Pro Bono Junkie’s Blog
A blog for those interested in integrating the pro bono ethic into their careers — giving their time and talent to strengthen nonprofit organizations.
As part of the Pro Bono Action
Tank's campaign to support and grow pro bono service
at professional services firms, we conduct regular conference calls with
leading firms. The calls include some of
the largest advertising, consulting, accounting, IT, legal and architecture
firms in the world.
The most recent call was on program
evaluation. An architecture firm, Perkins and Will, shared the
practice of POEs or post occupancy evaluations.
Ten to 12 months after a building is complete, architects go back and
ask those living, playing and working in the space for feedback.
This is so much more meaningful than
just getting feedback when you hand over the keys. After 10 - 12 months, you know if there is
enough storage space. You have weathered
all the seasons. You are able to give
feedback beyond the initial romance of first seeing the new space.
After the call I wondered if other
professions should adopt POEs. How often
does a strategic plan laid out in PowerPoint dazzle, but 12 months later it is still sitting on
a shelf? How often is a database built,
but it's never adopted?
Some firms do return to clients to
see the legacy of their intervention, but it is too rare. It may be that we want the praise associated
with the final presentation, but we are too scared to see the true outcome of
our work.
I just moved to Park Slope
in Brooklyn from
I've tried reading a book
and it is OK, but all the motion makes me a little ill. Newspapers take up too much space on a
crowded train and also tend to make me nauseated.
That is seven and a half
hours per week - the better part of a full work day. How can I make it productive?
Looking around a given
subway car there are likely between 50 and 75 people. Are they also wasting the equivalent of a day
a week? That would be about the same as two months per year, per person. That is 100 months per year, per car of folks
or the same as eight years worth of productivity down the drain for one subway
car alone. On a ten car train you have two entire careers worth of time
represented.
As a Pro Bono Junkie, I
immediately wonder how this time could be harnessed for the public good. I often see graffiti scratched into the seats
using a key. I guess that is a way to
create pro bono public art. There are
occasional preachers on subway cars that provide services for the religious
types on the car. For the faithful, this might count as some kind of productive
social benefit activity. Neither does it for me.
How can I use my time on the
subway productively?
P.S.
Does anyone live in
We are in the midst of evaluating the articulation of our organizational values. While our values hopefully never change, as we mature we hope that we are increasingly self-aware and able to better articulate who we are at the core.
When we interview candidates for jobs at the Taproot Foundation, we always start by asking the candidate why they want to work on our team. It screens out a lot of candidates, but it also teaches us a lot about how we are perceived and what we communicate on our website (their primary source of information).
Last week marked the start of the
Olympics and my move to Brooklyn after 12 years in
Over the weekend I watched a few
hours of Olympic events every day and was similarly struck by the heterogeneous
American teams and the homogeneous teams from almost every other country. We
talk a lot about ethnic diversity in this country, but I increasingly worry that
we treat it largely as an issue of social justice and not as a global
competitive advantage. As a social justice issue the frame is largely about how
to overcome challenges in society (very real challenges), but I wonder if it
wouldn't be in our broader best interest to change the frame to focus on how to
leverage and expand our diversity to continue to dominate the global economy and
reestablish our credibility as a global political
leader.
How can we change this frame while
still honoring and continuing to address the challenges of racism in our
country?
This is the first in a series of posts under the banner of "Pro Bono Design." Future posts will range from specific pro bono design project profiles to developments in the growing pro bono design movement. Two brief disclosures are probably in order: first that I am the executive director of a nonprofit (Public Architecture) on whose board Aaron Hurst serves; second that the subject of this post is a membership organization that I have belonged to for over eight years and which in 2008 became a sponsor of Public Architecture's pro bono service program, "The 1%."
This past Friday, August
1, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued a draft of its
forthcoming "Pro Bono Guidelines." This is
the first substantive and official statement on the subject in the AIA's
150-year history. To date, the
AIA's position on pro bono has been a very general 2-sentence mention in the
organization's Code of Ethics &
Professional Conduct.
Architects and the AIA
as our primary professional association are apt to compare ourselves to other
established professions such as law and medicine. The reality, however, is that both the American Bar
Association (ABA) and American Medical Association (AMA) have long had explicit
expectations and provided resources for their members to undertake pro bono
service, while it has been simply an aspirational statement in architecture. In this respect, the ABA in particular
provides a compelling model for the AIA to now aspire to.
Although still in draft
form and awaiting adoption by the AIA Board of Directors this fall, the
guidelines are a major step forward for the AIA and the architecture profession
as a whole. It also a sign that
this culture of pro bono that we have been working to build since the launch of
Public Architecture's pro bono service program, The 1%, is taking hold.
Between now and August 20, the AIA is
soliciting comments on its Pro Bono Guidelines, a 15-page document,
which is broken up into nine major sections. The stated intent of the guidelines is to provide
"encouragement, guidance, and recommendations for the management of the
provision of pro bono services by members of the Institute, firms, and AIA
components who are presently, or contemplating becoming, engaged in providing
such services." No small task.
AIA members have been invited to comment
on the draft in a members-only section of the AIA website. My hope through
this and future posts addressing each major section of the draft document is to
draw on the expertise and interests of this pro bono discussion forum to help
refine this important landmark document.
Your comments will directly inform Public Architecture's response and
recommendations to the AIA, and help shape the pro bono agenda for an entire
profession.
Click here to download a PDF of the 15-page report.
Seth Godin's blog just
directed me to a great posting by Clay Shirky, "Gin,
Television, and Social Surplus".
I had the pleasure of seeing Clay speak at the Ideas Festival in Aspen this
summer and many agreed that he was the most dynamic and interesting speaker that
week.
In the post, Clay shares his
calculation that Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of human thought and
hypothesizes that much of this time would have otherwise been spent watching TV
(Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV per year). He describes this as a
social surplus. At the close of the piece, he asks how else we might deploy our
social or cognitive surplus doing something more productive than watching
TV.
Clay focuses on technology. That is
his gig and he is hopeful that much of this surplus will find productive outlets
online.
As a social entrepreneur, I see this
200 billion hour surplus and it gives me a great deal of optimism about our
ability to harness human capital to improve the human condition through
service. We need to make it easy for American professionals to spend an hour or
two a day using their talents to invest in society.
The average American watches four
hours of TV a day.
If we could cut that down to three hours per day and have that other hour dedicated to service, imagine the changes we would see in
society.
This page is an archive of entries from August 2008 listed from newest to oldest.
July 2008 is the previous archive.
September 2008 is the next archive.
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