WomensLearningStudio

Corporations are interested in making skilled volunteering a larger piece of their community involvement activities, and companies like Microsoft, HP, American Express and The Gap are publically and actively building more skills-based and pro bono volunteering programs.

The skilled volunteering movement is also growing among individuals – organizations like Taproot Foundation and Catchafire have joined VolunteerMatch to connect skilled volunteers directly with nonprofit projects, and they are growing by leaps and bounds.

standardized taxonomy of skills that volunteers possess and that nonprofits search for.

Junot Díaz’s Drown and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!—both of those collections, from the late ’90s—and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which I still think is one of the most perfect short stories ever written.

Zora Neale Hurston and Mules and Men. In that book, she writes, “Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

And this tends to turn into the idea that writers of color are in some sort of “identity corner,” whereas white writers just get to write about life. I will never forget one night in workshop when the professor asked our brilliant mutual friend Brit Bennett to explain what her story had to say about the black experience. Like her story had to be some after-school special, either harrowing or uplifting, just because her characters were black.

What you want to do is debrief failures openly. That’s really critical to resilience, because otherwise when people fail they’re totally unprepared for it.

It's much more helpful to say I understand you’re probably in a lot of pain right now, and I want you to know I’m here with you. Just the acknowledgment and conveying you want to support them is much more helpful.

One of the things that affected me most, actually, was watching Sheryl commit to finding joy.

Since his inauguration, the Justice Department has reversed the previous administration’s efforts to uphold voting rights, served as an impediment to police reform, and weighed in against same-sex rights. It’s an agenda breathtaking in its scope.

Many Trump supporters believe themselves to be losing their country, something that leads them to prefer a social milieu more consistent with days gone by — one in which primarily white, middle- and upper-class, heterosexual, native-born men reigned supreme.

Moreover, in 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Supreme Court ruled that for the sake of diversity, race can be one of many criteria used by a college as part of a more holistic means of evaluating applicants.

They’ve been sold on meditation as a simple way to bear the unbearable.

In other words, if you’re stressed out, you’re not working hard enough on your personal focus strategy. You’re letting the team down.

the marketing of mindfulness as a solution to work stress and life balance rather than the complex spiritual approach to living it is meant to be.

But almost entirely overlooked amid the public outrage is the massive pool of low-wage workers – especially in the sharing economy – who are vulnerable to a wide range of abuses on the job because they lack basic labor rights.

“We have to talk about this as a problem these platforms have created,” said Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor who studies online abuse. “[If you’re] going to set up a platform to make it possible for people to instantaneously communicate with people they don’t know ... you know full well it’s going to be abused and weaponized.”

The success of many on-demand companies like DoorDash depends on hiring a large, cheap workforce of contract employees who have no benefits or job security.