Philippe Lazaro
OCTOBER 2016

To my moment-makers

It recently dawned on me that the thread connecting all the stuff I love doing is that they’re all about creating experiences.

From improv and making a one-time-only moment for the people sharing the space, to taking my kids out on field trips, to my love for inviting friends on trips and splitting up a big house… I think the most natural way for me to express love for people is to try and create experiences for them.

Something that breaks up routine, opens up senses, and introduces something unfamiliar.

I try to take this practice into my work and art, knowing that one of the things I’m most naturally inclined to do is to create an experience out of whatever I’m working on.

Imperfect Climate Action

Imperfect climate action is where it’s at.

One of the easiest ways to suffocate a movement is to demand perfection from those who join.

Getting a large number of people to reduce meat consumption ultimately helps the planet more than getting a handful of purists.

Flight shaming, diet shaming, and other guilt-based approaches aren’t just annoying. They’re strategically unwise. Trying to have a “perfect environmental report card” is ironically rooted in the same sort of individualism that created the climate crisis.

When you move past this and embrace the fact that your actions will be imperfect, you can then work on focusing your efforts towards what gets done together.

You don't need to be the one who hits launch

From my vantage point, the world of nonprofits, social initiatives, and change-making projects is a little too oriented around the people at the top of organizations, as though the work of making a difference in the world is concentrated in the hands of founders and executive directors.

Not to take anything away from how hard it is to start and run an organization, but running a successful mission requires way more people than that. We shouldn’t approach the world of social innovation and philanthropy as though that were the case.

I’ve been in the world of nonprofits and social organizations for well over a decade. In that time I’ve subscribed to so many newsletters, joined so many networks, and attended so many conferences on how to make a bigger impact.

The fact that I’m here after all these years and feel like I’m just getting started is a testament to how much I enjoy the space. I love the energy of people committed to a mission. But so much of the material I read or the events I attend are designed as though the only people in the audience are in the organization’s top position.

The thing that makes these organizations run are teams. Not just a couple people at the top. If we acted as if those starting and running organizations were the real changemakers, and everyone else were a cog in the machine, what does that suggest? That the biggest impact gets made by having hundreds and thousands of “organizations” that really just consist of 1-2 people so everyone can be a founder or executive director?

Of course, everyone realizes how absurd that sounds when you say that out loud. Yet, when the world of philanthropy routinely hosts a bunch of gatherings, organizes networks, and invests only in those top roles, that’s kind of the structure we’re assembling.

I’m not saying we should have less of that for organization founders and executive directors. I think there should be more of that for everybody else.

Ultimately, that shift would be reflective of a bigger culture shift that I think needs to happen in the world of nonprofits, social investing, philanthropy, or whatever you want to call that space. We need to become less focused on finding heroes and more focused on creating communities.

I’ve seen a good number of organizations in recent years rise on the shoulders of their founder’s charisma, only to collapse under the weight of a personal moral failure. Ironically, that moral failure is often tied to the pressure they face in their role. A role described by many as a lonely one.

When I was a student, I absolutely loved the origin stories of some of my favorite organizations.

There was such a common pattern to them, they almost became a trope. 

The founder is usually someone at a crossroads in their personal life. They go on some sort of trip to find themselves, and end up discovering some social issue when they get there. Trafficked children. A civil war. Intense poverty. They decide to do something to solve the problem and then, presto! Organization launched. Purpose found.

When I graduated college, it was easy to imagine my life following a similar path, which is why one of the places I ended up a few months afterwards was at a home for at-risk kids in a seedy South African neighborhood. 

To sum up a few challenging, growing, and perspective-shifting weeks in one of my many takeaways, I came to better understand all the problems with trying to be a “hero” to a complex social crisis, and how often that creates more harm than good. I realized that there was no substitute for local leadership, or having years of experience working on the ground. And I learned that showing up consistently, day-after-day, is how real change happens.

I remember one mentor who told me, in reference to the work of stopping human trafficking, that everybody wants to be the action star who kicks down the door to the brothel. But none of that is happening without somebody who writes the grant applications to fund it. Or somebody who handles the travel logistics and financial documentation. And you’ll also want to make sure you have someone trained in trauma counseling who can handle aftercare. 

Long story short, it takes a team.

If anybody is kind of in a similar position to where I was back then, I think the thing I’d want them to think through is to ask if you really need to be starting an organization or launching something, or if there are already people out there doing the work who you could join, team up with, or amplify in some way.

After all, what do we think would work better? 200 anti-trafficking organizations that are mostly the work of 1-2 people a piece? Or six anti-trafficking organizations with full teams, and team members who can really specialize in their area of expertise?

