Our Story
Once I had a prized coffee mug, hand-crafted by my brother-in-law. Mmm, I loved how my aeroPress coffee tasted in that mug.
One morning, I pressed too hard and my mug broke to pieces. I thought there was nothing I could do to salvage it, so I sadly threw it in the trash.
Life is like that sometimes, isn’t it? Sometimes our lives crumble under pressure and we feel discarded, thrown away like my beautiful mug.
A few years ago, I learned that people in Japan fix their broken items: they fill the cracks of their broken items with gold. Not only does its strength hold broken pieces together, but it also adds profound beauty to the item that was broken. In this way broken items are transformed, converted into something new and even more precious. After this realization, I did what any enlightened person would do and dug my mug out of the trash bin. There was good to be saved.
It’s likely your nonprofit began to do good work in this world–work that responds to some of the brokenness you’ve seen or experienced by patching up the cracks and crevices with strength and beauty.
Over the past 20 years, I have started, worked for, and overseen several small to medium-sized nonprofits.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve patched a lot of my own nonprofit cracks, and had to patch some within myself. I have started, worked for, and overseen several small to medium-sized nonprofits. But this expertise in transformation was hard won through much trial and error. Quite honestly, when I first started out, I didn’t know how to operate a nonprofit organization. I searched for resources but they were mostly geared for large, existing nonprofits, not for the needs of the organization I was trying to establish. We had a young and inexperienced team with few financial resources, but we were united with a passion for making a difference that would rival any large nonprofit. We did eventually figure it out, but it seemed like we were spending more time learning how to run an organization than we were serving the people we were called to serve.
In other words, it wasn’t a good use of time.
Join our Loving Venti community and we will walk with you.
~ Catherine (Draeger) Pederson, Ph.D., Founder of Loving Venti, LLC.
“It’s likely you or your nonprofit began to do good work in this world – work that responds to some of the brokenness you’ve seen or experienced – by patching up the cracks and crevices with strength and beauty.”
