action family ideas tips

Membership Orgs, Don’t Do This to Your Members

Last fall, I became a member of the Arbor Day Foundation. Yay, trees! I love trees. I want to save trees. The Arbor Day Foundation loves and plants trees. Sounds like a membership marriage made in heaven, right? Not exactly. Almost immediately after becoming an annual member, like within a couple of months, I received a mailing from the Arbor Day Foundation asking me to renew my membership. What the what? Excuse me, I just…

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design history ideas pragmatic historian time

A Thought Experiment on Flag Day

Today is Flag Day in the United States. I thought it was Father’s Day, but that’s next weekend. My days are all messed up with working from home because they just run into one another. I can see why holidays are so important for marking time. I don’t typically pay much attention to Flag Day, but as circumstance would have it, I was thinking about the U.S. flag a couple of days ago. Here was…

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action history ideas pragmatic historian

C-19 Window Symbols for COVID-19 Victims

I have seen the sentiment expressed multiple times online that the weeks we have lived in 2020 feel like years as the serious events of the year, including the pandemic, innumerable political events, and the death of George Floyd with the resulting worldwide protests, pile up on us. We barely have time to process major news related to any particular event when another hits and it’s all we can do to hang on for the…

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