In this series, we’re highlighting Idealist staff members who’ve made their ideas happen. Today’s spotlight is on Claire Hansen, our New York-based graphic designer who knows a thing or two about sisterly collaboration, working long distance, and navigating a culture outside your own. 

Tessa and Claire in Guyana in 2007.

In 2007, Claire took a two-week trip to Guyana to visit her sister Tessa, who at the time was a Peace Corps Volunteer with the Red Cross in the capital city of Georgetown.

Tessa wanted to revamp an educational children’s coloring book about inappropriate touching titled “Your Body is Yours!” which was being used in the Red Cross’s “Be Safe! Guyana” program. The content was basically good, but the images looked outdated and didn’t reflect Guyanese people or landscapes. For kids to get the most out of the book, Tessa reasoned that the design and illustrations needed to be redone.

“The original coloring books were actual books,” Claire further explains. “We wanted to redesign them to be easily photocopied so each kid could have their own. And since a lot of the child abuse issues the country was struggling with were family-related, we wanted kids to be able to take the books home, so their parents and siblings might also see.”

Claire set to work researching the fashions, pastimes, and terrain of Guyana and re-illustrating and designing the book, also tweaking some of the language along the way.

“It was an interesting road to walk—between being representative and stereotypical,” says Claire. “As an illustrator, I wanted readers to feel familiar with the images but not appear to be reducing their culture to its symbols, or seem racist.”

When she finished all 24 pages, she made about 40 copies of the book back home in New York and sent them to Guyana to be distributed. The Guyana Red Cross then solicited donations and had more than a thousand copies of the book produced and distributed through their branches in coastal towns and more remote, indigenous areas. From beginning to end, the process took about six months.

Advice

Claire’s redesigned cover.

1. Know your expectations.
“I don’t know if it bothers me that I wasn’t around to see the books in use, or that I’ll never really know the impact they’re having—though of course I hope it’s good,” says Claire. “Mostly, I was just happy to attempt the project. But if the outcome of your work is a bigger concern to you, you need to consider how you’ll be able to track the results: is the org you’re working with organized enough to really give your project legs, for example? Will you be able to track the results of your efforts over time?”

2. Seek professional help.
“If I did it over again,” she says, “I’d try to get advice from a publisher, or someone else who’d done this same thing. If you don’t have all the skills or knowledge you need for your project, find someone who does, rather than trying to learn everything on your own. If you do that, you’ll only wind up with ten percent of what you need to know.”

3. See what technology can do for you.
“Now there are all sorts of great online print-on-demand options for books, and ways to track how many you publish and distribute,” says Claire. “If I were doing it again, I’d look into using tools like that.”

4. Keep calm and carry on.
“I got so caught up in being excited to do it that I didn’t spend much time dwelling on the negatives,” says Claire. “If you know it’s going to be a long, slow road, just reconcile yourself to that fact and try not to get upset about it.”

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Have you been involved with a project like Claire and Tessa’s? Have insights for others? Share your experience with our readers below. Or feel free to reach out to Claire through Idealist if you’d like to ask her advice.

Well okay, they’re not really secrets—we’re pretty transparent here. But our new video series, Idealist 101, will teach you some quick and easy ways to make the most of your experience on our site.

The first installment focuses on making your organization’s page the best it can be. Whether you’re currently hiring staff, looking for volunteers or interns, or want to connect with the best people and orgs, your organization’s page is how you represent yourself to the Idealist community. So make it shine! Let Matt and Kim from our Community Engagement Team show you how.

Aside from our blogs and info centers, all the org pages, personal profiles, and opportunity listings are generated by our community. So not only does it benefit you to make your contributions as fabulous as possible, it benefits the whole site and everyone who uses it. Why wait another minute?!

• If you administer an organization’s page, watch the video and click here to update your page and make it pop.
• If you use the site as an individual, share the video with your favorite orgs to help them make the most of Idealist.
• Check out more tips and stay tuned for the next 101 video!

How have you made your organization’s page the best it can be? Share your secrets with our community.

Memorial Day reminds us to reflect on the meaning of the military in our lives and the experience of the military community. Read how one idealist is striving to lighten their burden, one person at a time, and how you can help.

