Surrogate Mothers and Citizens of the World

I am happy to report the passport saga has come to a happy ending.

For those of you who don’t know: I have been working on getting my three children German passports for 14 months now.  They entered Germany with their US passports. Ruby and Rory are scheduled to leave and spend the summer in Silver City on July 10.  If they were to exit Germany with the US passports, and no proof of German citizenship,  they would get arrested for overstaying their visas. And not be able to return to Germany.

So we needed the German passports. This was not even an immigration or citizenship issue: The kids have German citizenship by being children of a German mother. No, I thought, it was a bureaucracy issue.  Or was it?

The sequence of emails between myself, the consulate in Houston and the Buergeramt (citizen’s service office) in Berlin-Steglitz spans a year, and if printed would circumvent the globe. The main hurdle: before issuing documents to Germans born in a foreign country, the issuing office has to receive the ok from the German consulate in the country of birth. I did not understand why until the very end of the ordeal. The reason is creepy.

I don’t want to bore the reader with details, but the barriers to receiving passports where a mix of bureaucracy and incompetence, and included

• No response to the letter of inquiry from Steglitz to Houston
• Steglitz refusal to follow-up with looking into why there was no response
• No response for a month from Houston to my phone and email messages
• Steglitz resending the inquiry via email to a mistyped email Houston email address
• Houston requesting “long” birth certificates, stating the town of birth (which Texas issues upon request, and NM doesn’t issue unless you bribe someone)
• Benny’s midwife’s basement having flooded a few years back, turning all records into pulp
•  City of Austin demanding a utility bill to verify identity of me requesting my kids’ birth certificates

Once we received the long birth certificates in the mail, mailed them to Berlin, pdf-ed them back to Houston, and after another nail biting ten days passed (the day of the kids’ departure now three weeks away) because the head of the passport office was on vacation, she finally sent this email to Steglitz:

Anhand des Schreibens der Hebamme für Ben Alfero und des Wohnsitzes der Eltern im Ort der Geburt laut der Geburtsurkunden für Rory Gregory und Ruby Zeuner, ist eine Leihmutterschaft hier  unwahrscheinlich. Hinweise auf eine Leihmutterschaft oder ähnliches kann ich hier nicht erkennen.

Ein positives Votum gemäß den vorläufigen Durchführungshinweisen des Bundesministeriums des Innern wird hiermit abgegeben.

Non-German speakers, this says: you can give these kids passports now, because there is no evidence of them being born to a surrogate mother... What????

So this is what this bureaucratic nightmare was about. Since surrogate mother deals are less regulated in the US, the German state needs to make sure my kids are actually, genetically, heretically, biologically, (to not say racially) German and not the product of a fertilized non-German egg planted into my German womb.  And this is what caused a year of trouble, hundreds of dollars in fees and mailing costs, and a bunch of gray hair. It had to be German blood in their veins. Creepy.

Whatever. My kids now have EU Passports and dual citizenship (or rather, they had it all along, but now the bureaucrats had to admit it).

So meanwhile, the block my dad lives on in Berlin Kreuzberg erupts in chaos. 40 asylum-seeking refugees from Africa have refused to leave the school on Ohlauer Strasse they had been occupying for over a year. Their asylum applications are not looking promising, and they are facing deportation back to war zones. These guys are on the roof of the building, threatening to jump. They have very little to lose.  1000 police have blocked the entire area, to prevent more people from joining them. Then the Kreuzberg authorities order the school to be cleared. But the police is smarter than the politicians and waits. Many people, including my parents and my sister, sign this petition, supporters are doing sit-ins and demonstrations in the streets right outside of my dad’s balcony.  He can only get into his building showing his ID.  The #ohlauer tweets come 3-4 a minute.

On Wednesday, my dad escapes to our quiet Steglitz and has dinner with us at the Greek place on the corner. He seems harrowed and tired, discouraged by the constant violence he sees outside his window. I offer him political asylum in Steglitz for a few nights. But that night as he gets home, an agreement is reached between the occupiers and the Kreuzberg government. The barricades are removed and everyone goes home. The refugees get to stay in the school, and their other demands will be looked at later. The agreement seems really non-committal, badly written, and anti-climactic, after this week of trauma and violence.

This shitstorm showed once again:  German asylum law, and the bureaucratic system it has created, are not working as a whole and are not doing justice to the individuals stuck in the process.  The whole thing is completely dysfunctional, outdated, designed for a world in which war, political prosecution and human rights violations that happen elsewhere did not concern us in the rich countries. “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar”, untouchable human dignity, says Article 1 of the German constitution. That should define the German nation.  Not blood. Yet that antiquated notion of nationality is at the heart of what keeps us from reforming our asylum process.

Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, it’s the Fourth of July, which President Obama marks by attending a naturalization ceremony, …. and taking the opportunity to remind the nation that US immigration reform has still not happened. The American notion of citizenship, based on shared values, in the President’s words, “adherence to a set of beliefs, and unalienable rights, and obligations to each other, to look after each other and serve one another” makes a lot more sense than the Germans’ in today’s ethnically intermixed world.

