Another reason to appreciate Fridays

Don’t worry – there is coffee available on Friday morning class (thanks D-SIP alum!)  Luckily, the Friday educational component offers plenty to keep you awake and interested!

Plenty of interns enter D-SIP unfamiliar with the development profession and field.  Friday morning class offers an opportunity to explore the history of philanthropy, the psychology of giving, and the impact donors have within the university and Ann Arbor community.  Class time also allows interns the opportunity to discuss their projects – any questions about the workplace, research challenges, and accomplishments.

The best part?  The opportunity to hear from a number of university and community leaders about their philanthropic experiences.  D-SIP connects interns to major donors, dedicated Michigan volunteers, and nonprofit leaders.  These speakers help put the development experience in perspective, and offer candid advice about entering any profession.  We had the opportunity to ask questions and make connections with individuals who have had an incredible impact on the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor community.

It’s safe to say that Fridays with D-SIP offer some of the best experiences you’ll have as an intern – and as a bonus, you can even take the class for credit.  If you have questions, feel free to email me at kbalzer@umich.edu – I’d love to hear from you, and I hope you’ll consider applying!

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Why should I apply?

You might be thinking: fundraising?  I don’t really want to spend the summer cold-calling alumni asking for cash…and I really wanted to find an internship that helps me learn more about marketing/research/management instead.

I would venture to guess that most D-SIP interns had similar thoughts when they first discovered the program.  I was drawn to the possibility of staying in Ann Arbor for the summer (you really can’t beat it), but wanted to make sure I would have the opportunity to develop actual skills and gain valuable experience in the non-profit sector, where paid opportunities are few and far between.  I was graduating, after all, and wasn’t sure what the future held for me after August.  So please, believe me when I say: apply to D-SIP.  Not only did I develop some serious analytical skills, I did it while working in arguably the most fun environment ever (the Neutral Zone), alongside an interesting, committed staff who helped me more fully understand what goes into running a successful organization.

While interns spent their weeks working on a variety of projects, Friday classes gave us time to: debrief, ask questions we may have been too shy to ask our supervisors, meet high-profile community leaders, discuss (and often challenge) assigned readings, and learning more about the other D-SIPpers.  Each of us came from a unique perspective – we had different majors, different backgrounds, different plans for post-grad – but we all left the program with new friends, interesting stories, and a shared love for the Friday morning coffee.

I can’t say enough good things about my D-SIP experience and the Neutral Zone (seriously, you’d have to stop me), and I’m happy to say that I’m still in Ann Arbor, working in the development department of a local non-profit.  So even if you don’t think fundraising is for you – consider applying.  You might be surprised by what you learn!

Go blue!

Kate

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Brown bag with the VP!

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a brown bag lunch session with the VP of Development at the institution I work for. I have been spending some time thinking about all those fun questions, you know, the “what am I doing with my life?” kind and having a chance to meet with her was just a super fun perk from my super fun job.

The session was intended for new employees as of a year ago, so I shared lunch with 12 women, all under 25. When our host arrived, her first remark had to do with the overwhelming amount of women working in the field which gave way to a discussion about women in the workforce and what about development attracts or retains more women than men. She mentioned that when she started working for a very prestigious, east coast higher education institution in the 70s, the situation was reversed and it was something that she found extremely boggling. She had (and continues to have) strong feelings about how unjust the work force was for women and she felt it was her responsibility to surpass expectations and work to obtain a leadership role in a fundraising organization like the one she now has.

So of course all 13 women were simultaneously curious and interested in asking, “how did you do it?” The following is her advice.

Start somewhere where the goals and the mission of the institution is something you believe in. The position you first take is less important than being part of an organization you genuienly believe in and can see yourself invested in for a long time.

Ask yourself (repeatedly) what you want to gain, learn, or achieve with the experience and check in with yourself to see how you are doing. It doesn’t have to be a 6 month timeline- the questions you ask could be the ones you will need eight or more years to answer, but it is important to work with a goal in mind. And this she emphasized time and time again. Know what skills you are trying to gain, remain aware of where you are trying to go and have a check list where you can keep track of your progress. If you can visualize it and if you can evaluate yourself, you will remain perpetually aware of the skills you have which helps your confidence, and of the skills you have yet to gain which keeps you motivated.