Meet Ellen

Ellen Severino

“I’ve always been drawn to complementary healing treatments,” says Ellen Severino, a Brooklyn resident who volunteers at the borough’s Fort Hamilton army base. “I was trained in reflexology many years ago and more recently was introduced to Reiki. I received several treatments and found them to be very powerful—like they shifted, or realigned, something inside me. I felt more balanced and at ease.”

Reiki is a hundred-year-old Japanese spiritual healing practice that uses light touch to bring balance and relaxation to the body and mind. Wanting to learn more about it after her own treatments, Ellen enrolled in Reiki classes at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York a few years ago.

“My dad was a World War II veteran who dealt with PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder], although there was no such diagnosis back then. He had a full life, but PTSD did limit him. I have often wondered how different his life would have been if he had received appropriate treatment. PTSD remains an enormous issue in today’s military. Reiki is by no means a cure-all, but I’ve seen it really improve the quality of people’s lives. It can be an effective tool in creating a sense of well-being.”

The intention

Ellen gives a soldier a Reiki treatment.

Ellen started volunteering to provide Reiki treatments at the base in August of last year, and has committed about eight hours a week since. “This is a community under a tremendous amount of stress, and their resources are limited—there are year-long backlogs of vets waiting for services, and in the meantime, they’ve more than picked up the tab,” she says.

Anyone in the military community is welcome to participate in what Ellen’s been calling “The Brooklyn Reiki Project,” including enlistees, their families, civilians who work on the base, and employees of the nearby VA hospital.

“I offer Reiki treatment in a very conventional, straightforward manner,” she says. “It is an elegant and simple practice.”

So far, she’s received enthusiastic feedback. “I have 6’2” Marines coming in skeptical,” she says. “I give them a brief explanation of what Reiki is and say, ‘Give it a try.’ They’re usually surprised by how much better they feel. I’ve done at least 400 20-minute sessions, and out of those, only one person said she didn’t feel any different afterward. The soldiers I see report feeling better, sleeping better, and being able to interact with their families with more patience and ease.”

Ellen would like to spend more time offering Reiki at the base, but can’t afford to be a full-time volunteer. She would also like to see Reiki treatments made more available to the military community at large, but isn’t sure how to take the next steps.

Obstacles

So far, Ellen has shared her idea with several people and knows at least four other Reiki practitioners who would volunteer their time. She was also recently invited by a colonel at Fort Hamilton to present about Reiki on a “resiliency training” panel for over 250 army recruiters. Despite this support, Ellen is still facing some challenges:

1. Organizing.

“I lack business savvy,” she says. “I’ve looked into creating a nonprofit to expand this work, but need someone with expertise to explain the pros and cons. Perhaps there is a better way to move forward.”

2. Funding.

Ellen feels strongly that military personnel shouldn’t have to pay out of pocket for these services, but she needs ideas for alternative funding. “The good news is the overhead is very low: space is provided by the military base, Reiki doesn’t require special supplies, I don’t need to develop a product. But it still needs some money to keep it going. People tell me to look into applying for grants, but I don’t know how to single out the most likely funders, or much about the application process or writing grant proposals.”

3. Expanding.

“This is a national concern,” says Ellen. “Many military people are unsatisfied with the medical choices available to them—they want alternatives to the conventional treatments. Creating programs to educate them and offer treatments like Reiki would empower them to take charge of their healing.”

Ellen knows many practitioners successfully implementing Reiki programs in different settings, but hasn’t seen anyone near her doing it on a big scale. “There’s a program in Fort Bliss designed by the military that employs Reiki,” she says, “so they have publicly recognized its benefits. They’re also using it at Walter Reade and other veterans’ hospitals. But it should be out there more.”

How you can help

• Are you a Reiki or other complimentary healing practitioner who has created a nonprofit and could offer advice?

• Do you know about grants available for alternative medicine projects?

• Are you a Reiki provider who would like to volunteer with Ellen, or start your own volunteer project in another area?

• Are you a member of the military community who could introduce Ellen to useful contacts in your network?

• Can you give Ellen advice about the pros and cons of starting a nonprofit versus a business to advance her work?

If you have ideas, please leave them in the comments below or send Ellen a message through Idealist. We’ll keep you up to date as The Brooklyn Reiki Project progresses.