Yet the US Congress cannot or is not willing to pass reforms that assure human dignity, keep families together and create a system that works for people and the economy. 50,000 unaccompanied children from Central America have crossed into Texas alone (of all places) since October. Fifty Thousand.  A few hundred were sent to California for processing, and met by angry protesters, shouting “Send them back!”

My children are privileged. Even though it was a pain in the ass, they now have two passports. Through pure luck they are citizens of a country that grants citizenship based on blood and of another country that grants it based on place of birth. But does that really make them citizens of the world? Both passports were issued by wealthy nations with democratic political systems and lots of opportunity. Both nations are democracies that have not figured out how to change policy and how to address the incoming tide of the poor, prosecuted, opportunity-seeking humans that surround us – address it politically, economically, legally and humanely.  It’s the next big challenge for us.  When we figure it out we’ll be true citizens of the world.

One Year and Counting

When you are part of the global tribe, when you are familiar and at home in more than one culture, people ask a lot of questions: So what is this like for you? ….What do you miss most?.... How are the kids doing?....Is it weird to be back?.... there are never short answers. And I can’t help but constantly update this running pro and con table in my head, hunting for the never-to-be-found answer to the question: what is the better side of the fence?

We have been in Berlin for one year this month. June 11, 2013 was the day we left Silver City, NM.  Since I don’t believe in bearing my soul on the Internet, the rougher personal and emotional aspects of our move won’t be discussed here. This blog is about culture, politics, society, and economics, and how those relate to our lives, of course, personally.  I will try a snapshot of what we learned this year.

It is weird to be back. Until now, I had this rule in my life: Never go back to a place you have already been. I am not sure why, but it just wasn’t something I did. I always moved forward. Just breaking that rule in itself is weird and new.  Back to GO, the place of origin.

What helped was that Berlin is probably one of the places in the world that has changed the most radically over the last 20 years. If not the most changed place of all – in terms of the built environment and the culture, mostly. This is of course even more true if one is from East-Berlin. “Ossis” also changed political and economic systems. “Wessis” just had the fact changed that there was a wall around the place and that we were a small, provincial, over-subsidized pool of standing water with a high opinion of our subculture status, not really part of West-Germany, and certainly not part of the surrounding geography. Now Berlin is a full-blown European and global metropolis with most of the advantages, and a growing set of disadvantages, mainly rising cost of housing. But it is still cheaper to live here than in any other city in Germany, and way cheaper than in London or Paris.

So it wasn’t really like going back. It was going to a new place, with a lot of familiar cultural stuff, and the old West-Berlin neighborhoods looking largely the same.

There were a lot of unknowns when we first got here. Would the kids be able to manage school? Would I find a job in this tight job market? What’s the nonprofit sector like here? Would we survive a Berlin winter?  Would my friends remember me?

Most of these questions have been partially answered after one year.  The winter wasn’t so harsh, some friends turned out to be friends and others have moved on.  Engaging in the joy and labor of gently reconnecting with some of them, with their new 20-years later selves. The nonprofit sector has a slightly different role here and sits in a different environment. The German nonprofits themselves feel like very familiar territory. And I have found a job, and it has brought me the level-up in professionalism and challenge that I had wished for, for many years.

One thing I have learned: If I make assumptions about my children, they are probably going to be wrong.  All three have proven that this year, in different ways. From a parenting perspective, this has probably been the hardest year of my life, the most challenging and puzzling, frustrating year, taking me to an unknown edge I didn’t know existed: the point of not knowing how to handle a situation or behavior. And at the same time, my children have made it the most rewarding and reassuring year:  I have seen my older kids grow more into themselves, take the challenge of the new environment, deal with their loss and grief caused by moving. All of them have widened their horizon, their perspective, their relationships and have learned a lot – mostly not in school. None of them have done what and how I expected them to do 12 months ago.

What do I miss most? Of course my husband, and my oldest daughter. My husband.... lover, partner, co-parent.  Then the people of Silver City, and the few close friends I had.  Our spring break trip to Mexico.  Mexican food, sometimes. The Gila River. Our beautiful house. The Tour of the Gila.

What do I appreciate most here? My family (parents, sister, cousin) close by and spending time with them on a regular basis. My family. And then, my family. A few good friends. Being able to go to a movie and concerts, theater. The beauty of Berlin, its parks and lakes and its surroundings, much of which we have yet to explore. Being able to drive to Italy in a day. Living in a buzzling, global, diverse city with interesting politics and always something new going on. My kids being part of an international community at their school. The wild life in our backyard, and its giant old trees swaying in the wind at night. How cheap everything is.  That this is now part of Europe, which is a whole new perspective. My neighbor, who is nice and weird and feeds our cats when we are gone. And a socio-economic system that is still based on solidarity, even though it’s being whittled away, but the idea is still that you should be able to live your life not being in constant terror about paying for healthcare, child care, education, transportation, and that it is ok to pay taxes for this.

So for now, from this perspective of politics, culture, education, economics….this is the better side of the fence for us – but only if our family becomes complete again.

