Year-end links
comments
posted Dec 31, 2008, 12:10pm by Rodolpho Carrasco
How to get things done
3 comments
When I learned this news, I was on board the merchant vessel Hanjin Miami, a container ship plying the North Pacific trade route, making a bumpy, stormy passage between Seattle and Shanghai. I booked a cabin for the three-week crossing because I had some writing to do, and I’ve discovered that I’m incapable of doing any kind of focused, uninterrupted work as long as there’s a cellphone to ring, an e-mail to read or the Web to surf. The isolation has been very productive.
When the time comes, I might try a similar crossing.
posted Dec 22, 2008, 8:29am by Rodolpho Carrasco
Youthworker alert: MTV plans 16 new reality shows “for the Obama generation”
1 comment
“Our new shows will feature themes of affirmation and accomplishment,” says Brian Graden, prez of entertainment at MTV Networks music channels and president of Logo. “Our shows are going to focus less on loud and silly hooks and more on young people proving themselves. These are themes that are consistent with the Obama generation.”
The sub-head reads, “As ratings drop, network overhauls lineup.”
posted Dec 20, 2008, 1:42am by Rodolpho Carrasco
The New Digital Divide: Overcoming Online Segregation
comments
Andrew Sears writes in Sojourners:
As the recent book Divided by Faith points out, the segregation of the church results in a separation between rich and poor communities, which in turn perpetuates injustice. For example, a church member in a very resourced church who is looking for a job may get 10 referrals from friends in the church, whereas someone in a church where half of the attendees are unemployed might not get any referrals.You can see a similar segregation reflected in profiles of Christians on online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace; most people will have friends with backgrounds similar to their own. If everyone links to people they know, the result is that a disproportionate number of resourced individuals and ministries will link to each other, while ministries serving under-resourced communities are stuck in a virtual ghetto. The rich link to the rich, while the poor link to the poor.
TechMission started to see these effects when we launched our Web site ChristianVolunteering.org to match Christians with volunteer opportunities. Within a few months, our organization had secured partnerships with the Christian Community Development Association, the Salvation Army, World Vision, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, and most other major national Christian organizations serving under-resourced communities—not surprising, since we had strong relationships with people in those organizations.
Then we did a similar push for partnerships with Christian organizations with ties into wealthier communities and suburban churches—the same amount of effort, but with almost zero results.
LINKS ON the Internet are big business because they drive Web traffic. The value of those links can be quantified, using models like the ones I developed when I was a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I estimate that in the U.S. alone, online segregation gives resourced ministries a net benefit of $432 million each year, while ministries serving under-resourced communities are losing the same amount.
This is a big deal to ministries serving the poor. For every click we get from another Web site, Christian Volunteering.org is able on average to turn that into $5 worth of volunteer time donated to serve the poor. That $432 million of lost Web traffic could easily be translated into more than $2 billion of additional volunteer time donated to serve the poor.
So what can be done? Read the rest of the article.
posted Dec 12, 2008, 9:28am by Rodolpho Carrasco
25 hour round-trip to DC
2 comments
I do this type of itinerary a lot:
– Leave LAX around 10 or 11 pm
– Arrive in DC at 6am
– Get from Dulles or DCA to meeting location at 8ish
– Meet meet meet
– Get back on a plane at about 5pm or so
– Fly home, sometimes direct, sometimes to DFW
Tomorrow there is a meeting hosted by the White House Faith-based Office. The purpose is to review the past eight years of the faith-based initiative and highlight key learnings. They’ve invited a bunch of foundations and then agency folks like moi. I’ll be in the meeting most of the day. We’ll be in the Old Executive Office building. I’m on this direct overnight flight from LAX to Dulles. I’ve got just my laptop bag. I’m wearing my suit. In and out, baby. I just left a board meeting at 9pm tonight, and then Keith my assistant drove me to the airport. I stopped at home to kiss the kiddies good night. I made Sam pray for my trip.
UPDATE: 430am EST: Sitting here at Caribou Coffee at 17th and Pennsylvania. Doors open at 730. It’s cold. Me, I’ve got my suit and shirt. The DC people have thick coats, ear muffs, wool caps.
UPDATE: 9:05pm CST: Waiting for my flight home from DFW to LAX. It was a good day. Lots of good networking, interesting information presented by folks at the conference, and got some questions answered about the new administration’s approach to faith-based stuff. More later.
posted Dec 8, 2008, 10:11pm by Rodolpho Carrasco
razed: corner store at Howard & Navarro
6 comments
(Click the photo for larger image) The store is not only down. It’s almost completely gone. The tractor has been banging away all day. There’s a crew of men cleaning off old bricks (they’re worth a lot, evidently) and stacking them neatly on pallets that get picked up throughout the day. That’s Harambee across the street, upper left, with the white picket fences.
posted Dec 8, 2008, 3:28pm by Rodolpho Carrasco
Americans Pass Economic Woes to Churches
2 comments
Americans are adjusting their expenditures and cutting back wherever possible to adapt to the economic downturn, which includes for many people reducing donations to churches, according to a new survey.