Ero just looks different without a beard. He’s still giving our users the same great tech support.

You may have noticed that, just like our tech support representative Ero, Idealist has recently undergone a makeover—the first step in a grand spiffy-up of our whole site. We’re doing some housecleaning, planning some new initiatives, developing some new tools… all in the name of making your experience with us as easy, valuable, and pleasant as possible.

But the big takeaway for now? Don’t worry: not much is actually different… yet!

All we’ve done so far is tweaked the way our pages look to pave the way for lots of functionality improvements in the future. We’ve hardly removed anything or changed the way any features work. You might see some buttons that used to be blue and are now gray, or a few links that live in slightly different places, but that’s about it.

We’re rolling the changes out incrementally, which will give us regular opportunities to learn from your feedback as we plan and tinker. Hearing from you is the number-one way we have of identifying effective improvements, so if you run into any trouble, please comment below or drop Ero a line at Ero [at] Idealist.org.

Ultimately, our goals are to:

• Make Idealist easier to use. We’ll put the things you most want to see and do front and center.

• Make Idealist more responsive. We’ll deliver mobile improvements that will make accessing the site from all your devices a smoother experience.

• Make Idealist faster. We’ll improve performance so every page will load in a snap.

And as always, we’ll keep you posted on new developments as they happen. Thanks for being along for the makeover ride!

It’s something we hear all the time: You want to do good, but even your best intentions go awry. So what can you do about it? We asked Francesca Gino, a professor of decision-making and negotiation at Harvard Business School and author of the new book Sidetracked, for some advice.

Francesca Gino. Photo credit
Rosalind Hobley.

The three forces that throw us off track

Sidetracked addresses a problem most all of us can relate to: How is it that we spend so much time making plans and charting goals, then find ourselves far afield from them later, wondering where we went astray?

“Both in my own experience and in talking with others, one consistent surprise is that we think big things are going to move us and get in the way, but the reality is that very small and seemingly irrelevant forces have a huge effect on our decisions,” Gino says.

In many cases, the forces guiding us aren’t obvious. So the first step in getting set straight again? Awareness.

Forces within ourselves. Most of us harbor an overly positive view of ourselves, and Gino’s research concludes that our intentions are often as valuable to us as our actions. “For example,” she says, “I tell you I’m coming with you on Saturday to pick up trash in the park. If it rains and I call you to postpone, I’ll still feel as good about myself as if I’d actually done it, regardless of whether or not I ever do reschedule.”

Forces stemming from relationships. We are of course influenced by the people we know, but also by people we’ve never met. In a UCLA study mentioned in Sidetracked, it was found that hotels who advertise to their guests the environmentally-friendly option of reusing their towels during their stay get many more participants when they include a statistic about the large percentage of previous guests that have done so. Whether we are conscious of it or not, most of us feel drawn to join a crowd, rather than blaze new trails of our own.

Forces coming from outside. In a study involving car insurance, policy buyers were required to report the mileage on their cars’ odometers to determine their premiums: the less miles driven, the lower the cost. Participants were significantly more truthful when the form they filled out had them sign their name and an affirmation of honesty first and then give the mileage number—rather than the reverse. In this case, a very subtle, simple visual change was the sidetracking culprit.

Do you need help staying on track?

Sidetracked

“We are all vulnerable to these forces, so let’s recognize them for what they are and take steps to minimize their impact,” says Gino. Here are her top three tips:

1. Check your perspective. “It’s good to feel confident, but also important to realize when we’re giving ourselves too much credit,” Gino says. “To avoid getting sidetracked, we need to be honest with ourselves about what we do, and give ourselves credit for following through, not just for having good intentions.” Her advice is to stop sometimes and ask: Am I being egocentric? Am I discounting the advice or experience of others because I have tunnel vision with my own?
2. Take your emotional temperature. “It sounds silly, but I think it works,” Gino says. “It’s very easy to take stress or other emotions you feel from one area of life into another, unrelated time and place.” So if you feel your emotional temperature rising in rush hour traffic, avoid getting sidetracked when you get to work by asking yourself: Are the emotions I’m feeling at the moment going to cloud my judgement? Should I cool off for a minute and then start my day?
3. See the big picture. “Often, we’re very narrowly focused on the task at hand, and we forget to step back and zoom out,” Gino says. She advises periodically stopping to revisit the bigger goals we set out to accomplish and make sure they stay on our minds, even though the details of carrying them out can require the bulk of our attention.