Find someone in the work place who you find inspiring; someone you want to be like and learn from them. Try to connect with them, observe them, converse with them and analyze what about them you like and want to immitate and why. There will always be someone at any organization you work for that is really good at what they do and they will most likely love what they do. If you have the aspirations to be really great at something, you need someone to teach you the craft and to guide you on your next steps.

Find someone you don’t want to be like and learn from them as well. Observe, converse, take note. There will always be someone difficult to work with or someone you will find hard to understand and it is just as important to learn from him or her as it is to learn from the people you look up to.

That is it, that is how she did it (I mean, I am sure it isn’t it, but this is definitely at the core of what she believes determined her success). It is nothing enlightening per say, it is stuff we hear all the time, but I really liked hearing that it actually works. Especially for the current d-sipers, who I am sure hear it time and time again, you are in an incredibly priveleged position to be interning at Michigan and it is vital that you make the most of this opportunity because like me, you never know where it is going to lead.

As for me, the emphasis on being methodical in your actions to get to where you want to go and of doing some self analyzing is something that really works. It might seem obvious and sensible, but I do think it is really easy to stop thinking about the “little” goals one has to stay focused on in order to reach the “big” goals, the “dreams”. I liked being reminded of its importance and just wanted to share.

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No Such Thing as Goodbye

They are the center of the many goodbye brunches, lunches, dinners, and drinks I have been having over the past week as I prepare to say goodbye to Ann Arbor (for a while, anyway). They make up the majority of our days as we interact with everyone from coworkers to loved ones to people we are meeting for the first time. They are even the basis for an HBO franchise that may or may not have recently extended one movie past its welcome.

Romantic or platonic, professional or personal, real or imagined – relationships are the basis of our existence as humans. We as individuals can certainly be defined by our own characteristics, but our unique personalities are also brought to light by our interactions with others. For example, in the arts, an audience member can learn a heck of a lot about a group of musicians just by watching them interact on stage; in music, a musician’s personality can’t help but bleed through his or her performance.

Over the past year, I have come to understand about a particular kind of relationship – that between an institution and its donors. Before working in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, I had never really understood what a professional relationship was like. Sure, I had been in professional situations before, but they mostly related to music – rehearsals, lessons, coachings, and performances. And they didn’t really feel professional in the shirt and tie sense. When working with other artists, sharing something as personal as your interpretation of, say, a piece of music, the line between friend and colleague can easily become a bit hazy.

Last summer, I found myself easily adapting to work in development – I was writing, I was interacting with different personalities, and I was working to support the arts. I began to understand what it meant to have professional relationships with my colleagues at the School. They were friends, mentors, and supervisors all at the same time, and I came to understand the limits of those roles. All was well, except for one nagging thought, buzzing around my head like an annoying mosquito.

“Development is about relationships. It’s about building relationships.” These are words I must have heard a hundred times through my first few weeks as a D-SIP intern. I understood – development is about people forming relationships with people who want to support a cause, organization, or institution. But it didn’t seem fair to me to call those bonds relationships – maybe that’s what they were, but they certainly didn’t seem real to me. How could you call something a real relationship when the ultimate goal of any interaction was money?

I sought out a colleague in my office and posed my question. I thought for sure she would be stumped, not for lack of intelligence or poise, but because, at the time, it seemed to me to be an unanswerable question. I was delighted to get an answer that satisfied me, one I hadn’t even considered.

“You’re misunderstanding the point,” she said. “You’re not building a relationship between the donor and yourself. You’re building a relationship between the donor and the School.”

I was dumbfounded. How could that be true? How could someone have a relationship with such an intangible idea? You can’t hug performances. You can’t talk to buildings. I understood the concept but couldn’t fully embrace it until I had experienced it myself.

