A Conversation with… Dr. Michael Eric Dyson

As part of the new lecture series, Conversations with …, the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative of Third Sector New England hosted a presentation by Dr. Michael Eric Dyson for the region’s nonprofit community. The professor, CNN commentator, author and pundit spoke of the central role diversity and inclusion play in building cohesive and effective organizations – and strong communities.

He shared his insights on issues such as the politics of inclusion; the privilege of invisibility; institutional perpetuation of racism; challenging other “isms”; stereotypes and forms of bigotry; and rethinking the paradigm of race, bias, and class prejudice vs. concentrated poverty.

 
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by tsne with a No license (All rights reserved) license.

Capacity Building Fund Grantees Announced

The TSNE Capacity Building Fund has awarded Planning Grants to 16 networks for the 2008-2009 grant cycle. Projects will help the participating organizations and the network as a whole more effectively achieve a shared goal: collaborating to face a community challenge — while together learning new program management and administrative strategies.

Congratulations to the new grantees!

Search Engine Optimization

SEO has been on our minds here at TSNE, and we’re excited to kick-off a more concerted SEO campaign this afternoon.

We’ve read a lot about SEO, and we’ve hosted a series of articles about it. It was certainly interesting to post an article and then realize – d’oh! we’re not doing x ourselves! – as we sat down to integrate the lesson learned.

But what we haven’t done yet is take a more systematic approach to our SEO, and build in techniques from the ground up. We’re so often putting up content under an immediate deadline that SEO is an afterthought.

Today we have a meeting with an outside consultant so we can finally start pulling all these pieces and techniques together in a comprehensive way. With the redesign in the works, this is the perfect opportunity to really practice what we preach. We’ll soon have some new content that we’ll be able to work with, and remap our brains to automatically think of SEO when posting.

I’m quite excited. We look forward to sharing what we learn.

Can an old dog (well, middle-aged dog) learn new web tricks?

It’s been interesting, as a relative techno-newbie, to work on the Third Sector New England Vlog Project with people like Steve Garfield, Deb Finn and Bethany Ramirez, folks who are in the thick of the Web and Web 2.0 (maybe 3.0!) revolution. It can be intimidating, as a person who cut her teeth in the print, pre-computer design and production days, to help to conceptualize a project that requires me to think through pre-production, “talent” prep, final production and distribution for a completely different mode information sharing.

Registration now open for Capacity Building Training Series

Beginning this fall, we will offer nine (9) workshops designed to help you make a clearer connection between daily management functions and organizational mission — and develop systems that support this alignment.

The workshops will be held monthly from September to November 2008 and January to June 2009 at TSNE’s NonProfit Center. Workshop topics include fund development, financial literacy, marketing and communications, and governance.

You can enroll in one workshop or in multiple workshops. Each will provide you with field-tested tools and concepts to take back to the office to use and share.

The cost for each three-and-one-half-hour session is only $79 (the full-day Effective Supervision workshop is $99), and a discount of $40 will be offered for organizations that enroll in five or more different workshops at the time of registration. TSNE is also offering a discount of $10 off the workshop price for each additional person attending the same workshop from the same organization.

Register now! Space is limited, so register early to ensure availability.

TSNE Capacity Building Fund Grants

The Capacity Building Fund (CBF), a program of Third Sector New England, is announcing another round of grants for 2008. It is a two-part process, beginning with Letters of Intent to Plan that are due on Wednesday, September 10, 2008, by noon. We are holding information sessions later this month to provide an overview of the grants and the application process.

Full details on the guidelines and application process can be found on our website. Please review all information about the Capacity Building Fund, particularly the Letter of Intent to Plan guidelines. We encourage you to read the application in its entirety.

Information Sessions in July

The CBF will be hosting information sessions, and while not mandatory, interested parties should plan to attend one of the following meetings:

Idealist.org June Promotion

Need to post a job? Idealist, an interactive website where people and organizations can locate opportunities and supporters, is inviting all nonprofit organizations to post their job openings for free throughout the month of June.

Welcome

Welcome to the Third Sector New England blog. Periodically Denise Moorehead, Communications Director for Third Sector New England, and her colleagues will bring you practical “how-to” capacity building strategies to help nonprofit executives, board members, managers, staff, and volunteers serve constituents more effectively.