And imagine if those resources and networks were available not just to CEOs or founders, but to all kinds of roles found within a team? The relationship building fundraisers? The grant-writers who can take these dry forms and tell a story on them that compels? The people doing tech and engineering work for social impact organizations?

And guess what? This exists! For people in my kind of role, there’s the nonprofit storytelling conference, there are ways to meet others. Just imagine if there were even more. Imagine if there was more out there on how to lead from within. How to lead from behind. How to lead from a niche role. Because that’s what the majority of us will do.

One quick note- while I am in the habit of telling people to quit thinking they need to start everything from scratch and to look for the others, I do realize that there are a good number of people who, due to their gender or skin color or whatever else, might not be initially thought of as someone who could assume a top spot within an organization’s structure. Maybe because people don’t often see them in that way, they’ve learned not to see themselves that way. To people in that position, I might say, don’t let these ideas here lead you to be less of yourself. Just marry your pursuit of leadership to the following idea.

Creating change in the world should invite less hype around heroes and more focus on cultivating community. 

I understand the appeal of having some people you can really look up to, and I certainly have a good amount of those figures. I think of Bryan Stevenson with the Equal Justice Initiative.

But just imagine if all the hoopla that we put into trying to win people over using personalities were redirected towards an atmosphere where people were welcomed. A place where other people could find their people.

A Better Way to Plant Trees

I used to think of planting trees as one of the simplest ways to do something good. Trees are pretty straightforward, help heal the earth, and are simply pleasant to be around.

Turns out, the act of tree planting can be pretty complicated! In a frenzied effort to plant as many trees as possible, there have been several recent examples of tree planting going really wrong. These include scenarios where reforestation sites have displaced human communities, cases where harmful species have been planted, or where a failure to account for social factors have resulted in a net loss of trees.

Get this, though. Tree planting is still important. We just need to figure out a better way to do it, one that turns up the good and reduces the harm.

Based on my recent visit to a Plant With Purpose reforestation site in Ethiopia and my conversation with tree planters, here are a few core ideas behind tree planting in an effective way:

🌳 Plant the right tree in the right place

🌳 Let the locals lead

🌳 Pay attention to social/economic factors

🌳 Focus on beliefs around trees, not just behaviors

🌳 Strive for whole-ecosystem health

Tony Gwynn

I wanted to do a Tony G piece this year since it’s been ten years since the Patron Saint of San Diego passed. Saw a thread polling people on the hardest ballplayers to hate, and unsurprisingly he was a top five response.

Once I met Tony Gwynn at a Gateway Computer Store. Had to have been one of the most 1990’s days of my life. Great guy. Great hitter too, of course.

The Bad News Bias

A big announcement dropped a couple weeks ago.

A pre-exposure prophylaxis medication against HIV had its phase 3 study end early… because it had already shown to be so effective that anything delaying this from getting to the public would at this point be unethical.

The tools to end, or at least significantly disarm the threat of HIV within our lifetime are now coming into focus, and I keep thinking about some of the HIV-impacted kids I spent some of my earliest post-college years working with.

This is perhaps the 6th or 7th major disease this decade I’ve seen this happen with. What would’ve been an ominous prognosis 20 years ago is now liveable. I’ve also seen very few headlines about this. No major media outlet blasted this, you would’ve likely needed to seek it out, or have heard about it from someone more immersed in HIV reporting.

I think of all the people I know who face copious anxiety, at least partially because of all that goes on in the world. Yes, there are a ton of horrors too. But bad news travels so much faster than good news, even really good news. Don’t forget to factor that in to however you feel about the world.

Rhys the Travel Buddy

I took Rhys traveling around Finland for a week and by the end, couldn’t help but think to myself… I got a really great travel buddy.

We talked about our “big snowy trip” for months. He got real familiar with the Finland page of his world map book. He triple checked with me to make sure the wolves and wolverines would stay within the woods of the Taiga and not be in our way.

Kid took to the adventure with all the enthusiasm and curiosity that comes natural to a four year old, but also with a sense of adaptability and teamwork that many adults struggle with. In the end, he had a great time. I had a great time.

I kept thinking of our first year together. Him as a squish and both of us cooped up at home. At some points it felt like I might never travel again. A part of me was okay with that, and another part was dying. Four years later, I can be both dad and backpacker. We get to walk together to find the right train platforms and food markets.

It’s brought me so much joy to hear him share stories from the trip with the rest of the family in his own words. We did so much cool stuff, but what was really cool was getting to do it with him.

Best Books of the 21st Century

The NYT Books section recently released its picks for the Top 100 books of the 21st Century, so far, given that we just hit the quarter-mark.

I was honestly surprised to see that I was in agreement with so many of their picks! Then I read the reader picks and thought… huh, this list is pretty good too.