Travel Notes Italy

Kufstein: Berlin has become the laughing stock of Europe, for its inability to build the new international airport. The BER originally was scheduled to open southeast of the capital in 2012, but the opening has been delayed due to faulty fire prevention systems and other logistical fuck-ups. Planning councils and construction managers came and went. The current manager’s main goal seems to be to NOT commit to an opening date, so he won’t get blamed for not meeting it. Our waiter in the local food restaurant in Kufstein, Austria, upon hearing we were from Berlin, told us that at this point it would probably be easier to tear down Berlin and rebuild it next to a functioning airport, than to finish BER. Haha.

We had a heavy, southern dinner - Spätzle, roast deer and the likes. Kufstein is a small town on the Inn River, with a mighty castle on a huge riverside rock towering over everything. The river was the only way to get through this part of the alps, and apparently the castle on the rock was used to blackmail heavy taxes from those trying to pass through. 

Late that night, Rory got locked out of the hotel when he went to get something from the car. After a while he slipped back in, behind a group of freaky people wearing something like part lucha libre/ part heavy metal outfits. We decided, once and for all, that Austrians are weird. Their airports are nothing to write home about either, right? Have you ever had to stop at an Austrian airport?

Montegabbiano: The thing I love most about central Italy is that you can drive off the highway at any point, follow the most intriguing road up the hill and then look for a sign that says “Agriturismo”. You drive up some dirt road to an old farmhouse, and you will get a cute, cozy room and a dinner made from food all produced on the premises. I have never been disappointed with this travel method. You don’t need a reservation, because there a so many of these places, and they are all good. On our way down to Southern Italy this time we stayed at this little place just across the Tuscan Umbrian line, in the province of Orvieto, called Il Gatto Giallo. The owner of this well-run business was a good looking young man named Alessandro, who appeared to be about 22 years old. Despite the fact that the restaurant had catered the police departments of the three surrounding towns for the local election that day, and had a dinner party of 15 headed by a big shot journalist that night, they dragged two extra beds into the last remaining apartment and fed us a dinner of homemade prosciutto, cheese and salamis, roast duck with fave beans, linguini with fresh crab and their own wine. It rained hard all night. In the morning we got hot brioches, fresh fruit and the best coffee I had in years. 

I took an early morning walk from the Agriturismo.
A view of solar fields and beyond.

Hedge Dolphins

And off to the south we went.

Battipaglia: when we first drove through this southern Italian city on our way to the beach town of Santa Maria, it felt distinctly like being on our way to San Carlos in Mexico. Run down stores, feral street dogs, garbage, peeling signs, abandoned buildings, all this right next to the fields that grow much of the vegetables for people and countries north of here. 

Italy (along only with Spain and Greece) features all three economic development categories created by the EU. These are determined by how a region’s per capita gross domestic product relates to the EU average. The categories have fancy names, but essentially they describe poor, developing and rich. The “poor” category means the region is under 75% of the average GDP – this is true for all five southern Italian states.  As a result, more funding goes to these areas, as part of the EU Structural and Rural Development Funds. You’ll see the “made possible by EU funds” signs featuring the golden stars on blue everywhere: bridges, roads, archeological sites, restored buildings, small business start-ups, environmental clean-ups, you name it. Despite the money, (29 billion Euros over the next 7 years for Italy) and the resulting infrastructure projects for the area, Italians have grown weary of the EU, and especially the austerity policies imposed by Germany on the failing EU economies. We saw this poster for the upcoming EU Parliament Elections.

 

The group Italia dei Valori, advocates for Italy remaining in the EU, but for not “becoming Germany”.

Anyway, Battipaglia was ugly, and we were glad to go south to Santa Maria, which is much prettier. The region has one thing going for it, economically, and that is Mozzarella made from Buffalo milk. Several large farms are located along the road between Agropoli and Battipaglia. This cheese, no older than three hours when you buy it at the store or the farm, is the best, most subtly creamy tasting dairy product you will ever have.

But the next day, when we drove back up that way to pick up Charlie from the train station, a Mozzarella truck hit us from behind, putting a huge dent in the brand new rental and a big shock into the kids. Unphased, a few days later, we drove that way again and visited one of the Mozzarella farms, petted the gentle buffaloes and had buffalo yogurt.

Cilento: This whole area, sort of the peninsula south of the gulf of Salerno, is called the Cilento, and it is very, very beautiful. It is a UNESCO world heritage site, and includes Paestum, and ancient greek settlement which was later taken over by the Romans. You can see greek temples next to the foundations of Roman houses. 

Castelabbate is one of the most beautiful medieval mountain top borgos in Italy, with its little viccolos and breathtaking views down to the valley and the Mediterranean Sea at sunset. 

View from Castelabbate-
This totally looks like the ocean should be flooding into the valley

Santa Maria below is the little seaside town where I had found a beachside condo complex that on the internet looked pretty close to our beloved Condominios Pilar in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. It was indeed nice, with a big pool, a clean beach and a simple condo. The difference: it cost four times the rent and the resort was completely inhabited by Germans with tons of little kids, who were entertained by a child care person that was part of their travel package. It was totally like being in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. To complete this impression, it rained most of the time, too. Oh well.

