A Lesson from P2PU’s Digital Journalism Mashup: Treat For-Credit and Not-For-Credit Participants Differently (And How Someday, Maybe We Won’t Have To)

My first guest blog post on Open.Michigan and I'm already critiquing the work of Creative Common's CEO. Yikes! I hope I manage to start a good (and in my opinion, much needed) conversation in the OER community without offending anyone.

Measuring Contributions of Joy: An In-the-Moment Logic Model

My roommate from my first year of college, with whom I haven't spoken in person since but who, I gather, now works with some sort of youth-serving nonprofit, recently crowdsourced the PR objectives of her fundraising department on Facebook:

If you were deciding to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program, what would you most want to know about the program or the agency providing the program?

The responses were the typical relatively ungrounded concepts: measurable results, effectiveness, impact, maximized efficiencies...

Having worked at a major granting institution focused on youth-serving programs, I figured I probably had some ideas to contribute. I prepared to ponder it for a couple minutes, as is my custom with serious FB surveys. I looked up from my computer and propped my head to one side, but by the time the comment box was open, I was off typing an idea I'd never heard before anywhere, and certainly not at WKKF.

Well, to be honest, I did manage to pull it around and relate it to their logic model (inputs, outputs, outcome). And, I think the initial inspiration came from the pictures the Foundation had hanging in their stairwell. But generally speaking, what I had to say was not the talk of bureaucracies. After all, she had asked what I would want to know, not what Kellogg would have wanted to know. But then again, I thought, they're probably the same.

What I would want to know, and what I think other people might consider wanting to know, is how much joy the youth add to society.

Too often we think of youth-serving programs as exactly that: youth-serving. We wise and well-researched adults serve the kids what is best for them, the aim being to make them into wise, well-researched, serving adults. But is that really what we want our communities to be about? Today's world, both youth and adult, is permeated with depression and loneliness. Too many kids grow up seeing themselves as a burden: expensive, distracting, and service-requiring.

It seems to me that what we really need is to let youth serve us. With their abundant energy, curious spirit, and fun-loving nature, I can't think of a demographic that could better help us slog through the day with a smile on our face. Really, it's such a perfect pairing, you'd almost think our species evolved with generational interdependencies as habit.

Okay, so, maybe my idea is completely obvious, but that doesn't make it bad.

So, in case you haven't gotten it yet, what I'm saying is that we should measure the value of youth programs by how much good they allow kids to do. It's good for the kids; makes them feel appreciated, which is absolutely imperative for them to grow up continuing to do good. And it's good for the rest of the world. Good is good.

To balance out the equation (don't want to get carried away with all the good), we subtract what the youth take out of the world: the inputs in the logic model. Namely, of interest to me in our current agricultural climate, is what they eat - hopefully sustainable harvests that add good jobs to the economy. Also, maybe I'd want to know what kind of space they consume. Do their buildings inspire awe or do they make parents want to run to the outskirts as blindly as freeways will let them?

Well, hmmm, maybe it's okay to get carried away with the good afterall. Or maybe it's just that when we don't have to look so far into the future to find it, we make sure that that which we take from the world gives back. Win-win, they call it, and, no, I don't think it's too optimistic a thing to aspire to. Unfortunately, future-looking assessment systems that focus on one subject over a process don't even have a mechanism for measuring themselves against that aspiration.

The older I get, the more I think the idea that we should be enduring hardship for the future is fundamentally flawed. I don't have near the philosophical chops to explain it, but I think we want to be adding more in-the-now analyses of value, and it seems to me the most clear-cut place to start with that is recognizing that youth have something to give, now, as youth; it's pretty darn hard to argue with the fact that youthfulness is too great a thing to keep locked away in receipt of service.

We need to start demanding that nonprofits measure their value to society as a whole, in terms of joy, in the now. The way the math works out, the amount by which their youth are actively making the world a happier place is going to factor into that calculus significantly. And for the time being, as long as I, misguidedly, I suppose, have a chunk of happiness stored away in some cold, hard cash, that calculus is going to be what I approximate when I decide "to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program."

Green Popcorn! The fruit of my temporary return to a raw nutrients + cooked crap diet.

Having discovered the promise of the Green Smoothie Revolution last winter, I necessarily spent the spring whirring frozen fruits in with fresh, detoxifying greens in my new Vita-mix, Vido, ushering in the reintroduction of fruits to my diet with gusto. Since college, I'd mostly limited my sweet fruit intake to granny smith apples and grapefruit in attempt to control candida, so I was pleased to discover that this reintroduction of fruit, combined with a diet of mucho raw vegetables and leafy greens, seemed to go swimmingly. I juiced, smoothied, and chopped my way to, well, somewhat improved health. Then finals came, or rather, the final deadline for papers with previously missed deadlines. I started munching on cereal in attempt to control my globus hystericus so that I might breathe so that I might think so that I might write. The result, however, of the cereal, stress, and what I just recently realized was probably seasonal allergies was that I found myself zonking out regularly with low blood sugar, never managing to get around to that writing bit. I blamed it all on the fruit, of course, and then dedicated my summer to figuring out what kind of diet I should be eating so I can breathe, think, and write.

