Growing Pains

A lot happened to my two-bit NPO in the past month and a half.

I applied for more money, even though we have "enough". We hired a new person for program management and we are hiring someone to do some coordinating in our region of California (we have two other offices covering a Central Valley region and Central ans Southern Coast Region). We also got new computers.

My grant applications were nothing new, but the other two items were less than ignorable. Firstly, our program manager needed to be brought up to speed with the whole spiel of the organization, including me explaining our CRM, CMS, RPCs, and the sheet that explains all those acronyms. Secondly, our computer upgrade was a handful.

We hired someone to work with our computers off of a recommendation from someone else. He ended up having his own vision for the office that conflicted with ours. As a result, he spent more time in the office than needed (over a month!), charged us far more, and left in fumes telling us that our new machines sucked and that we were practically doomed. Then we found someone else who was much more patient and fixed all our problems in one afternoon. Sigh.

Organizational growth is like constant puberty. It's painful and at times blemishes show up. In fact, growing organizations do not escape from problems they had as smaller organizations. They just end up trading in an earlier set of problems in exchange for a newer set of problems. We now offer more loans, have a growing networks of professional consultants, are wrestling with new technology and end up suffering more in the name of efficiency.

But, the advantage of being a VISTA is that I'll be out of there in a handful of weeks and, since THEY weren't paying me, whatever storms I helped create can be left behind. I am trying to see what I will do for the seven months I have between the end of this gig and grad school. Hopefully something that pays...