Our Favorite Things: What We’re Reading

We recently asked CEC’s Staff, Board, and Partnership Council about their role as thought leaders in the Santa Barbara community, asking what books, articles, films, apps, podcasts, and other multimedia are influencing their work.

Today we’re hearing from Jacob, Sigrid, Barbara, and Brian.  Stay tuned for the next installment of this series!

What we’re reading…

	CEC Partnership Council Member Barbara Lindemann read Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver.  Set in a small east Tennessee town, this story addresses the “reality of climate change and the resistance that scientists face in countering the influence of corporate-sponsored denials.”  Amidst the environmental, economic, and political dilemmas, the characters are forced to challenge what they have always deemed as truth and consider sustainable change in their community.
CEC Assistant Director Sigrid Wright recently read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.  She says it’s “a must-read for anyone wanting to involve all personality types on their team.”  After taking a small group of non-profit executives to see the author speak at a UCSB lecture last fall, she said the topic “sparked some great dinner conversation and got me thinking further about how powerful solutions can come from quieter reflection.”
	CEC Partnership Council Member Jacob Tell recommends Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, saying it is a “great book on examining how creativity and the creative process work from both an artistic and scientific perspective.”  Even in the wake of Lehrer’s plagiarism scandal, this book has still been highly acclaimed as a must-read as he expands on the importance of “embracing the rut, thinking like a child, and daydreaming productively” in order to create better neighborhoods, companies, and schools.
CEC Board Treasurer Brian Fahnestock recommends a timely article entitled Ten Nonprofit Funding Models in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.  It discusses the challenges the nonprofit sector faces when it comes to financing organizations in the current economic state and provides 10 models that “could support the growth of organizations” while simultaneously examining “potential and constraints associated with those models.”