ON BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL FUNDRAISER
Getting ready for a virtual fundraising gala during the pandemic. Fires were burning, people were dying, but damn, did we raise a lot of money for vulnerable populations.
My career started after my time at the American Film Institute as a Producing Fellow, when I landed work as a reader of scripts and novels for various studios in Hollywood. Like everyone else in LA, I was writing a screenplay and picking up production work on films whenever possible. Being a free-lance reader led to a full-time job on the HBO series The Hitchhiker, aka the “erotic Twilight Zone.” Rather than entice me to climb the ranks and battle to work on sometimes embarrassing film and TV projects, these experiences turned me away from all things Hollywood and toward literature. I wanted to write something meaningful about what it was like being a woman in contemporary America. I wanted freedom from the creative confines of commercial film and television. I wanted to tell real stories about feminism. I wanted to be an artist.
Leaving LA, first for Mexico and then for San Francisco, was a pivotal move. By then I had met my future husband and father of my children. Working at the San Francisco Art Institute while he got his BFA was the link from artmaking to the nonprofit world, which was a morally acceptable way to support myself, my husband, and our baby. I didn’t want a corporate life, or a conventional relationship. I was writing about those choices, and the personal consequences and challenges of trying for an alternative existence in a world still crippled by sexism and patriarchy.
Seeds of social justice and radical feminism were germinating in my writing as I chaffed against the debilitating burden of being a mother and artist while also supporting a family that turned, over time, into five people. To quote Rachel Cusk from her novel Parade:
“Where women have gone wrong…is in mistaking an unconventional man as their chance for freedom. The worst stories of female sabotage in the arts are always those ones. A woman artist marries a male artist because she sees her ambitions mirrored in him. She thinks that because he’s an artist he’ll let her be an artist–she thinks he’s the one guy who will understand her. But a male artist wants a slave, and when he marries a woman artist he gets the bonus of a slave who thinks he is a genius.”
The harsh realities of my domestic life as a mother was exacerbated by being married to an artist, though the injustice was/is true for all women. The grueling grind was shocking. Writing was my escape, providing a world in which I could explode a fantasy life where I was freer. Meanwhile, my relationship and communications skills, honed as a producer at film school as I talked people into giving time and money for dumb student film projects, served me well as I meandered into the world of nonprofit “development,” aka fundraising. Turns out that if you are going to work at low-paying nonprofits, a path to a decent C-Suite salary is through development. Publishing my personal writing about sex and liberation felt too risky, however, as I became a more public figure with tremendous responsibility.
I attempted for years to satisfy my yearning to be a full-time artist by raising money for arts organizations, but my passion for social justice took over while living in an artists community that my husband and I created on Market street in San Francisco—where poverty and homelessness still meet the extraordinary wealth of Union Square. When I was offered a job at Glide, a nationally recognized center for social justice located in the Tenderloin, my career took another turn. By the time I left Glide five years later, I was the senior director of development responsible for raising millions per year and overseeing a large team of development and communications professionals.
Now, as a semi-retired leadership coach and fundraising consultant to a number of nonprofits committed to social justice, I finally have the freedom to spend the majority of my time writing. I’m finishing a memoir and a collection of short stories, starting another book, and defining my online presence without concern that my writing will offend donors or board members who (formerly) controlled my paycheck. I am, at last, financially independent. This site offers a place where all the elements of my creative and professional journey can find integration. It will help me identify and bond with my true friends and allies.