Why 8th House?
When I started out 25 years ago in nonprofit fundraising, working primarily in the performing arts, I felt very othered and out of place in a lot of professional development and networking opportunities, from development luncheons to internships. They didn't always feel welcoming to fat queer female bodies like mine. They didn't always reflect my progressive values. Sometimes they encouraged a performance of class markers that felt uncomfortable, as though you have to present as a rich person in order to ask rich people for money. It was hard to find answers to questions like:
. . . what if those rich funders are kind of gross, terrible people, but you know you'd do good things with their money? Is the moral thing to say yes, or no?
. . . do nonprofits have to operate under the same rigid, top-down hierarchy as a corporation, or do we only think we do because we always have?
. . . what is, and is not, appropriate for your manager at an overworked, understaffed nonprofit workplace to ask you to do?
. . . how do you navigate the ethical gray area of tailoring your asks to match your project to a funder's values? Are you just emphasizing the parts they might like most, or are you downplaying the parts they might find controversial?
Everything I know about how to do this work in alignment with my conscience, I learned in the field from other people who were doing it. I learned over post-work happy hours and in long, tense meetings; from incredible bosses who mentored me and from organizations that seemed perpetually in crisis. I've worked for companies whose annual expenses were close to $10 million a year, and companies who tracked their budget with a shoebox full of receipts. I've seen more executive leadership transitions, panic-inducing deficits, and organizational near-implosions than you can imagine.
And I've come away from it all with strong opinions about how a good grantwriter can serve a unique, powerful role within a nonprofit: not just as the person helping keep the lights on and the water running, but as a guiding ethical voice, a vital centralized information hub, and a community advocate helping push the whole nonprofit sector in a more progressive direction.
If this sounds exciting to you, I hope you'll join us in the 8th House.
What's with the name?
In astrology, the wheel of the sky is divided into twelve wedges called "houses," each assigned to different traits or aspects of your life; the placement of particular astral bodies with particular properties within each wedge when you were born is said to shape who you become. (For example, I have Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto all in my 1st House of identity and self, which I assume is what ADHD looks like on a birth chart.)
The domain of the Eighth House includes any area of your life connected to other people's money and assets, which makes it the house of grants and fundraising. But the Eighth House is also ruled by Pluto (see, now, I lost you with the astrology bit, but I won you back with this because everyone loves Pluto), which is the planet of death, rebirth, cycles, and change.
Quite frankly, I think there are a lot of aspects of nonprofit fundraising culture which need to die . . . but I'm hopeful about the possibility of collective action to help us dismantle what's holding us back from progress and build something better.