I had the opportunity to provide a lunchtime keynote speech, participate in a panel, and provide a workshop during the 2015 annual conference of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Grand Rapids. I was particularly honored to speak alongside some really powerful guests, including a number of personal friends and the tremendous damali ayo.

I had the opportunity to give the lunchtime keynote, which focused on my own personal and professional story.

My afternoon talk was called Queering the Value Equation. In it, my goal is to show that reticence to be inclusive in nonprofit organizations is often directly related to reticence to fully, authentically embrace the organizational mission*, and investment in developing a culture of authenticity both solves the “LGBT question” and makes the organization real. For a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which is that I no longer give the kinds of presentations that involve a lot of bullet points, but rather the kind of presentations that tell a story**, I rarely do handouts, and I do not print a copy of my slides for people. I did, however, decide to make the visuals for my afternoon presentation available online, at least for now, via the beta iCloud Keynote. To see the visuals for that presentation, please head on over to here, using an iCloud supported browser. Think of it as a trial, and maybe I’ll decide to do it again in the future. Maybe I won’t.

Click the picture to see the afternoon presentation visuals

* And I really mean the mission (or better yet, dream), not the mission statement. Mission statements, at their best, can be  powerful rallying cry or call to arms, but much more often, they are about as useful as traditional, annual performance evaluations.

** I do feel there is a certain element of intellectual property, as well, in the way I give presentations, which is mine and mine alone. I am pleased to give away passion and some knowledge, but I retain ownership over my art form. In case you’re wondering if I still think like a libertarian….