Thanks to the glorious @davidwolinsky, everyone — well, at least, everyone who reads NBC’s IncWell — knows about my twelve now.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/inc-well/How-to-Embrace-the-Power-of-12-138325404.html

What are yours?

This year, I made only one resolution: to learn a new skill each month. (Friends will recognize this resolution. Yes, it failed last year. No, that does not discourage me.)

So, the list so far:

January – Morse code
February – Souffles
March – CPR
April – Cooking (specifics tbd)
May – Knit or crochet
June – Scooter
July – Stick shift
August – Juggling
September – Calligraphy
October – Music
November – novel (NaNoWriMo)
December – Flash

Every November, I write a novel. Some years I start with pages of plot and notes; others, more usual, begin with just a hint of an idea. This year, resolving to do better and perhaps even produce a draft worthy of being shown to other people, I looked back at my folder of interesting snippets and found:

During the 14th and 15th centuries, the Valois dukes of Burgundy ruled over extensive territories in present day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands from their capital in Dijon, which during their reign became a major center of artistic patronage. Their court’s sculpture workshop, presided over by Claus Sluter and his followers, produced some of the most profound and original art of the period. The tombs of the first and second Burgundian dukes, Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, are among the summits of their achievement. The ducal Tombs were conceived for the Charterhouse of Champmol, founded in 1384 by Philippe the Bold as a burial place for the new dynasty of the Valois dukes, and featured an array of stunningly lifelike mourners carved in individual attitudes of grief.

www.mourners.org

In 2010, the mourners went on a short tour while their permanent home, the Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France, underwent restoration. As the coverage of that tour indicates, their number is incomplete. One mourner, separated from the company, has gone astray.

Aha! I thought. I had many theories, based on no facts whatsoever, about where that stray mourner went — and why. I ordered the gorgeous catalogue from the exhibit in New York. I had characters ready to go, conspiracies aplenty, and a general sense of excitement and impatience…

…until I discovered that someone had already written a crime novel along very similar lines.

Now what, would-be novel?

Shall I write you anyway?

I think so.

Since March, when I last wrote about amazing opportunities provided by my CCT fellowship and what I brought home in my brain from Boston, I have attended two more incredible sessions: a week at the University of Chicago (Booth) on strategic growth, and one at Northwestern (Kellogg) on growth and innovation. I come away from every one of these experiences with my mind on fire, sparks sizzling out in every direction: things we do well at Open Books that we can do better, things we have always wanted to try that turn out to have solid theory behind them, and things we had never thought of that now seem blindingly obvious as avenues of exploration and impact. Heartening, too, is the continued momentum of the Chicago Literacy Alliance (now 30+ members strong, with 8 working committees) and its Chicago Reads project (now live in Humboldt Park with 12 different organizations, and already making a difference to students in every grade at Cameron Elementary). I started this project with a good idea of what I was looking for: some tools, or at least a validating framework, for the growth plan of Open Books for the next five years. I now know that I will be finishing it with much more than that, and I am already looking forward with ill-concealed impatience to the December process of putting it all together.

A few months ago, unexpectedly and much too soon, my grandmother died. She was not the kind of person I know how to capture in writing. I do not know how to make you see her spirit, her generosity, her beauty, her stamina, her integrity, the way she rounded her eyes when she was pretending to be surprised, the way she peered sideways at you when she knew you were in on the joke, the instant recognizability of her handwriting on an envelope, or the tiny trim gorgeousness of her in anything from her gardening shorts and canvas sneakers to her dancing gowns and spike heels. I do not know how to make you taste the giant cookies she made, or the creamy tomato bisque, or the grainy fudge. I do not know how to make you feel the light and warmth she brought into the room, or the paradoxical way that every afternoon with her was a blend of adventure and security, or the absolute conviction that she loved you — and she loved many people fiercely, and they loved her back just as much. I do not know how to make you hear her elegant Rhode Island accent, or her shocked intake of breath when you told her something particularly scandalous, or her cheerful greeting every time she saw a friend, which was every time she went anywhere. I do not know how to share her with you if you did not know her. I only know that I am sorry for you that you did not and sorry for myself to be without her, and that because her death is not yet real to me and cannot ever be, I am still occasionally able to think about related topics like mourning from a slight intellectual remove, because of course it is obviously not possible that I am thinking about them in the context of BB.

