Slow down please!

Since the time that I was old enough to swing a hammer, I have spent part of almost every summer working on the docks at our family cottage on Georgian Bay in central Ontario. We have torn them down, built them up and torn them down again. Over the years I graduated from gopher to crew chief but nothing much has really changed. We still reuse every nail, trim the rot and hammer back tried and true boards, and spend hours arguing about what the best way is to level a certain stretch that will never really be straight.

The one constant on our docks, as they have grown and shrunk and been drowned and then left high and dry by changing water levels, has been a sign painted by my grandfather in the 1940s and touched up annually ever since. It reads simply, “Slow down, please”.

Now the intended audience for this message is the boaters who race passed our dock and whose wake does on-going damage to every log, board and spike (not to mention banging our own boats constantly on the sides). But it has occurred to me that maybe, all of these years, we have been pointing the sign in the wrong direction!

For decades, as a teacher, administrator and parent, the frenetic pace of the school year has been replaced by an equally manic need to cram every possible bit of activity into summer vacation. Part of this has been growing up in a climate where July and August were like a fine late spring day in Bermuda and the rest of the year struggled to keep up. Part of it has been a product of living in a fast paced urban environment in which relaxing meant wasting “valuable” time.

This summer will be different. Oh, I will still be swinging the hammer, straightening nails and sawing boards – but I know already that my pace will have changed. I am going to take my grandfather’s advice to passing boaters, and slow down. I have young children and grandchildren to play with and enjoy, sand castles to build, rocks to skip, fish to catch, books to read and batteries to recharge.

So don't bother trying to get me to ramp things up and to cram in more than is humanly possible into a few short weeks. If you want to spend time with me, I'll be down at the dock leaning up against my grandfather's sign!

Cash Advance

Years ago I was reviewing a school in western Canada and giving all sorts of sage advice about how to effectively raise money, build an alumni base, track annual giving, etc. The advice was well-received, my recommendations implemented, and positive change was made to the advancement programme. The only problem is that I wasn't really sure what I was talking about! Oh, I had been in dozens of schools and met with a host of highly successful fundraisers all over Canada, the United States and Europe. I am confident that I was giving proven and workable expert advice, however (and this is a common problem in education) what was lacking from my repertoire was a solid track record of raising funds myself. My experiences in Montreal taught me a lot about event planning and community building; they taught me about the difference between what people said that they would do and what they could actually deliver; and, they taught me the difference between highly "public" giving and true philanthropy. But, the bottom line at Weston was that we raised money by generating surplus revenues through operations, not through the generosity of external donors. This was a lesson that was lost to some extent on my successor (supported by equally myopic Boards of Governors) who, depending on the vague promises of "generous" constituents, ran huge losses and slowly bankrupted the school while they waited for their advancement ship to come in and bail them out.

Fast forward ten years and there I am, thousands of kilometers away in the middle of the Atlantic, standing at the mike and thanking a host of volunteers for staging an outstanding fundraising event at an art gallery set in the beautiful national botanical gardens. The night was a highly successful component of what is slowly emerging as a comprehensive development and strategic financial plan.

I have always said that timing is everything. When I joined Somersfield in January there appeared to be three strikes against expanding our development prospects. To begin with, a long-standing, highly respected and locally connected Head of School, my friend Margaret Hallett, had stepped down at the height of her game to pursue other interests; the long-serving development officer had been lured to a powerful rival school early in the fall, taking contacts and relationships with him, and hadn't been replaced; the school had just finished a massive and exciting building campaign which had inspired giving but now was completed (and about $12 million in debt); and - wait, did I say three strikes? - we were plunging headfirst into a major global recession which was bound to have an impact both on our school population and the financial liquidity of our donors!

It is now six months later. Standing at the botanical gardens on Saturday night I was able to announce that we had just completed the most successful annual giving and fundraising campaign in the school's history. How did this happen? Well, the same three (four?) strikes turned out to be to our advantage. To begin with, the current economic climate galvanized the Board into reassessing its financial position and willingness to carry a significant debt load. The finance committee began to discuss strategies for long-term sustainability; we created a formal development committee to set priorities, name targets and identify new sources of funding; and, the Board opened itself up to expanding our student base in key areas as a hedge against future contraction - the result was an improved cash flow, a manageable debt-reduction strategy, and a revitalized development mandate.