Do you find yourself getting sidetracked? Why do you think it happens? How do you avoid it?

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Visit Francesca Gino’s website for more about her research on decision-making, judgement, negotiations, and other areas of behavior. Buy Sidetracked on Amazon or Barnes & Noble for more research and tips on how to stay your course.

Meet three sprightly Southern Colorado septuagenarians who won’t stop.

After a long teaching career, Rhoda Cordry still has a spring in her step

Rhoda Cordry, now 78, retired from a satisfying career as a public elementary school teacher in the mid-1980s with no particular plans to take on another big job. But after a friend asked her to attend a community meeting about restoring the town’s unique cold mineral springs she found herself intrigued by a new endeavor.

Cheyenne Spring, one of Manitou, CO’s prized cold mineral springs. Photo courtesy of the Mineral Springs Foundation.

“Manitou is right in the mountains; we can’t grow physically as a town,” explains Rhoda. “And there’s no industry, so we have to do something to keep the economy up as a tourist attraction. The springs are the thing, but they’re hard on the pipes and fountains people put them through—they clog, corrode, eat through them. They need maintenance.”

In 1987, Rhoda and a handful of other concerned locals started the Mineral Springs Foundation to restore, protect, publicize, and document Manitou’s springs. So far, they’ve succeeded in working with private landowners and the city to restore eight of the area’s approximately two dozen springs, and are working toward more. Rhoda left the foundation in 1995 due to health problems, but stays involved.

“I spent all my working years teaching elementary school, so that was child- and parent-focused,” she says. “But this was a whole new world. I learned a whole new set of skills, met wonderful people, and benefited greatly from it. I loved teaching, but I loved this, too. People asked what I wanted to do in retirement, and I said ‘I don’t know!’ So I’m glad this happened.”

Eagle Scout badge, black tie, and choir robe: some of Arthur Benson’s many uniforms 

“Being an Eagle Scout is probably worth $50,000 over a lifetime in terms of preference for schools and jobs,” says Arthur Benson, a 71-year-old retired plastics industry manager who now spends between 40 and 50 hours a month volunteering for five organizations in Colorado Springs. One of his favorite roles is as a leader and committee chairman of a local Boy Scout troop.

Arthur Benson presents the Theodore Roosevelt Medal of the Navy League of the United States to a junior ROTC cadet. Photo courtesy of Arthur Benson.

“When I was in my 30s, I mentioned being a Scout leader in a job interview and the first question was, ‘Were you an Eagle Scout?’ and I was able to say yes. And I’ve read many college admissions deans say that all things being equal, they’ll choose the Scout,” he says. “It’s because scouting drills integrity into boys—teaches them about trustworthiness and loyalty, and how to live those traits out. It’s the right age to teach them, too, because then at 16 or 17, two kinds of fumes draw them away from scouting: gas fumes and perfume!”

Arthur is also a retired Navy officer with 23 years of service. He’s now active with the Navy League, an international, 50,000-member civilian organization that educates the public and Congress about the value and needs of the country’s sea services—”a mission especially important in a landlocked state,” says Arthur.

As treasurer of the local board and Navy Ball committee, Arthur helps to raise about $20,000 a year to support the League at the annual black-tie-or-uniform Navy Birthday Ball they sponsor for hundreds of active military and the public in Colorado Springs.

In addition, Arthur sings in two choirs and volunteers as treasurer for the small foundation that owns the real estate assets of his church, as well as for a charter school building corporation. “Those commitments don’t take a lot of time now, but I have a feeling they’ll snowball!” he says.

Bob Baker takes on many roles as the roll winds down

“Serving at the soup kitchen is really neat; it’s humbling,” says Bob Baker, 70, of the monthly volunteering he does with his wife in Colorado Springs. “Serving at that level is really valuable.”

Bob Baker of Colorado Springs. Photo courtesy of Bob Baker.

But Bob has served at many levels for a long time, including in his professional life as CEO of Goodwill Industries of Southern Colorado for 17 years. Prior to that, when he was president of a local bank, he also dedicated time to the United Way, first as a campaign solicitor and eventually as chairman of the board of their local chapter.

