I recently had occasion to meet-up with some former co-workers from the non-profit community agency that I worked for back in the 1990s. The Catholic priest who founded the organization was celebrating his almost-50th anniversary of ordination, and his underlings were nice enough to include me on the invitation list. Actually, there weren’t all that many people that I remembered, and those I did know were often ex-employees themselves. Nonetheless, I was still glad that I went. (The priest-in-question considers himself to be a pro-black community activist; but no, he didn’t perform any anti-Hilary tirades, a la Father Pfleger. Still, the African nuns who serve at his parish had an interesting little dance step that they perform when marching up the aisle, so there was some entertainment after all.)<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most interesting comment that I received was from a fellow about my age who still works for this agency. He is a fairly well-known community activist within the agency’s service area, and not long ago he began dabbling with politics by running for and being elected to the city school board. Unfortunately, he recently ran for a second term and was defeated. Some of the local political power factions put together a block of candidates that did not include him. He was no doubt hoping that his boss and his agency would rally to support him, given the fairly large number of people that the agency-in-question serves each day. <\/p>\n
But I got the feeling during my brief conversation with the community activist that his boss (the priest) decided not to get in the way of the powers that be. No doubt the agency needs their cooperation in matters such as tax collection leniency and unused land sales and grant funding assistance. The activist’s disappointment and disillusionment was rather clear when I told him that I was hoping to become involved again with a community-based outreach agency at some point (I went over to a governmental law enforcement agency in 2001). Only two or three years ago, the same fellow was encouraging me to consider returning to the non-profit fold (unfortunately, pension considerations and financial support commitments to an aging parent make that idea impractical at present). But yesterday, when I expressed such interest, his fact took on a grave expression, and he said “be v-v-v-e-e-e-r-r-r-y-y-y careful”<\/span>. <\/p>\n Ah yes, good old “burn out”. Today, when I got back to my insignificant little desk job in the law enforcement world, I didn’t feel so bad about it. I guess that you have to just make the best of things where ever you are, whatever the cards you’ve been dealt. And actually, I’m not totally giving up on the non-profit world. The government gives me a fair amount of vacation time, and I might eventually start using some of that to do part-time work in “the community”. That’s perhaps one reason why it’s good for me to stay in touch with my former non-profit colleagues. Like many of them, I experienced burn-out, but maybe I’ll eventually get past it. And I’m sure that my community activist colleague will also get past his. <\/p>\n As Governor Schwarzenegger once said (before he was Governor): I’LL BE BACK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently had occasion to meet-up with some former co-workers from the non-profit community agency that I worked for back in the 1990s. The Catholic priest who founded the organization was celebrating his almost-50th anniversary of ordination, and his underlings were nice enough to include me on the invitation list. Actually, there weren’t all that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4937,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions\/4937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}