Secondly, Margaret had hired, in consultation with me, an atypical candidate for development officer. Starting the same day as I did, Megan brought no advancement experience, but offered a wealth of energy, enthusiasm and personal connection with members of the parent body and the larger community. In fact, we used our newness as an advantage as we were able to talk about change and growth and the fact that somebody else had build up the debt but that we were left to pay it off!

Over the next few months, we launched some new academic initiatives: the Somersfield Chair in Mathematics; full-day programming for three year olds to support working Bermudian parents; lap-top carts; SMART boards; and, the introduction of PYP strategies to our Foundations division. Before you knew it, companies and individuals became interested in what we were doing and wanted to get on board. One company (KPMG) donated 40 laptops and two lap-top carts to kick-start our "mobile computer lab" initiative; another (MS Frontier Re) funded the expansion of our SMART board capabilities; and our parents' association got so excited about what we were doing that they raised money to create a new entry-level classroom; upgrade our theatre facility; and make significant technology purchases at all levels of the school. Other companies and individual parents supported our Math initiatives and before we knew it, we had recorded the best year ever in raising funds (in half the time!)

So what did we learn in all this? Three important lessons have emerged in our first venture into the potentially shark infested waters of development. The first, is to tell the truth. We have been up front and open about our debt challenges, our cash flow concerns, and our worries about the escalating need for bursaries and scholarships. Donors have welcomed our candor and have been interested in being a part of helping us find solutions. Secondly, we have been grateful. Saying thank you and giving public recognition have been a big part of what has caught people's attention. There are no tax breaks for charitable giving in Bermuda. Our supporters are just that, supporters. They are interested parents, good corporate citizens and friends of the school. Our events are as much about community building as they are about fundraising and we want people to feel good about attending, not merely good about getting out without spending too much!

Finally, we have been cheerleaders for what we are doing and what we are going to do. I wrote to our parents last week that in a young school like ours with no deep-pocketed alumni to keep us afloat our only recourse was to outperform our rival schools; outperform our expectations for ourselves; and then do even better the next year! They responded that that is something worth supporting.

We will always measure the success of our advancement initiatives in terms of dollars and cents, but there is so much more to it. As long as there are development strategists that think that heavy handed pressure tactics and guilting out potential donors is a long-term sustainable strategy - we should continue to do quite well by comparison!

In some races, nice guys don't necessarily finish last!

Living without addresses

This morning I got an invitation to go out for lunch later in the week. I was told to meet my host at "the Dinghy Club in Paget". No address, no directions - I knew where Paget was, and could find the water, but after that... 

I emailed back and asked if this was somewhere that everyone knew - the response (along with an anecdotal description of how to find it -"turn left at the chain-link fence", etc.) was that everyone but me knew - but now, I did too!

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a map freak. I study them constantly (often missing what I was supposed to be looking for because I was staring at the page rather than looking out the window). Maps, Michelin guides, Eyewitness Top Tens - you name it, I've bought it and committed it to memory. Nothing makes me feel more complete than visiting a strange city and being able to give random passers-by accurate directions to get where they are going.

Then I moved to Bermuda. It's not that the streets don't have names, or that houses and buildings don't have numbers, it's just that no-one really pays them much mind. All directions are couched in terms of commonly known points of reference. It's probably not a bad idea because road signs (where they exist) tend to only be visible from one direction and not the other. A street that you have passed ten times before traveling west, becomes unmarked when you are searching for it in an eastbound car or bike. Distances are measured in minutes and specifics are addressed in terms of "just before, across from, or just passed" some locally notable landmark. For years I told taxi drivers how to find the school by telling them that it was the "old National Sports Club" just passed the Devonshire Marsh - worked every time! Now that I live here, I find myself slowly devolving into the same practice.

Our house (112A North Shore Road, Unit 4, Devonshire FL03) cannot be found by anyone simply by giving them the address (not even the post office on a regular basis). It is identified as: "the first orange house in Palm Gardens, just before Terceira's Shell station on the North Shore Road coming from town." The market is "at Bull's Head car park"; the bookstore is "by the birdcage"; T-ball practice is "in that churchyard just past White's Market in Warwick". When I tried to give directions the other day to a friend who was looking for the only pub in Hamilton where you can play NTN, I told her that it was at the corner of Front and Parliament. She looked at me quizzically and asked: "That's all well and good, but if I was staring at the Pickled Onion, would I go left or right?"

So, even though the roads have wonderful names like: Point Finger Road; Corkscrew Hill; and Parson's Lane - they never get mentioned. For my Bermudian friends it is a bit of a come down to have to actually resort to numbers and streets to locate an address. The sign that you have truly acclimated, it would seem, is to master the ability to pinpoint a house by visual picture rather than by an alpha-numeric label.