Having made the mistake of seeking my optimal diet in books, I have no answers to report here. I know, roughly, what I knew going in: raw is good. Despite being inspired to believe in little other than skepticism when reading the works of most raw food advocates, I'm still fairly certain food enzymes are the bomb. What I don't know is how bad cooked food is, whether fruit is good for me or bad, whether too much fat is the problem, and whether I should eat fish and meat.

So, my plan is to eat the way I think my body wants me to eat and figure it out from experience. Yes, I did get some books on intuitive eating, but I'm not going to wait until I've read them to start. Three months older and unhealthier than my first attempt to eat raw, I've learned my lesson, thank you.

I promise to spare you the details of my trials, just as I didn't bother to report back on the nonsense I read over the summer. This is not a food or health blog, nor is it an everything-I-do-I-must-report blog. I promise you, there will never be a poop assessment here.

That said, should I be lucky enough in my personal experiments to stumble upon a link from how the human race, in general, is intended to eat and how communication advancements might allow us to eat, I will be sure to share it with you.

This link is a stretch, but the result is so cool, I have to tell you about it: green popcorn.

So, without further ado, let's stretch: Sitting back on the futon to relax into a good movie can feel so natural at times, can't it? Whether it's an insightful moral or powerful inspiration, somewhere in movie watching is an undeniable benefit to our internal human. Whether popcorn is actually critical to making that experience or not is an unknown, but I figure, when trying to relax, it's best to not to take any chances.

Oddly enough, however, I never much liked the taste of popcorn, despite its excellent smell. I always felt betrayed by the false advertising and found it better to stay away altogether - at least, that is, until I spent a summer room-surfing in a coop in Berkeley. They had popcorn for breakfast, lunch, and dinner there; I kid you not. There was always an old fashioned stirring pot on the stove (complete with an engraved web address), and my most appreciated contribution to the coop that summer was to suggest that they buy popcorn - their fastest disappearing food item - the same way they buy beans and rice: in twenty pound bags. Funny how addiction can make you blind.

Anyway, when I left Berkeley for LA, I would eat popcorn to remind me of what it was like to be around "sane" people. Then it was usually just Bragg's and nutritional yeast, but the coop had also taught me to add maple syrup and salt to it, which I started to crave just for the taste of it. Sometimes though, in the midst of a popcorn-free period, I'd suddenly remember what it had been like to eat popcorn with those Berkeley kids, and then I'd always go for the Bragg's and nutritional yeast version.

So, when I tried to eat raw, I was saddened to loose my instant time warp back to Berkeley's bliss. My first attempt at a substitute involved dehydrating my juice pulp in the oven, alternating between the lowest heat option and no heat. That was disgusting. Then I got a dehydrator and learned to make kale chips. Now, kale chips are pretty much completely awesome. To this day, it is the main reason I keep that big, honking appliance on the counter. But, kale chips don't do much to fill you up, and when you just want to relax and watch a movie, you don't want to make and eat a big salad before you get to eat your popcorn substitute.

Fortunately, I've spent the past month on a return to my raw nutrient-filled foods plus cooked crappy foods diet. Basically this is how I've eaten for much of my life, and I love it, but I don't feel nearly as healthy on it as I do on raw-only. The idea is that you take whatever is hard about raw and you do the easy cooked substitute and throw in a ton of veggies. For example, I make mini-pizzas with Ezekiel tortillas, raw tomato sauce, "cheese" that's half grated Parmesan or mozzarella and half grated squash, a thick layer of raw chopped spinach, and a ton of veggies. I also buy TJ's Pad Thai meals and dump in ten times the quantity in veggies. Same with their Indian Vegetables. Even a personal Mac 'n Cheese packet is much better with a few fist-fulls of spinach and broccoli thrown in (although I lightly steam that).

Also, it turns out, most advantageously for the human race, popcorn is better with kale. I call it Kaleta Corn (kale-to-corn, like Kettle Corn), and it's yum. But, like most of my crap-based, high-nutrient meals, it is definitely not something my body needs, so I'll move on from it soon, but first, I wanted to take advantage of our communication advances in a move to break free from my prolonged period of book-obsessed anguish in order to share it with you.

Kaleta Corn:

1 part ground dehydrated kale or kale chips
1 part nutritional yeast
ground onion flakes, to taste
garlic granules, to taste
squirtable Bragg's Liquid Aminos
popped corn

Pop popcorn in a pot, air popper, or a paper bag or topped bowl in the microwave. Mix and grind the dehydrated kale, yeast, onion, and garlic in a coffee bean grinder or food processor. Transfer the popcorn to a bowl at room temperature and spray the top with Bragg's, then sprinkle on the seasoning mix. Stir and repeat. Enjoy.