“The United Way was a very vibrant organization at that time,” Bob says. “They had a ‘give once’ philosophy—you’d give once, to them, and they’d distribute your donation to worthy organizations in the community. It was very effective.”

Since retirement, among a host of other volunteer pursuits, Bob has joined the board of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration, a Catholic organization that provides health care and other services to those in need.

“The connections I’ve made—as a nonprofit CEO, board member, and volunteer—they’ve been very important,” he says. “I’ve maintained a lot of them. But life is that roll of toilet paper, right? And now, it’s winding down, so I want to make good use of the time I have left. There’s great fulfillment in all types of community involvement. We’ve been fortunate, and giving back is important to us.”

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In Colorado and want to volunteer? Search hundreds of opportunities on Idealist. Or check out Metro Volunteers, a Denver-based organization that promotes volunteerism in the community.

Learn more about Colorado month at Idealist!

More than five months after Hurricane Sandy tore into the coasts of New York and New Jersey, many people are still feeling the effects. One neighborhood that suffered great losses and is still digging out is Rockaway, Queens, where the nonprofit organization Respond and Rebuild is working to repair damaged homes and get residents back inside.

The idea

Shanna Snider and Terri Bennett, two founders of the disaster response nonprofit Respond and Rebuild, met when they were volunteering with relief efforts in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Neither woman had any prior field experience with disaster relief, but they both took an instant liking to it.

Terri Bennett (all photos courtesy of Respond and Rebuild)

“It’s a weird kind of work to enjoy,” says Terri. “The world would be a better place if it wasn’t needed.”

After months spent helping in the Caribbean, Shanna, Terri, and three other good friends they’d made on the island scattered around the map. They watched from different vantage points in 2012 as Hurricane Sandy drew closer and closer, and then struck—hard.

The five friends, soon to be joined by another they’d meet in New York, dropped what they were doing and, in 24 hours, made tracks to the Rockaway Peninsula—11 miles of beach at the southern edge of Queens whose neighborhoods were devastated by the storm. Nearly 100 homes were completely destroyed and many more seriously damaged, over ten thousand residents were displaced, and the power was out for weeks.

“When we came out here, we just wanted to help,” says Shanna. “We didn’t intend for it to become an organization—we all had other plans.” When the hurricane struck, Shanna was weeks away from leaving the U.S. to serve with the Peace Corps in Jamaica, and Terri was halfway through a Ph.D. program in international development and humanitarian relief. “But this took off,” Shanna says. “So why would I leave? This is obviously where I’m supposed to be.”

Shanna Snider

Respond and Rebuild is now the leading volunteer group working side-by-side with homeowners and community leaders in Rockaway to safely clean out and repair damaged homes so their owners can return to them. The water removal, mucking, and (their specialty) mold remediation they perform is funded by donations and comes at no cost to the residents.

“Organizationally, we wanted to do something different than we’d seen done before. We wanted to be community-led and centered—not to drop in and tell the community, ‘This is what you have’ and ‘This is what you need,’ Shanna says. “The community here has really shaped what we do; they’ve led us to be able to meet their needs very directly.”

Obstacles

Respond and Rebuild’s success has not come without challenges. Here are a few Shanna and Terri have come across:

Obstacle: Living conditions
Solution: For the first five weeks of their operation, the initial members of Respond and Rebuild all lived together in a one-bedroom apartment near the beach. At times, it was hard for the crew to keep the organization running without going crazy.

But when they reached out to the community for help, they quickly secured two larger apartments to live in rent-free. “Everyone is vulnerable to disaster. So it’s a cause that touches people in a different way: it’s very personal,” Shanna says. “When we asked for assistance, people really opened their hearts and homes.”

Obstacle: Narrowing focus and asserting expertise
Solution: Given that there are a lot of needs in disaster response, Shanna and Terri knew they needed to give a focus to what they were trying to do.

“One thing we identified early on was our signature ‘cause’,” says Terri. “Mold. We became ‘the mold people.’ We researched and outfitted volunteers, waged a public health campaign, reached out to experts and other city orgs who had experience… We were the most organized group you could speak to about it, and that gained us trust.”