Santa Paolina: The hometown of Charlie’s grandfather Giovanni Aufiero, located in the beautiful green mountains of Campania, has 1,500 inhabitants today. Never a center of major economic activity (between 1880 and 1920 more than half the male population from here migrated to the US, fleeing extreme poverty, natural disasters and overpopulation), this time we felt and heard about “la crisi”, the recession, and how it affects everyone, including the people in our extended family here. 

Charlie’s cousins, all retired from public service jobs and living in their own houses, are doing fine. But those of their children who remained here, and who are now in their thirties and forties, are unemployed, underemployed or without a way to improve their economic situation. Our cousin Agata had to pull her daughter Marianna out of the local elementary school, named after her own late mother, because there were only six kids left in her 2nd grade class, and she was being taught the same stuff as the first graders. Her dad Luigi is down to working 5-6 days per month for a subcontractor of the FIAT factory in nearby Avellino. Almost no young people are left in Santa Paolina. People talk about migrating again, this time to Germany. After talking to the other cousin (also named Agata, distinguished by the adjective “piccola”), who never finished her law degree after getting pregnant with her daughter, I could feel the collective depression the village is in – she halfheartedly assured me she would continue to study after the baby starts going to daycare in September. Towards what future was not apparent….

To this day, people here love America… and dislike the Germans. Cousin Felice, the official town historian, showed us the evidence of the switching of this particular alliance in 1945: the blacked out house number on this old building in Santa Paolina featured the sign of Mussolini’s fascist party. It was quickly painted over during the hours between the retreat of the German troups and the arrival of the Americans. 

Immediately after the end of the war, the family members that had migrated to New York sent care packages to Santa Paolina every few days. In the fifties and later, the expatriate Italians sent money to pay for the floors and the stained glass windows of the church, and for the annual Festa of the Santa Paolina. Ties with the US are strong to this day. New Americans show up several times a year, trying to find their family roots. Felice helps most of them, despite his total lack of English.

One ancient man we talked to in the street, unaware of our German origins, said that Germany had taken over the world with military means in the 1930ies, and was now doing the same with economic means through the EU. It was like his horrible historic memories had come full circle.  Meanwhile the EU helps to pay for the village water drainage system, assuring that the whole place doesn't go downhill with the next rain. That's not as popular as church stuff, I guess. 

Santa Paolina church community getting ready for the procession
 of the Madonnina del Rosario on Easter Monday

Fano: On the way back up north, we decided to check out the “east coast” and stopped in a totally nonfamous town called Fano, just north of Ancona. We checked into a seaside hotel and after an affordable seafood dinner slept to the sound of the Adriatic sea. We spent the morning walking around the historic center of this buzzing, lively town, which combines a seaside port, ancient roman walls, beautiful renaissance architecture, a huge market (apparently on Wednesdays, we were lucky), surprising numbers of inhabitants on bicycles, and tons of cool little stores, cafes and bars. No tourists. Which proves again that traveling anywhere off the beaten path in Italy is so much more rewarding than the Venice-Florence-Rome stress tour.

Bressanone/Brixen: Going back north towards Germany, you have to pass though an Alpine region called Alto Adige or Südtirol, in German. It stretches across Italy and Austria and is bilingual Italian and German. You would think that this eases one back gently into the German world, but it really is quite sudden and feels uncomfortably more German than Germany. This area is very much hidden away in the mountains, conservative, old style, and the southern dialect sounds funny to the kids. Brixen is a pretty historic town of 20,000, still in Italy, surrounded by snow-covered mountains, featuring a huge cathedral, picturesque town square and expensive stores catering to the wealthy mountain climbing and skiing crowd. Tired of driving, we stopped and checked into a little Gasthof where we also had a simple dinner.

Tomorrow night we will be back in Berlin – the capital of the most powerful and wealthy nation in Europe, of the EU bully…..that still can’t figure out how to finish building its airport.

courtesy by Sven Giessen,
found here:https://plus.google.com/+SvenGiesen/posts

Surviving Secondary Education

One of the reasons we moved to Germany was for our kids to get exposed to an education system with higher expectations. I wanted for them to get a good basic body of knowledge and skills from school. That part totally worked, the expectations are higher,  they are learning a lot, even though we buffered this by putting the two older ones in an international secondary school and Ben a grade back at the neighborhood elementary school.

They are all struggling with school in their own ways, and all managing quite well. I am glad they are having to establish study habits, manage their time and do a good job. That sounds trivial, but in NM I felt nobody had instilled the expectation that you not only complete an assignment on time, but that it is well done, looks good and it has been edited and fine-tuned. Or that you keep good notes in an organized binder (which will later serve as you study guide). In NM, my kids always had a bunch of dog eared pieces of paper stuffed into their backpack or their cubby at school. Here, kids get a grade on their binder.

Apart from these improvements, the education system and the schools here are far from perfect, unfortunately. And years of intense involvement in my kids’ school in the US have left me with little energy to do the same here. I just kind of wanted to lean back and know that the system works. Not happening. We are thinking about a different school for Ruby, for reasons that have nothing to do with her performance and everything with the school’s performance.

Ruby is part of a public school experiment (the Nelson Mandela International School) and within that, part of the second international school being spun off from the first one. The whole process has been mired by jaw-dropping levels of incompetence at the school administration level: Of all the components you and I know are needed to start a new anything, they had exactly zero: No plan, no leadership, no staff (other than teachers), no building (other than two sublet classrooms a 30 minute walk from the main building), no infrastructure, no steering committee (until recently) no division of labor and no assigning of responsibility.

