Nate Levin-Aspenson Archive

Why I can’t get North Carolina’s state motto out of my head (and what other white people can learn from my obsession)


My friend Jess Null recently started a book club for the Rhode Island AFP Chapter. It’s been great, and not just because I need structure and deadlines to finish anything. We’ve been able to have some really rich discussions of important texts in fundraising.

For the last one, I finally read Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth. Near the end Villanueva, a fellow North Carolinian, ties the book together by recalling the North Carolina state motto, and how that phrase informed the values he grew up with.

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Take a lesson from Legos: Donor-centric fundraising doesn’t have to be in opposition to community-centric fundraising

When I was a kid, my mom (shoutout to my mom), found this catalog in the back of a Lego instruction booklet that let us call the Lego company and order little packages of specific Lego pieces.

This was a game-changer in our house.

Because whenever we got that big blue Lego bucket out, we were always on the hunt for those little fiddly pieces that were so hard to find. Joints. Hinges. Those little toggles that make the Lego people look like they’re using a joystick. All of them worth their weight in gold if you wanted to build a cool robot or a spaceship with a working hatch (which, as it happens, I often did).

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