Obstacle: The ebb and flow of a volunteer-led group
Solution: “Especially in the first few months after a disaster, people come and go,” says Shanna. “And that can be a very emotional experience. But the group that remains, the core that’s left behind, is the one that works best together. It can be hard to hang on and not burn out; to recognize when to step back and breathe and when to give 150 percent. The ones that are left are the ones who figured out the balance. And as things formalize and become more structured, it gets easier.”

Advice

Volunteers pose in their ‘Mold Buster’ suits

Since the end of October 2012, Respond and Rebuild’s hundreds of volunteers have logged an average of 1,800 hours a week to bring more than 100 homes back to livability. And the work continues.

Currently, Shanna and Terri are developing a blueprint of their organizational model, which they plan to share with others. In the meantime, here’s their advice for people who want to coordinate their own disaster response effort:

• Just do it. “Trust yourself and the people you work with,” says Shanna.
• Share skills.“We all had different skill sets and experiences that complemented each other: logistics, construction, management, communications, fundraising. And we also worked to partner right away with other organizations, which was a great way to take what we all had and make it most effective.”
• Ask for and accept help. “Never be so arrogant as to think you don’t need help,” says Shanna. “I make a lot of calls and ask for a lot of favors. No one has all the answers by themselves, but together, you can get close.”
• Be open to advice. “If someone else has already learned the lesson, don’t waste time relearning it yourself,” says Shanna. “Take advice openly, then decide if it’s right for your mission.”
• Maintain balance. “Initially, adrenaline pushes you forward in disaster relief,” says Terri. “But as the immediate relief period comes to a close, the pace changes. Now we’d like to focus on employing local people, moving forward with partnerships, and developing a case management system for homeowners.”

“In five years, I can see us doing this work around the world,” Terri says. “But having the patience to take on all these things can be difficult. We’ll have to balance focusing and growing.”

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Inspired to help with disaster relief in a community you’re close to? Read more about Respond and Rebuild’s successful model on their website, or contact them through Idealist. In the NYC area? They’re always looking for new volunteers and donations.

Respond and Rebuild is also always looking to make their nonprofit better. If you have experience with disaster relief, they would love your advice about what surprise obstacles they might expect to encounter down the road. Or if you have experience with volunteer management, they’d love to know your ideas on best practices to retain volunteers, and on the best volunteer and donor tracking solutions.

An ongoing experiment: Can our community’s collective brainpower help an idea become reality?

Kirsten Doherty can’t say enough good things about Lowell, Massachusetts. As the birthplace of the industrial revolution in the U.S, home to numerous public institutions and a diverse immigrant population, the city has a rising creative economy with new projects and initiatives springing up all the time. Many are calling it a renaissance.

“We also have very smart people with brilliant ideas to make Lowell a better place to live,” she says. “What we are missing, I believe, is a physical space—like a resource center or incubator—for people who want to be creative and do good.”

Kirsten knows a thing or two about the situation, having spent 15 years working in fundraising and lived in the city of 100,000 for six years. She’s also currently interning with Lowell’s Department of Planning and Development.

“But there are some gaps in my training. I want to see this happen, but need help.”

The intention

Kirsten says she often notices artists and others active in the community having meetings at Starbucks because they don’t have a place to do business. She sees a need: these people should have a space to work.

“A lot of the people starting things here have great ideas,” she says, “but they’re often on these tiny staffs where they’re experts in their program, but need back-office support and help with the other stuff—graphic design, accounting, grantwriting—so they can focus on their missions. I want this place to provide one-stop shopping for those services.”

Obstacles

Kirsten says she’s very well connected in Lowell, but admittedly, she doesn’t know everything. So far she’s planned meetings with Third Sector New England and Space With a Soul, two nonprofit spaces in nearby Boston, to learn more about how they got started and get a sense of how they operate.

She also recently submitted an application to the UMass Lowell Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Merrimack Valley Sandbox project, which gives annual seed money awards to local aspiring entrepreneurs. But the more ideas she can collect and connections she can make, the better.

Kirsten is most concerned with getting advice to help shape the following three aspects of her idea:

Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell, MA. (Photo via Kirsten Doherty.)