Teachers, students and parents, when this lack of everything slowly dawned on them, had to take over. When you do this, when you speak up and you try to compensate for the lack of activity by doing something (like, the teacher brought her own cell phone hotspot, so the classes would have internet, the parents organized recess supervision, wrote letters etc.) of course this is not received well, because your activity will reveal the lack of competence of those really responsible. Moron exposure, not a happy thing. So then, conflict arose between the school and the parent community, which is now hopefully morphing into some kind of collaboration, but certainly not built on mutual trust yet. 

Remains to be seen if it turns into a viable school before Ruby’s secondary years have passed. Her class has shrunk to 11 people, which of course creates a dream student-teacher ratio. But Ruby's circle of friends is rather small as a result. Meanwhile I joined the steering committee, with a big sigh. Do I have the patience? Not really, and anyway, I didn’t come here to start a new school, and while some parent involvement is great, I still believe in the concept of paying taxes so public schools give my kids a decent education (and only if that doesn’t work, move, or pay tuition to a private school). So Ruby and I are reviewing our options.

Generally, high school seems to have gotten a lot harder in Germany over the last 30 years. While each Land (sort of the German states) is different, due to a federalized political system, I think this is true all over the country. I remember sailing through Abitur with not a whole lot of effort 30 years ago. Today, the content of higher level secondary education (Gymnasium), which ends in Abitur, is squeezed into two, instead of three years in many of the Laender. Students and parents complain that there is no life outside of studying. I see that with some of my friends who have children in Gymnasium: They spend a good chunk of their family weekend on homework and studying for exams. 

It goes on at the university, which has become more school-like, with tons of tests and exams, very structured curricula, all this since Germany changed degrees and grades along the lines of European reform, which included adopting the US bachelors/masters system. So, people complain it’s more measurable, test-ible knowledge and data squeezed into one's head, and less thinking, independent research, group work, project work – less of the competencies that makes us capable to continue on a path of livelong learning.

I have heard quite a few people remark recently: Almost everything I learned in high school I have never needed in real live ever again. And now school in Germany teaches even more academic stuff that our kids won’t need, as part of that core curriculum of secondary education. There is the argument that you should learn these things to train your brain to learn, so you can learn other things that you will actually need later. But what is even the point of memorization, when there is no context for what you memorize? You will forget it immediately after the test.

Knowledge that we apply on a regular or even occasional basis will stay in our head because it is relevant, because it is connected to something meaningful or useful. Instead of high level calculus, can’t they teach kids to do a tax return, navigate healthcare.gov and use excel and bookkeeping software? That would save a lot of money and grief later in life. Teach them foreign languages. Teach them skills and study habits, so they know how to organize thoughts and research, how to understand what they read and how to write so other people can understand. Teach them how to work on their own and as part of a team. How to speak in public and to advocate for something they feel passionate about. Finally, along with all these competencies –and I think this is the high end art of being an impactful teacher - do not kill your student’s curiosity, but nurture it. Help you student succeed.

The other day I heard this on NPR’s Fresh Air, from an interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Dave Davies: I read that you were recently asked to give, I think, a commencement address at, was it your elementary school, and declined. Did you feel let down by the public school system when you were a kid?
Tyson: Oh, no, no. So everyone has all different experiences in school. I just know that throughout my life, at no time did any teacher ever point to me and say, hey. He'll go far. Oh, he's someone you should watch. You know, I had some OK grades. They ran the gamut. I had some high grades in math and science, and medium grades in other subjects, and slightly lower grades in other subjects. You've got to remember, the school system is constructed to praise you if you get high grades. And if you get straight A's, you're the one that everyone puts forward, and they prognosticate that the straight-A person is the one most likely to succeed, because that's the way the school system is constructed and conceived.
And there I am, getting grades all over the place, but I know my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs, because I live in a huge apartment complex. And 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this.
I took classes at the American Museum of Natural History at Hayden Planetarium, advanced classes for adults in modern astrophysics. I did all this, but none of that showed up as a high grade on an exam in school. So, there I am, and teachers complaining about my social energy, as though that was something bad, and, oh, he's disruptive. Not purposely, I just had energy, right.
So my elementary school wanted me to come back - because I was already well-known by then - to talk and say what a great education I had. I said no. That's not the talk I would give. I would say I am where I am today not because of what the teachers said about me or did for me, but in spite of it. And I don't think that's what you want, so I will decline. Invite me back one day, and I'll talk just to the teachers, all right, and then I'm happy to tell - give - you know, tell them what they should be looking for, perhaps, in their students.
Also consider - now, see you've got me started here. Also consider that if you have a straight-A student in your class, that student has straight A's not because of teachers, but in spite of teachers. That's what having straight-A means. It means you do well, no matter the teaching talent of the teacher. That's what straight A's mean. So if you're a teacher and you put forth your straight-A student as though you had something to do with it, you are deluding yourself. The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student. Then let's talk about your teaching talents.

