Do you believe in kismet?

Kismet is another word for fate.

I do. Not in the sense that my life is mapped out to take a certain pathway or destiny (although I don’t know if that is not the case), but more like the “things happen for a reason”, or “being in the right spot at the right time” kind of fate.

Why fate? Why now?  Well over the last few weeks a number of things have happened in my life that lead me to believe that I should make a particular decision.  At first, all of these seem to be unrelated, but then Saturday (as I was cleaning my office) I had an epiphany.

This realization came to me as I was pondering my future, having just received a scholarship that requires me to continue my education through spring 2007. It has always been my intention (well my recent “always”) to continue directly onto a graduate program after I complete my BA later this year, but lately with the tuition rates going up, and not having direct access to scholarships to help out, I was starting to think that maybe I could take some time off to work, and then return to school. Of course, this would delay my goal of completing a masters before I turned forty, but I was giving it some serious thought.  That is, until Saturday.

Now it is all perfectly clear.  To me at least.

I have often been troubled by the natural progression that a community organization has to “eat its own” (to put it crudely).  (This may be related to the ongoing issues that have been surrounding CCGLA, the Foundation and myself.)  A community organization often forms as a result of a need being identified by a person, or group of people.  The initial phase is one of excitement and a great deal of activity.  We keep busy doing things to make the organization a reality, and we work with each other often blissfully unaware that under different circumstances “this group” may never have evolved with its composition.  At this stage, the group evolves into either a system of multiple personalities each trying to get what they can from the organization, or the organization starts to feed on other organizations – to bring them under the umbrella.  Of course, this is primarily my observations within GLBT community organizations, though from discussions I’ve had with other involved volunteers, it does not appear to be that different.

The question that is fascinating to me is “why?”  Why is it necessary for a community to splinter itself, rather than bond itself together?  Why does one organization feel the need to destroy another organization when both organizations have similar missions or goals?  And the most important question, and the political one, is why do community organizations fail to get their acts together when it comes to political involvement?

These thoughts were floating around in my head, and it was this point (the epiphany) that I realized that my graduate thesis should revolve around these questions, and determine if there is a reality to my thinking that GLBT community organzations work against more than they work with each other. 

Isn’t it interesting how it all comes together?