1. Spatial and organizational layout. “I’d like to get different ideas, especially about how organizational membership could work—like, would you need to have a 501(c)(3) to join, or maybe just a fiscal sponsor? How would we handle groups with controversial missions?—and the physical layout of the space. What are some different models for those things?”

2. Funding. “I’m particularly interested in ideas for funding and governing/leadership models,” Kirsten says. “I sort of picture a place with reasonable rental fees that the participating nonprofits would pay for—and maybe they could get some help from government grants or private philanthropy?”

3. Staffing and maintenance. “I want to see this happen, and am up for helping to launch it—maybe be on the advisory board?” says Kirsten. “But ultimately, I don’t think I would be the best ED or manager, so would need options for that. And for staffing, I’m not sure if full-time people or consultants would be the way to go… Or what!”

How you can help

• Do you know any nonprofit spaces like the one Kirsten envisions?

• Do you have advice to share about organizational structure, membership, fundraising, governing, or staffing options for a center like this?

• If you’re part of an organization that belongs to this type of nonprofit space, or would like to, share notes on your experience or needs with Kirsten.

• Do you live in the Lowell or Boston area and want to help turn this intention from ideal to real, or know anyone else who might?

• Can you think of another way to address the community issues Kirsten’s identified, besides opening this type of nonprofit space?

If you have any bright ideas for Kirsten, leave them in the comments below, or send her a message through Idealist. If the project progresses, we’ll keep you posted!

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Are you a practical dreamer with an idea that’s just starting to take shape? If you’d like to be part of this series, or know someone who would be a good fit, email celeste@idealist.org.

Idealist Staff

Idealist is a great place to work, largely because such great people work here. We’re currently hiring for three web development positions in our Portland, Oregon office, and we’re looking for—you guessed it—great candidates.

If you’re a top-tier web developer or operations engineer who wants to join a stellar team, work in a dynamic environment, and play a key role in keeping Idealist.org fast, available, and growing, then check out the jobs below.

• Senior Operations Engineer
• Web Developer
• Senior Front-end Developer 

Can we talk instead of bumping heads? (Photo credit: gin_able, Creative Commons/Flickr)

A few weeks ago, we released our 2012 nonprofit survey reports, culling the responses of over 1,000 U.S.-based organizations and over 3,000 active job seekers. Together, the reports help paint a picture of today’s nonprofit sector: who’s hiring and who’s looking, trends in funding and compensation practices, and what’s posing the biggest challenges to both organizations and job hunters right now, along with a lot else.

Most surveys yield some surprising results, and these were no exception. But a few statistics that received the most attention from readers were in the area of communication between organizations and job seekers regarding application submission.

Communication breakdown?

Only 14% of job seekers reported receiving either a personalized or automated acknowledgement after sending an application, but 63% of hiring managers said they send them. Seekers also said that hearing back from and general communication with employers is their number one frustration during the search process. In the same arena, 40% of hiring managers said they dislike candidates contacting them to check on their application status.

Job seekers take time applying for opportunities and want to know as much as possible about where they stand, but many understaffed organizations already strain to keep up with the array of tasks that need attention daily, in addition to hiring. In fact, 84% of staff filling human resources roles at organizations reported wearing at least one other hat at work, the majority of them also responsible for program management or support.

Communication solution

So what are applicants and hiring managers to do? Here’s one tip we love that could help bridge the gap: the autoresponder!

Here at Idealist, we use Google for our email needs, and their handy autoresponder, Canned Responses, can be found in the Labs tab in Settings. In their words, this feature allows you to “compose your reply once and save the message text with the ‘Canned Responses’ button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.” You can also, “set a filter to grab one of your saved responses, create an automated reply, and hit the Send button for you.”

So whether hiring managers want to cut down the time it takes to manually send out “Thanks for your resume! We’ll get back to you soon” emails to every applicant, or set up an email address just for applications that will automatically shoot an acknowledgement message back to the sender, autoresponders are here to save everyone time and effort as well as keep potential candidates up-to-date on their status. Additionally, Constant Contact, GetResponse, and lots of other companies produce low-cost or free versions. Autoresponders have helped us streamline our HR practices and keep our applicants in the loop.

How else can anxious job seekers and busy hiring managers find more common ground? Readers, share your thoughts!