Oh well, the only saving grace for me is that now when someone wants to know specifically what street something is on, my Bermudian colleagues always say - "ask Jim, he'll know!"

Some things never change.

Always learning

I have spent the last 10 years yapping at Boards and Heads about governance. I knew it all. Based on my experiences in L&A, at Weston, and over sixty CESI reviews, I thought that there was little that you could tell me about the mechanics of good governance. Wrong, as usual!

Last night we had a Board retreat deep in the wilds of Hamilton Parish. Sitting on the porch of one of the most wonderful homes that I have ever visited, the Somersfield Board took its own spin on the nature of governance and schools. The meeting didn't run according to plan or schedule, it didn't specifically address its stated objectives and outcomes, but it was wonderful. 

My Chair, and friend, Tom Vesey takes a low-key, somewhat folksy and self-deprecating approach to leadership. But he is masterful at his task. There was a wealth of bright and creative minds around the table and they doggedly pursued tangents, got mired in "what ifs" and generally tried to stray as far from closure as possible on any topic. The result was a discussion that was rich and nuanced and full of surprises. And what did they discuss? Philosophy and vision and kids and learning and sustainability and legacy and everything that you would want a strategic board to talk about. What did they avoid? Nuts and bolts and day to day and niggling concerns. They are parents and community members, educators and business people, entrepreneurs and professionals of all stripes. 

What did I learn about governance? I learned that effective "management" of the Board process is not necessarily effective leadership. I learned that talented Boards trust their Head but don't necessarily believe them on any given issue. They challenge, they push and they question. An old colleague of mine, Willis Boston - Director of the Lennox and Addington County Board of Education - once said to me that Boards never make the wrong decision. If they don't do what you want, it either means that you were wrong or that you didn't make your case well enough. In either case, it is up to you to change not them. 

I feel fortunate to work for people who believe in the school and its mission and who are going to hold my feet to the fire to ensure that things happen the way that they should.

Life gives you what you need. I came to Bermuda to enjoy the daily company of my wonderful partner and beautiful young boys after spending years where I knew the Maple Leaf Lounge at Pearson better than my own living room. That has been beyond amazing!

But I have rediscovered something else en route. The joy of being part of a learning community. The energy and resilience of children. The amazing depth of commitment of teachers and staff to do everything they can for the families that trust in them. The amazing contribution of volunteers who could just as easily be sipping cocktails or playing tennis but instead give of themselves to ensure that everyone's child gets just that much more attention.

Mostly I have been reminded that I have been an "expert" for too long and that I really needed to go back to school.

I even pack a lunch - although most days I feel like I am eating crow!

Getting out the door

Used to be that I did my best thinking in the shower or on long drives down the 401 or up the 400 to the cottage. Since I moved to Bermuda I found that these two staples of life in Canada no longer worked for me. The scarcity of fresh water for long showers and the fact that the farthest I can drive from my house is a relatively short and attention demanding twenty kilometers to Ireland Island means that I have had to search out a new venue to clear my head and tackle the issues of the day.

Palm Gardens, our family's oasis in the middle of the Atlantic, sits on North Shore Road overlooking the ocean. A step out of the front door leaves you looking at passing cruise ships, sailboats, the occasional Dockyard to St. George's ferry and a vast expanse of some of the most beautiful blue water that you have ever seen.

Behind us is a steep incline to the top of a ridge which runs parallel to the sea and overlooks, on its south slope, the campus of Somersfield Academy. Half-way up our side, winding through farms, forests, a golf course and the occasional pocket of houses is our section of what used to be the rail bed of the old "Rattle and Shake" Bermuda's short-lived, narrow-gauge railway that ran from one end of the island to the other. The railway is long gone, supplanted by the overpopulation of cars and motor-bikes that now clog the local roads, but the rail bed is still there. Converted into a running/walking/biking/horse riding trail, the legacy of Bermuda's brief participation in the age of steam is a car-free passage that intermittently can take you from the outskirts of St. George's in the east to Somerset in the west.

It is the railway trail that has become my new respite from the incursions of the day to day and has become an integral part of my exercise regimen - four or five good runs a week - and my almost daily walking route to and from school.

So, like the horse droppings that I often have to dance around or dodge with the running stroller, these are my trailings - thoughts that come to mind and get deposited during my trips along the trail. No doubt some will be worth avoiding but hopefully some will result in the fertile growth of new ideas and responses.

I'll keep you posted!