The following is a shout-out to all of my peeps in the business of online community management / outreach, many of whom have expressed, in one form or another, a moderate sense of terror regarding job stability in the present financial crisis. Considering I am not an economist, and that I have a mere bachelors degree in political science and philosophy from a state university, one might want to take the following with a grain of salt but... I do have a bit of hope regarding the opportunities provided by this somewhat grim economic environment.

Friends are telling me about what approach their cable news financial guru says makes the most sense with regard to their investments. Public intellectuals from Francis Fukuyama to Joseph Stiglitz are publishing explanations regarding what went wrong in popular news magazines. On the nonprofit-front, we're all trying to figure out what happens when donors, sponsors, underwriters, and other members of our financial lifeblood begin to feel strain on their wallets (on her blog, Channing offers some suggestions re: not stressing out). Beth wrote a post about this earlier in the week, and Seth Godin posted a heady explanation about luck, effort, and putting our "free time" into getting our professional acts together.

The importance of resonance, a concept around which much of the work we do is constructed, isn't going anywhere. Making connections with consumers, donors, and volunteers is no less an imperative art in a time of financial crisis than it is when streets are paved with gold. In a time when things are getting tight, and the economy, depending on who you talk to, is threatening to implode, it's and understandable to worry - but we've got ideas to sell and clientele to connect with.

While market news has been grim, all hope shouldn't be lost. Yesterday, John Steel Gordon, an economic historian, talked with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace about how comparing today's economic crisis with the Great Depression/era America is inaccurate and irresponsible. Today, Joel Rogers, co-founder of the Apollo Alliance**, is speaking at a conference in Maine about the opportunities we have to reconsider the way we look at economics, and the opportunity we have to place more value on the worker than the bottom line in the post-crisis economy. A grim today doesn't necessarily translate to an hopeless tomorrow.

Nothing is going to stop us from worrying every time the Dow closes more than a percent less than it had closed at the day before, and nonprofits are going to continue to wonder where the money is going to come from. However, we've spent the past four or five years trying to understand how to best connect people, both when times are flush and when they are worrisome. Especially in a time of worry like this one, a time when, in fact, as Rogers points out, a possible paradigm shift is on the horizon regarding what we value, the lifeline of of an organization may very well be maintained by its ability to reach out to and connect with it's base. This is, of course, something we pride ourselves as being instrumental in being able to do.

We might be faced with a shakeup of some sort, or the potential of working longer hours in order to keep up, but I have faith that our jobs - our specialties - are going to be an important element with regard to weathering this storm.

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** The Apollo Alliance is a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution through focused research and development initiatives on the scale of the Apollo space program.