Monday, August 06, 2007

Finally revealed

I am due in Lansing tomorrow to present a marketing piece that will hopefully help this community coalition stay afloat in Michigan's horrible non-profit economic environment. Of course, being the grad student I am, I've been sitting on this crap for weeks and am just now getting to it - and I discover two things that annoy me deeply:

1. I have been ignoring emails (what can I say, I like to let the conversation unfold and absorb it as a whole), but the board (of which I have only met three members) has agreed that they don't want to present "sob stories" (I am not proposing sob stories, rather sappy-happy success stories) and therefore will agree only to present vague stories of programming offered and number of people served.

Yeah, that's compelling.

2. As I read through a grant proposal that I was just given, I discover that their primary teen health program consists of three components:

Nutrition
Abstinence
Teen parenting skills

(Completion of the Abstinence-Only program guarantees you a spot (9 months later) in the very-popular Parenting Skills program.) For god's sake, am I the only one reading this?

I know you have to follow the non-profit dollars where they lead, but ABSTINENCE programming !?

I feel so dirty.