Then I just needed to make my own. But I don’t read quite as much as the whole books section of the biggest newspaper. So I cut it in half. Here are my top 50. My excuse for every snub is that I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Tree Planting Day in Ethiopia

Check out this reforestation day in Ethiopia.

Here is something I often see left out of the conversation around tree planting, unfortunately. The local population. COMMUNITY! A lot of time it’s easy to think of forests and imagine National Parks or the Canadian Rockies, places that have very little human activity. But in some of the most critical and endangered forests in the world, like the Amazon or the Congo Basin, human communities play a vital role in maintaining the forest.

When you have a community that understands the social, spiritual, cultural, and economic benefits for having trees, and when you address concerns like poverty that often drive tree cutting, you wind up with local caretakers and protectors of the forest. And they are the most effective stewards of the land that you could ask for.

10 years after one of my best days

It’s been a decade

A few weeks ago, we celebrated the ten year anniversary of my proposal to Deanna. (Yup, that’s something I track and celebrate… at least for big numbers like TEN)

Anyways, it was a great day. Naturally, we rewatched the video of the event a couple times. I managed to recruit friends and family from all kinds of corners of our life and turn a pier in Santa Barbara into a blitz restaurant.

Here are some notes & observations of the proposal, ten years after the moment…

1) To make a moment meaningful, make it FOR the person you’re celebrating

Sometimes it can get a little too tempting to create a moment around my own sense of what would be romantic or fun. I’ve made this mistake on dates more than once, but there was no way I was going to do that on our proposal.

It seems obvious, but make sure whatever you’re planning actually lines up with what your person finds meaningful!

For Deanna, I already knew that a proposal needed to have her family around. Maybe a few of her closest friends

The summer leading up to the proposal was actually full of fake-outs, most deliberately to throw her off my trail and keep the element of surprise alive for the real thing! We spent that summer in the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Montana, and Lake Tahoe, so there was no shortage of opportunity for a proposal in any of those settings that would’ve been romantic… but it wouldn’t have been as meaningful for her, especially since I couldn’t get her people all out to those spots.

The reminder to make things FOR the person you’re celebrating continues to be important, as I’ve had more opportunities to celebrate different people… including three kids each with their own distinct tastes and personalities.

2) Build that Village

One of my favorite parts of rewatching the videos of that day is seeing the faces of so many people we love cast into different roles in that mock restaurant.

Her cousin was the greeter who seated us. My cousin and another friend took our order. One friend was the floral arranger who was really hiding cameras in the centerpieces. A couple other friends from school and church came to serenade us.

It was a remainder of the people we were fortunate to have in our lives in 2014, and the way community has always mattered to us.

At that point, we were only a couple years removed from college. It was where we met and the bulk of our friendships came from there. It was a really easy season in our life for making friends. In the ten years that have followed? It’s gotten much harder. Schedules busier. People’s lives whisking them in all sorts of directions.

But the importance of having community, of building that village, remains.

I’m thankful that the past 2-3 years have been more plentiful in that department. Sometimes you’ve gotta keep going until you find more people who also recognize the importance of having other people around, switching things up as needed to make it a priority.

3) Set yourself up to be proud of your younger self

I’m not going to lie, rewatching the video makes me proud of that moment. I’m proud of how everything came together for the whole experience. There were at least a handful of things that I did really, really right in my mid-twenties and so many of them came together on that pier.

I once had a friend say that he wanted to keep growing and getting wiser in life, so much so that in five years he’d only look back at his present-day self and laugh at the foolishness.

I love the growth mindset, but if it means drifting so far away from your present day self you have nothing left to do but to discard it, I dunno. Something about that seems off. Might as well get Jason Bourne’d every few years.

I prefer to think of growth as building on top of the foundational blocks you put down today. Of course you grow and evolve and change in many ways. But thinking that I’m building on-top-of today is a better motivator to doing my very best with it.

4) Crafting an experience is one way to show love

And I think it might be my favorite way.

I love taking my kids out on 1:1 mini-adventures with dad.

I’ve loved taking several friends on trips in recent years.

One of the things I love about improv, speaking, and performing is the aspect of creating an experience for the audience.

I think I place an extra strong emphasis on creating moments because in the end, it’s what we’re left with. Most gifts come apart with age, but our actual lives are a string of moments, and to be able to add an exceptionally good one, a memorable one, on someone else’s string seems like one of the best gifts.

Plus, I’m a big believer that life is a little too big of a gift to not want to free it from repetition and routine to remind us all of how incredible it is to even be here.

5) The Crappy Parts Fade

So there’s another part to the proposal, one that kind of sucks, and one that I often forget about. And I bet almost everyone else who was there doesn’t remember it until I bring it up.