This November,  my novel will be about a group of carved statues of mourners very similar to these, and what happens when a curious researcher with an only partially hidden agenda begins to search for the one that is missing. I suspect there will be mystery in it. I am pretty sure there will be alternate history of one kind or another. It will be sad in parts, I know, and hopefully funny, and at least a little bit scandalous in at least a few places…

I hope, in short, that it will be the book I have been warming up for all these years.

And I hope that she will be in it, and that I will feel, when it is done, that she would have approved.

Tomorrow is World Give Day, which is a lovely initiative from GiveForward designed to focus on giving back and encouraging donations. They asked me to blog about small-scale donors, so I did, with a tip of the metaphorical hat to the original nanomentor in my life. 

As you have probably heard, it has been a very snowy winter in Chicago. Almost all of it is gone now. Instead we have occasional pools of standing water, quiet dark reminders that the earth, too, has a limit of absorption. Two of these pools are in the corners of my yard. Jameson, not by nature a water dog, is wary of them. Until tonight, I did not mind them one way or the other. But that was before I got all excited about sheds.

Like most people who love books, I love special places to read them. Like most people who want to be writers, I pretend that the proper space is all that I lack to become one. Last summer at the Big E I spent an inordinate amount of time in the impeccable shed displays, marveling at their cornices and moldings and windowboxes and weathervanes. At the time, I had no need or place for one; after all, we lived in the city. Now I have my very own Lake District with plenty of room for a shed (which, under current conditions, would have to be put on stilts and be called the Shed Aquarium) and a renewed fantasy that if I get the context right, the text will follow. Yes! I will shed my inhibitions, inhabit a shed, and finally write the book I have been waiting all this time to read!

Assuming, of course, that I can get the yard dried out first.

I am back from Harvard, and my brain is full.

The  Social Enterprise conference was everything I wanted: amazing people, huge ideas, thought-provoking topics, and a chance to reflect all of them back to my beloved Open Books. I went with a host of place memories (I was based in Cambridge for many years during my first few startups), a list of nonprofit preconceptions (scale = growth, outcomes > outputs), and a set of social enterprise questions (impact measurement, strategic planning). I came back knowing that I live in the right place, that you cannot go home again, and that the track that led here is the one to follow forward.

A few especially bright points from this weekend for the map I am making:

- Whether the proper measure of success is outputs, outcomes, or impacts depends largely on the nature of the enterprise, and for certain sectors and nonprofit models, the correct answer may well be further to the left than is generally rewarded or advised.

- It makes no sense to talk about strategy until you know about purpose.

- Scaling an idea is not the same as scaling an organization.

- Be only as big as you need to be to effect the change you seek to make. Work at scale, not to it.

- You cannot buy people’s passion, creativity, and engagement. You can only buy their time.

I often say, and with good justification, that I have very little social life.

My social enterprise life, on the other hand, is increasingly amazing.

Next Monday, I get to go to IMSA as a judge for PowerPitch. Last year, we heard about everything from free filesharing and confidence-building materials through a scannable receipt payback system and a new line of nutrient-enriched juices, and then we gave $5,000 in real money to the students whose pitches were most compelling. Will it be even more awesome this year? Absolutely. I cannot wait.

Next Thursday, I’ll be at a mini-summit sponsored by Chicago Social Innovation about creating agents of social change through mentoring, recruitment, investment, and advocacy. (I already have a trench coat, sunglasses, and an almost uncontrollable desire to print ‘Agent of Social Change’ on my next business card instead of ‘Founder & Executive Director.’)

And next Friday, as part of my Fellowship, I leave for the Social Enterprise Conference at Harvard, where I confidently expect to be crushed into humble paste by the achievements of the assembled attendees and then pumped back up again by their energy, enthusiasm, and excitement.

At this rate, I will someday become a socialite after all.

As of this morning, with extreme excitement and great glee, I am officially registered for the conferences and seminars that comprise the formal education part of my Fellowship, and the calendar is starting to look awesomely colorful.

Social entrepreneurs, I will see you at:

The Social Enterprise Conference
Harvard University (HBS/Kennedy)
Cambridge, MA
March 5-6

Building and Implementing Growth Strategies
University of Chicago (Booth)
Chicago, IL
July 11-15

Growth and Innovation Week
Northwestern University (Kellogg)
Evanston, IL
September 18-23

The Social Enterprise Alliance Summit 2011
Chicago, IL
October 31 – November 2