I agree with Tyson, and I see how inquisitiveness, curiosity and hunger to learn about things kids are interested in, are in direct competition (for time, attention and energy) with the core curriculum and its contents that my high school age kids are expected to hammer into their poor teenage brains.

Rory does not get good grades for teaching himself Ableton, a complex music production software, doing extensive music history research, organizing a library of samples, learning the base guitar, learning drums and producing an ever improving body of musical work over the last seven months. I do have to admit, the IB program he is in (the international high school degree, as opposed to Abitur), at least acknowledges his creative work through the Creativity, Activity and Service (CAS) component. Students keep track of their hours in these areas and it becomes part of their final score for graduating. But instead of just keeping time sheets about stuff you love to do, these talents and passions could be celebrated and supported in many other ways. And other students, who are maybe not as driven as Rory, could be supported in finding their service and creativity opportunities.

My biggest concern with public school beyond 10th grade here is the sort of sink or swim attitude of many teachers. Students in Germany can finish school after 10th grade here, with the Middle school Degree (MSA), and then move on to a technical or vocational career. If you stay in high school beyond this, you are expected to be entirely self-motivated. In a mass letter you receive when your child has unexcused absences (my fault in Rory's case, because I didn't submit the excuses), the coordinator states: "We do not want to unnecessarily prolong your child's education". Excuse me? That, precisely, is your fucking job, if you would only choose to deem it necessary.

The Nelson Mandela IB program requires said study skills, enormous discipline, and in year 12, essentially 100% of the students’ time. It’s a rigorous academic curriculum, comparable to the first 1-2 years of college in the US. For students to master this, however, Nelson Mandela school provides hardly any support from teachers, coordinators and advisors. In fact, they tend to be late, uninspired in their teaching methods (long, droning history lectures), badly prepared, and unable to exhibit even basic communication skills. They do not model the behavior expected from their students. If students are not fully motivated, or experience difficulty academically, there is no support.

Neil deGrasse Tyson would have a stern talk with those teachers. I don't get why these people even are teachers. I would think it’s too stressful and intense a job if you are not good at it and you don’t love it. But maybe they figured out a way to sail through and not feel responsible for the students left behind. I wouldn't want to unnecessarily prolong their teaching careers.

There is no one system that works great, and what I knew already in the US is true here as well: Your parental job is to put together the best possible education menu from available public and private resources for your kids, and complement whatever they are not getting yourself. And you have to support them and encourage them, for the whole 12 years. You have to teach them to function well within badly designed systems. And tell yourself that that’s a good skill to learn in itself, because it’s one of those you will need for the rest of your life.

P.S. I’d like to see your comments on this…. What do you think school should teach students by the time they graduate? How hard should they try? What’s not the job of the school, but of parents and community?

Nonprofit Worlds - A Comparison

Some of my nonprofit colleagues on both sides of the fence have asked me about my impressions of the German and European nonprofit sector, and how it compares to the US.  So this post is for you, my colleagues of the Third Sector. It is entirely subjective and non-scientific.

If you are interested in a more data-grounded analysis, there are a few, somewhat dated scholarly comparisons of the nonprofit sectors in a variety of countries, among them the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.

In short: some of the structures and the regulatory environment here are different, as are the sector relationships, overall infrastructure and the governance of nonprofits. And then some things are strikingly similar, above all the constant quest for money and resources in a similar culture of scarcity and self-exploitation.

Shapes and Laws and Regulations

Starting with the differences: The regulatory and legal environment that nonprofits operate in is a little different here. While there is a similar concept of nonprofit-ness, based on a charitable purpose and tax exemption, the details are different. For example, the equivalent regulatory entity to the IRS (das Finanzamt), does not have a central, federal exempt organizations department, and charitable status is granted by whatever general tax clerk happens to get your application at the local tax office.

There is some interesting variety in corporate forms:  there are, of course, foundations (more about them below), small community based nonprofits called Vereine, they include neighborhood and community organizations, little groups supporting schools, and the infamous rabbit breeders. Rabbit breeding is a serious charitable purpose in Germany.

Kaninchenzüchterverein W 103 Burgsteinfurt. Foto: Theresa Gerks

Then there are these gigantic corporate service provider kingdoms. Finally there are a good number of limited liability corporations with tax-exempt status. The whole hybrid LC3 is-it-good-or-bad discussion that we had in the US over the last few years? Does not happen here. Hybrids are a reality. People don’t really care about what flavor your organization is. A term of reference here is the “social economy” which encompasses all the stakeholders involved.

Giants

Those really large nonprofits I mentioned are called Wohlfahrtsverbände, and they are something like umbrella associations of smaller providers. These have most of the health and social services government fee-for-service market cinched up.  Out of the six large ones, four are faith-based. Generally, you’d have to be part of that denomination to work for one of the providers (I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in the US). The Christian Verbände employ 1.5 Million people. 90 % of their income comes from public sources, including social security.  Their members, many of them large conglomerates themselves, run day care centers, assisted living and nursing facilities, women’s shelters, hospitals, developmentally disabled programs, drug rehabs, mental health facilities, reentry programs – they provide really any health or social services you can think of.

