’s Huntopoly game is a smart way to bring neighbors together!
- New Resources: “Top 10 Fundraising Tips” & “Someone’s Done That…”