I'm not creative enough to make this up . . .

We see ALOT of unbelievable things on our travels through the non profit environment. Organizations that are barely getting by but have a core group of people who deeply believe in the mission and believe in helping people, right through to organizations that have more technology and equipment than they know what to do with. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish I had everything on videotape so that you wouldn't think I was making it up. Thankfully, I have witnesses on most of these encounters. Here is one that can be verified:

We were on an initial visit with a grassroots food bank and social service agency. The "office" was in what used to be a row house, but now was a single because the city had demolished all adjacent properties (our mayor's idea of wiping out blight). On our way, we witnessed a bizarre fistfight in the middle of the street where a woman was beating on a man twice her size while another man just watched. We had to swerve to miss them.

There was already a meeting in progress when we entered the house: "Can I use the bathroom before I leave", asked the man. " Oh no, we don't have any running water", she replied. "Something went wrong when they demolished the two adjacent abandoned houses."

When it was our turn to meet with woman in charge, we discovered that the hole in the roof had been fixed, but not the collapsed ceiling. Only half of the building had electricity. And she wouldn't dare go into the basement to show us the mysterious "hub" that she thought they had. That would have to wait for another time.

We also met with a man from the advisory board. "We'd like to design and host websites here in order to make extra money to support our mission", he said. "My tech guru is going to teach us how to do it. " "We'll keep the web servers (note the plural) in the basement and charge the businesses around here to host their websites. (Did he notice the demolished buildings, what surrounding businesses?)

I explained the current web hosting market environment and gave examples of how giant web hosting and design companies were charging only $2.95 per month. That volume was the only way to make a small margin on web hosting commodity. I even began to do a cost analysis for return on investment for equipment, software, Internet connectivity and redundancy. They argued that they could do it. . .

And then I reminded them both that web servers needed electricity to run and that half of their building didn't have that one essential item. I haven't heard back from them since. I should call them. Oh right, no phone.