Details I found interesting from the article:
posted Dec 4, 2008, 9:49am by Rodolpho Carrasco
Road Trip to East Palo Alto via the California Autobahn
1 comment
Relax, I’m blogging from the passenger seat using my flux capacitor. Keith is driving. This is Keith talking to students from the Latin American Bible Institute:
We are on our way to East Palo Alto. I speak today to the urban Young Life staff that is based in and around EPA. Tom Tryggstad and them are having me up. We’ll meet Tom at 8:30 a.m. at historic Hobee’s Restaurant in Palo Alto, just across the street from Stanford. Townies, Intervarsity staffers, and venture capitalists all like the place (at least, that’s what I remember from my days in the late 80s). I have a vague memory of some gnarly coffeecake (my friend said it was “gnarly” in a good way, but I don’t remember being that impressed; we’ll see how it tastes this morning). Speaking of gnarly, I hope this guy was able to outrun the wave:
We left Pasadena at 3 a.m. I didn’t sleep as much as I had hoped because Gaby was awake. I held her until she fell into a deep sleep.
UPDATE
– Had a great trip.
– Breakfast at Hobee’s in the Town and Country Center with Tom Tryggstad and Michael Toy. Great advice from these two men of God on all sorts of topics. I had the Chicken Apple Sausage, mmm.
– Keith drove most of the way there and back.
– Had a great time in East Palo Alto with the Urban Young Life Bay Area type individuals.
– I talked about indigenous leadership development, Harambee fundraising diversity, the Harambee programs and the Harambee “Pipeline,” and I showed the “Marquis Krump” and “Harambee: Invest” videos.
– Young Life EPA has a great ministry house on the end of town. It’s on the edge of town like a movie.
– Talked with Shannon Pekary of Ravenswood Athletic Association afterward.
– ate at El Pollo Loco in Gilroy. Why I’m telling you that, I don’t know.
– Got home at 9:30 p.m. We made good time. Flow of traffic baby.
posted Dec 3, 2008, 5:34am by Rodolpho Carrasco
The Poverty of the Official Poverty Rate y mas
comments
We’ve almost gone through all the Thanksgiving leftovers, +48 hours.
posted Nov 29, 2008, 4:39pm by Rodolpho Carrasco
video chat with Dr. John Perkins
5 comments
This morning Harambee staff engaged in a video chat with Dr. John Perkins. The vchat came within our Harambee All-Staff training, during my “Theology of Harambee” lecture. We connected via Skype using plain old broadband lines on both sides. The chat went well. We had my laptop hooked up to some external speakers and everyone could hear him well. JP and his staff took some time to figure out this video chat thing because it means he can limit some of his travel (he’s 78, after all). I recommend that you contact his office and request a time when JP can video chat with your staff.
posted Nov 25, 2008, 12:09pm by Rodolpho Carrasco
Sunny Side Up
comments
Wherein we glean:
But now that he has won the presidency and must, as the cliché goes, shift from campaigning to governing, Obama and his economic team will have to face up to a paradox that most of the media overlooked during the campaign. Namely, the Obama campaign’s twin messages of bashing deregulation and embracing the Clinton years were inherently contradictory. Bill Clinton signed nearly every deregulatory measure that John McCain backed—the same measures that are now being blamed (wrongly) for helping cause the current crisis. What’s more, Clinton administration officials have credited these policies for contributing to the ‘90s economic boom—the very “shared prosperity” that Obama says he wants to go back to.
posted Nov 24, 2008, 11:12pm by Rodolpho Carrasco
Link-ish
comments
Yes, the baby would not stay asleep.
…he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.
Now we’ve had over five years of war in Iraq, finally winding toward a successful conclusion, and in the process have spent a lot of money and made some changes in the law. But the changes in the law are promised to be undone by President-elect Obama, and the amount spent in five years on Iraq has already been dwarfed by the $5 trillion dollar tab run up during this fall’s bailout-mania.What’s more, there’s lots of pressure to pull our troops out of Iraq; Barack Obama was elected president largely on the strength of that sentiment, after all. While there may be some number of troops in Iraq for years to come, the Iraq War is pretty much over. By contrast, it’s a safe bet that whatever new social and regulatory programs are put in place as a result of the current economic situation, they will persist for decades. Ronald Reagan himself couldn’t get rid of the Department of Education, notwithstanding his campaign promise to do so.
posted Nov 22, 2008, 3:06am by Rodolpho Carrasco
• 
