August 24, 2012 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Trish Tchume, executive director of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, on what she reads.
Publications she follows on Facebook:
• The Huffington Post
• Colorlines Magazine
• Work on Purpose, a blog on an Echoing Green program for young social entrepreneurs
Favorite Twitter feeds for news:
• Nonprofit Quarterly (@npquarterly)
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy (@philanthropy)
• The New York Times (@nytimes)
Hashtag she tracks on Twitter: #ISNGen (Independent Sector’s tweets about developing young leaders)
Book she recently read: Children of the Movement, by John Blake
A book that has influenced her work: Mouse Pads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics, by Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter. The book taught her how to get her organization’s members involved in building the organization and why not meddling too much in their activities is smart.
Book she wishes she had read earlier in her career: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, essays by 21 activists that explore shortcomings of nonprofits. “It’s a very direct critique of the nonprofit sector and how funding structures perpetuate power dynamics. but it also pushes us and encourages us to think about what are the alternatives to do our work. I think that’s always a good thing.”
Worst advice she has ever read: The dating-advice book, The Rules, “sits pretty squarely at the intersection of two of my pet peeves: lists that tell you that if you do these 10 things everything will be awesome and any advice that tells you that your instincts are a bad thing.”
On her summer reading list:
• One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories
• Rock On: an Office Power Ballad, by Dan Kennedy. “He’s my favorite host of ‘The Moth,’ an organization that I volunteer with that promotes the art of storytelling. It’s been sitting next to my bed for a year.”
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath
Guilty pleasure: “I’m a total Jezebel addict,” she says about the site aimed at women and full of features on celebrities and fashion.