Over the past year, I realized I had experienced that kind of relationship and that I continued to do so. The music festival I went to for three summers in high school marked the beginning of the “me” that exists today, and I still yearn for those memorable experiences. Last month, I interviewed for a job at an orchestra that would have involved working with its guest artists – I was informed that the position was crucial to building a relationship between those particular artists and the orchestra as an institutional whole.

And, as I prepare to say goodbye to Ann Arbor and the University until who knows when, I realize that, without knowing it, I somehow wound up forming a relationship with this place. It kicked me around in the unbearable winters, embraced me in the spring, and kept my mind in motion for the past four years. It was there for me in a time of my life where I needed to explore and discover, and it challenged me to find direction in the most unlikely places.

Yes, saying goodbye to this chapter of my life is hard. But, as with the people I met while at Michigan, some who remain in Ann Arbor and some who are scattered about the world, there will always be ways to keep in touch.

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Giving: An Act of Communion

As time continues to pass from my many sleepless nights writing, sketching, performing, collaborating with my classmates in the Penny Stamps Undergraduate Studios up on North Campus, I’ve developed a feeling of disconnect from my former community and consequently a loss of  self.

Thus, recently I decided to embark on an attempt to reconnect with my A& D roots through writing a personal blog about food shaping my life, for better and worse. Over the last 25 years, I’ve lived in many different communities and one of the main passions stringing these temporary homes (and my life) together, the only substance that keeps me who I am wherever I am: food so why not share my experimental recipes, personal humiliations, small victories, favorite ingredients, bits of local cuisine knowledge I’ve picked up, delicious dives I like to claim I discovered, and memorable meals I’ve prepared and attended with others.  While in the process of re-engaging with my local community through food and writing, I came across another collaborative food/art project (The Daily Bread Project) which evoked an idea that transcends many areas of my life, particularly the role philanthropy plays in it.

Each day, the project collaborators send out an exercise, a kind of food for thought, for the participants to think about, write, create, inspire an idea in response. This Monday’s exercise asked me to consider the word, communion, and how I experience it with myself and others. Below is the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Communion - (noun)

a. The action or fact of sharing or holding something in common with others; mutual participation; the condition of things so held, mutuality, community, union.

b. The fact of being associated or linked; association, connection.

While of course, you can’t avoid the obvious association of communion being an act of sharing bread, I immediately considered the act of giving as a way to experience communion.  In giving back you are essentially staying connected/associated with a particular organization, cause, and in most of our cases an institution of higher education (University of Michigan).  It can be an experience that you do for yourself or one you experience with others by partaking in a class gift or a matching program with your employer. It’s amazing how many businesses today are using philanthropy as a recruiting tool to attract a certain kind of employee, an employee that values contributing to their local, national, and global communities.  It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day responsibilities of your job  that often cause you to lose sight and connection to the bigger social picture.

I came across a very inspiring article in the Seattle Times earlier this week about philanthropy’s influence on  Microsoft’s general business model by nature of the importance its employees place on commitment to social justice through giving back. An incredible figure of $90 million was the total amount of employee gifts and company matching funds combined from last year. That’s seriously incredible! The CEO Steve Ballmer remarks  how they are working as a corporation more than ever to find a way to align their business goals with contributing to society’s wellness. I would only hope that more  influential and successful corporations like Microsoft continue to encourage such a philanthropic approach to its business.

Excited by the countless former Microsoft employees that go onto to start their own non-profit organizations for some really amazing causes, I want to find small ways in my current position that enable me to contribute to society’s wellness and connect me to the larger community.

Read the article above and I am confident you will also feel inspired and may even consider your “giving” experience  as a form of communion.

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Ready (or Not), Set, Go!

This is what graduating from the University of Michigan felt like exactly one year ago. I was very content living the college life and wanted nothing more than to stay. I disliked everything about the way that being forced to voluntarily leave Ann Arbor made me feel. While my serious lack of excitement about reaching the finish line was founded on numerous reasons, it was perhaps my complete lack of confidence in what came next that motivated my inability to get going and get excited about all those “great accomplishments”  and those “great mountains to climb” everyone kept talking about.