In the US, these services are provided by individual organizations, serving specific groups of populations, and competing for funding and policy -maker attention. Just imagine the power and efficiency of the Verbände that comes from joint effort around maintaining funding, influencing policy and through supporting their member organizations with almost everything: evaluation, personnel management, professional development, resource development, compliance, accounting, QI, and data – all those things that seem to slowly kill social service providers serving our US communities.

Foundations

Philanthropy features a few strange birds, too: First, there are party-related “foundations”, which requires some explanation to my colleagues in the US, where foundations are prohibited from any political activity. Each major party has an affiliated foundation (corporate-form-wise, most of them are actually regular nonprofits, not foundations), and their mandate is political education. They serve as think tanks, places of research, dialogue and public education. Many also have stipends for Masters and Doctorate candidates working in their areas of interest.  

There is a quickly growing field of mid-sized family foundations, as well as small foundations supporting specific nonprofits. Last year, around 600 new foundations were started in Germany, for a total of over 20,000. This is of course a reflection of the incredible wealth in this country, and of the German baby boomer generation trying to figure out how to socially invest their surplus. The 300 community foundations in Germany seem to be very small and rather undercapitalized, and very grass-roots.

Then there are large family and corporate foundations, just like in the US. Except here they seem to openly operate for the combined purpose of sheltering revenue from taxes and influencing politics, both of these purposes at a level of mutual reinforcement which would lose any US foundation their EO status in minutes.  The Bertelsmann Foundation is the most well-known and aggressive version of this business model.

There are, to my surprise, very few accountability mechanisms for foundations, or for that matter, any nonprofit organization. Once you have the status, you have to file tax returns, just like in the US, but the returns are not public documents. Boards are not viewed as the accountability mechanisms that they are supposed to be in in the US. Rubberstamp boards, board members getting paid, boards completely removed from the organization’s constituency, all these are the norm, and are not discussed much. The exceptions, at least nominally,  are the 515 nonprofits that pledged to abide by voluntary transparency measures, an initiative of Transparency International.

Looking across the Pond

People in the nonprofit sector here are very interested in US  sector developments and trends. This does not seem to extend to policy, but more to trends in organizational consulting, fundraising and philanthropy.  A few nonprofits here have discovered social innovation and collective impact, for example. A consultant told me that FSG had considered to open an office in Germany a few years ago, trying to protect their “trademark”. I am not sure what happened. Fortunately, there is a healthy critical questioning of everything US, and especially of copying any new trend, maybe FSG felt that.

Some of the newer US-bred concepts and fads, especially those from the corporate world, such as the whole “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” business, are very popular here. Bertelsmann Foundation spun off a whole organization that does very involved, very expensive impact assessments for organizations, and upon passing, the client gets a stamp that says: Impact! It makes you shudder.

I went to a presentation on their method, and the speaker was enthusiastically talking about logic models like they were this great new tool that will save the sector. I walked out after the Bertelsmann representative in the room cut off the interesting discussion that had emerged from critical questions of the audience.

Some of the older schools of thought, for example Peter Senge, are still represented on most consultant shelves, and seem to stick longer than in the US, where new, sexy tools, theories and schools of thought seem to crop up on a weekly basis. Here they still happily use SWOT analyses and read “The Fifth Discipline.”  The EU Commission requires grant applicants for a number of programs to submit a logframe matrix with their proposal, a tool developed in the late 60ies in the US and then further fine-tuned by many development agencies.

Troubles

In the US I have always worked with and for small or mid-sized, often rural organizations. So I want to say a few words about that part of the sector here: It totally feels like home to me. Small organizations here have the same structural and capacity issues as small and rural groups in the US. The real or perceived impending doom that will come from shrinking public funds have caused them to turn their attention to fundraising from private sources and earned income strategies. Lobbying may come more naturally to some of these groups, than to their colleagues in the US, as they advocate for maintaining their public dollars.

The main capacity issue, mentioned over and over again in any conversation I have had with small organizations and with consultants, is termed here as “projectitis”: The tendency of funders, both public and private, to fund only projects. If your organization wants to provide services on a sustainable basis, you still have to chop your work and your thinking up into projects. The administrative burden increases with every new funding source, and soon enough people are busy with admin work, rather than with achieving their mission.  Sound familiar? Except that in the US, there is now a pretty broad awareness of this problem, and at least some foundations have started to implement more sensible funding strategies.

New ideas have a hard time cropping up in an environment where even the basic work is threatened by funding cuts. If at all, innovation may happen within those large associations (Verbände), which have extra revenue from church tax  (yes, everyone pays church tax here!) and earned income, and also strong organizational capacity. But these may not be the grassroots innovations most appropriate to today’s social challenges.

Consultants

In the consulting field, there are some differences as well. In the US, if you run or found a small organization, you can do most of the work yourself, with the occasional help from a tax person, more rarely will you need a lawyer.  The system has been designed to not be that complicated. Many nonprofit consultants acquire some tax and legal skills, often because the real lawyers and tax accountants have failed to acquire nonprofit specific skills. In Germany, when you found a new nonprofit, you just give it to the lawyer, and you don’t even mess with that stuff.  They will write your mission statement and your tax-exempt application for you. It’s a little scary to me. 

