It’s time for March Madness. For those of us who follow college basketball, this is the month when we talk endlessly of brackets and spreads and Cinderella stories and dynasties and upsets. We fall in love, we berate, we despair, and we exult–in game after game. In the end, only one team pulls off the six consecutive wins necessary to be named champion. Those of us who follow trumpet our victory or lick our wounds, vow to resume our diets, heave a sigh of relief that it’s over, and ultimately return to the routines of daily life. All in good fun–unless you lose big in the pool, of course.
Every four years we leap into another form of March Madness: that which accompanies the particularly American process we use to select political party nominees in the presidential election. The rituals are actually quite the same: we talk endlessly of brackets and spreads and Cinderella stories and dynasties and upsets. We fall in love, we berate, we despair, and we exult–in debate after debate and primary after primary. In the end, only one individual from each party secures the delegates necessary to be named nominee. Those of us who follow raise a triumphant fist in the air, or indulge in nervous musings about whether we actually might move to Canada this time if the other guy wins. Serious business, to be sure.
At NCG, March Madness is about the many, many opportunities to engage with the NCG community that we have created with our members. It’s a rich and busy month! Here is just a sampling of what’s happening:
- Join us at this Friday’s Breakfast of Champions: a gathering of engaged NCG community members to discuss our plans for the year and how we further connect and strengthen our work together.
- Attend a Nonprofit Displacement Project briefing on the results and implications of a survey of over 500 Bay area grantees that illuminates the growing impact of the rising commercial real estate market on the availability of the vital nonprofit services and human talent we rely upon to scaffold our communities.
- Talk with colleagues about the power of storytelling as a tool to achieve social impact.
- Consider the needs of children of incarcerated parents, and how funders are shaping service- and systems-based approaches to address these needs.
- Learn how to use a powerful new mapping tool to visualize funding investments in California.
- Share key learnings around the use of advocacy to increase access to healthcare for children in California.
And so much more.
March Madness, indeed.
We invite you to join us at as many of these gatherings as you can. We can promise rich, substantive conversation, the opportunity to connect and align with your colleagues, and of course, all the side conversations about politics and basketball you can stomach.
OK maybe we should stick to basketball.
We look forward to seeing you.