I started applying for jobs right and left. I joined every single job searching website and started cranking out job applications like WHOA without really considering where I had been and what my deep, deep desire was now that I had invaluable experiences and knowledge to share with the world from my time at Michigan. I graduated with a B.A. in Communication Studies and Italian, and I could see myself doing everything under the sun–moving to Italy to teach English, being a kindergarten teacher, PR, Television, Writing, Event Planning, etc. Is it clear yet that I had no sense of direction/didn’t want to accept I needed to find one?! I had to take it back to basics and consider what in my four years at Michigan had been pivotal–what had made my heart leap? I kept coming back to the U-M Development Summer Internship Program which I had participated in the summer before.

Before participating in D-SIP, the only thing I knew was that I wanted to do “good stuff”. I didn’t know how or where but I felt compelled to pursue a career with a mission. Participating in D-SIP opened my eyes not only to the importance of fundraising for higher education institutions, but to the vast world of philanthropy and the infinite number of opportunities available to do “good stuff” in a systematic and purposeful way. D-SIP also encouraged me to consider what philanthropic missions were important to me, and to become a serious participant in giving to those causes that were (and are) important to me, like education. The more I thought about this, the clearer it became that what was most important to me in answering the very frightening “what now?!” question was the underlying desire to enter a business concerned with giving back to society, with linking individual passions with the needs of our world, with the welfare of others.

Once I realized this, my job search went from being practically stagnant to moving rather swiftly. I really wanted to move to Chicago, and I was able to land a position at a prestigious institution of higher education in the area with their central development major gifts team. Crazy to believe (because it feels like I started yesterday,) but I have been in this position for the past six months and I could not be happier.

D-SIP surrounded me with incredibly talented and knowledgeable individuals who motivated me in my quest to find my path post-graduation, and who continue to encourage me as I dabble in higher education fundraising. I am incredibly excited to be part of this field and to share my experiences and thoughts on philanthropy with you all!

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Firsts, Lasts, and Everything in Between

Even though I feel like I have been swimming through a sea of performances, lessons, exams, workdays, and papers for something a bit longer than four years, I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the fact that I am (as of a week and a half ago) a college graduate.  Graduating from college was always one of those larger-than-life, “That will never be me!” kinds of events.  I was perfectly comfortable in my University environment and had never been a huge fan of change.  Over the past year or so I had, apparently, been denying the fact that the idyllic days of my undergraduate career had been quickly approaching a halt.

Which is why, during the last months of this semester, I was neck-deep in a pool of reflection.  During my last few days of college, I was acutely aware of all of the lasts I encountered. My last lesson with my oboe professor.  My last performance in Hill Auditorium. My last class in Angell Hall.  With every goodbye, remembrances of my many Michigan firsts crept into my consciousness.  My first meeting with my oboe professor when, as a senior in high school, I auditioned for the School.  My first performance in Hill Auditorium, where I was so nervous I thought that I might actually have to flee the stage in a fit of terror.  My first class in Angell Hall Auditorium D, where I remember wondering whether or not my high school teachers had actually prepared me for college like they had said they were doing.

As much as I would like to think that the rewarding experiences that occurred between my firsts and lasts were the solely the result of my own determination, I can’t help but realize that a much bigger force was behind it all.  The University of Michigan, steeped in a legacy of excellence, was the agent that created these experiences for me.  Where else could I have found the perfect combination of artistic and academic distinction that I had always craved?

I think it is the huge experiences that we never saw coming (either due to the simple unpredictability of life or our own state of denial) that create such introspection and cause us to give back to a particular effort or institution.  Whether it is a reflection of our own appreciation or our desire to ensure that others can have the same experiences, the indelible mark that they leave on our being cannot be ignored.

For the past year, I worked in development at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance.  This summer, I will continue my work in fundraising at one of the country’s premiere summer performing arts institutions.  I look forward to connecting people who have had these larger-than-life experiences in the arts with this particular establishment!

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