Later, if you have conflict, or plan a change process in your organization,  or need money, then you hire the nonprofit consultant. Many of these consultants have not as much technical knowledge, and instead have backgrounds in psychology, organizational development, or conflict mediation. The sort of generalist service that we provided to rural organizations in NM is not really available here, with a few sort of underground exceptions. These little guerilla-consulting shops keep quiet about the tax and legal advice they might slip occasionally, so they don’t get in trouble with the law.

The F word

And then there is, of course, “Fundraising”.  This has been a quickly growing priority, field, and profession over the last decade or two. Based on the premise (or the fundamental misunderstanding) that public funds will go to shit and Germany will move towards a model of more private funding for charity. Like in the US, right?

Except that private contributions in the US still make up only a 13.3 %  of nonprofit revenue – we just think  of philanthropy as bigger, because it is so loudly self-important.  Same here. The term fundraising, by the way, has been officially accepted in the German language and here it encompasses everything: grant writing, earned income, as well as working with foundations, individual donors and events. We’d call all of this (resource) development. (Oh well. Did you know Germans call their mobile phones “handy”?)

So there are fundraising workshops, certificate courses, master degrees etc., etc.  There is lots of noise and lots of interest, and, based on my very subjective impression, very few funds are raised. The exception seem to be European Union grants and contracts, a significant source of public funds that some organizations have tapped into successfully for a long time, and others are just finding out about.

Another larger source of resources for nonprofit and for-profit employers alike over the last decade has been coming through the so-called 2nd labor market. Since welfare benefits were merged with unemployment benefits, similar to what happened in the US under Clinton, the German government pumps a lot of resources into subsidizing and fostering employment. So small organizations have been able to hire people who are lingering on the 2^nd labor market (they have been unemployed long enough to lose their first-level unemployment benefits), and receive very substantial subsidies, often up to 100% of the labor cost. My subjective impression is, that this policy has created a 2^nd class of employees, and that they do not necessarily move back up into the first labor market. The effect on organizations seems to be similar to what happens in the US, when nonprofits rely too much on AmeriCorps members, VISTAs and volunteers to run their programs: high turnover, lots of time spent on training, questionable quality of services.  While the well-meaning intention of the German policies was to move people out of the “Prekariat”, the class of precariously employed people, it seems to just have grown that class.

The Umbrella Infrastructure

Given the diversity of the nonprofit sector here, the nonprofit support infrastructure is much less developed than in the US. The European Foundation Centre is an international membership association of foundations and corporate funders. They have a whooping 231 members. There is an association of German foundations, which also runs a searchable foundation database.  This tool is unfortunately much inferior to the great Foundation Directory Online provided by the Foundation Center in the US.  Nor is there any data source even comparable to GuideStar. This is probably due to the fact that tax returns are not public documents, and thus also not a source of data for researchers, grant seekers and funders.  

While the German Verbände serve as policy advocates for their members, there is no overall association of nonprofits in Germany, any of its states or, for that matter, Europe. There are lots of networks, of course, with varying functions such as capacity building, volunteer matching and collaboration.  Most of them are organized around larger policy themes, such as youth, peace, or development aid. An important one in the Germany is the BBE, the network for civic engagement. There is also a professional association of fundraisers, much like the AFP, and a newer one for EU fundraisers.

Volunteerism is promoted widely, and supported by government programs, a new 2007 law to foster civic engagement, networks and online platforms. I have shared my unpopular opinion about volunteerism in this prior post.

Finally, in regards to education, there are a few well-designed master programs for nonprofit management in Germany, the most prominent at the Center for Social Investment at the University of Heidelberg and the MA program  for Nonprofit-Management and Governance in Münster. Both shops also engage their students in hands-on projects and consulting. Both take two years and run about 10,000 Euros. If I didn’t have to make an income, I’d be a student again…..

To wrap up this rather lengthy post:  the German nonprofit sector shows a huge diversity in terms of corporate forms and structures, with organizations ranging from service provider firms, semi-public agencies, large conglomerates to small political groups and neighborhood initiatives with no legal status.  The European dimension adds more diversity and confusion, as well as new exciting opportunities for transnational collaboration and exchange  - accompanied by a glut of EU funding.

Service organizations are largely funded by government, providing most basic and all specific human and health services. This is based on the collaborative partnerships that emerged within the social democratic welfare state model in Germany. The power and wealth of the large Verbände assures continuity, resources and quality in services, although the system is by no means foolproof  or perfect. The lack of community-based boards assuring accountability is a real risk in my view. In the US, on the other hand, we have a lot of smaller, locally rooted organizations, operating fairly independent from each other, with associations, foundations and collaboratives constantly trying to offset the impact of this fragmentation. And everyone is constantly hunting for funding, which often is damaging to collaborative efforts.

Certainly the much discussed blurring of the lines between the three sectors has occurred a long time ago in Germany, at the cost of accountability and with the advantage of more effective systems.

So… I hear someone asking, then which model is better? I will stay on the fence, and not answer this question.  The civic sector models are a reflection of the type of welfare system, the history and the political culture of each country.  As with all the topics on this blog, we can learn some stuff from the other side of the fence, and some stuff will just not apply.