I bought Deanna’s engagement ring as a set with a wedding band, and just after she said yes, I took out the box to show her the other part. Opening the box had the effect of thrusting the ring upwards and out of the box.

It fell onto the pier, spun around a few times, and right into a crack between planks.

There’s at least one gold ring down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean if anyone wants it.

When that happened, it felt like the easiest thing to shrug off. There was no way I was letting that bring down how good of a day it was. What’s a ring when held up against an entire future together? I thought of the spinning ring as comical, then shrugged it off for the rest of the day.

Of course I’m not thrilled about losing something that valuable to the ocean. But what can you do? Making the choice to not feed the disappointment with any oxygen was the right choice.

Also, we ended up getting a matching set from a quirky jeweler at an Oregon farmers’ market that we’ve been wearing the past decade. Seems more ‘us’ in the long run, anyhow.

I love having moments in the past that I can look back on and simply say, “yeah, wow. I’m really glad I did that.” And since my early-to-mid 20s were such an eventful time in my life, it feels like I’ve been commemorating a lot of those lately.

But the way you get there is to simply make the choice in the present to make the moment. Give your future self some gold to look back on. (Just not literal gold. That’s for the ocean.)

Paella

Wikipaella is an online platform on a mission to save Valencia’s signature dish from being bastardized and lost in translation.

A proper paella isn’t meant to be a seafood showcase. It’s traditional proteins have been chicken and rabbit. It’s actually meant to be more of a presentation of the rice and saffron, highlights of regional trade, rather than all the fixins. And the Wikipaella editors aren’t afraid to take shots at the likes of Jamie Oliver for his inclusion of chorizo. “Imagine if we said that we were making typical British fish and chips and we were putting oranges in it?”

Are they cops? Yes. Cops of cuisine. Are they gatekeeping? Proudly. It’s impressive and intimidating all at once. There are as many things to argue about regarding paella as there are ways to make the dish.

So you want to plant trees

Planting trees is in many ways more popular than ever.

On the whole, it’s a good thing that there’s so much interest in reforestation. But, there’s a right way to do it. There’s more to it than frantically planting a large quantity of trees. You need to think in terms of the ecosystem.

When you think about the entire ecosystem, it becomes important to plant the right tree. It becomes important to involve the local community. It becomes important to not just plant trees, but to protect them.

Things That Demand Presence

Improv, travel… even baseball. There’s this throughline between the things I enjoy doing most.

They’re things that ask you to get out of your own head. To be in your body. And to be totally present.

It’s strange and a bit unfortunate that being present like that, having to focus on nothing but the event right in front of you, takes special effort and invitation. But locking into that flow is so rewarding.

I’m a bit of a chronic multitasker and doer-of-too-man-things in everyday life. Time usually feels like it’s going too fast. Rather than always trying to go faster I love those invitations to hop off the treadmill through something that feels a bit more like play.

Finnish Happiness Hits Different

Finland has been named the World’s Happiest Country for several years in a row now. It’s a nice little win streak.

But if you were to spend some time in Finland and got to know a few Finns, you might start questioning that. Like, wait… these are the happiest people in the world? They don’t exactly seem especially jolly.

Generalizing, of course, but Finnish culture tends to be reserved. And they have a habit of tempering expectations in a way that might seem like pessimism to a lot of other cultures. It’s really different from how I’m used to thinking of happiness. Finns aren’t terribly caught up in futuristic ambitions. Back in the U.S., there’s a constant effort to try and ‘make it,’ to accomplish some big feat.

In Finland, people set their aim toward being just okay. Reaching a state of contentment. Being okay or content is a higher priority than being exuberant.

On one hand, I like that. It keeps you grounded and present. On the other, I dunno. I kind of like riding the highs and lows of a pursuit.

Sanya

Seven years ago this summer, I took my first visit to a Plant With Purpose program site: Tanzania.

Dropping new art of Joyce in Sanya to commemorate it.

I visited communities right at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It made the links between climate change and poverty pretty clear.

Melting ice, unpredictable rain, longer dry seasons all set up the land for soil erosion. When you’re in a community where everybody farms and life is already difficult, an inadequate harvest is devastating.

Despite this situation affecting some 800 million people, I never saw an approach well tailored to deal with this intersection until Plant With Purpose, taking it a step forward to improve people’s land and livelihoods by integrating their spiritual lives.

Thanks for the outstanding hospitality, Tanzania. I still have strong memories of the enthusiastic welcome.

Valencia

A flavorful little taste into our life in Valencia:

Evenings of making poser paella, a playground right outside our front door, windy beach evenings, using the colorful gym at the end of our street to navigate, xurros and orxata, city buses, Mercadonas, and the best Gulliver’s Travels themed park I’ve ever been to.