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Community Consulting Teams-Atlanta is an organization that matches up local professionals (mostly MBAs, both students and graduates) with local non-profits for consulting projects. The exact qualifications for clients and projects as listed on their website are:

Organizations that
-have a 501(c)(3) or equivalent designation
-have an annual budget of less than $1 million (although we work with larger organizations on a case-by-case basis)
-are located in the Metro Atlanta area (local chapters of national organization are acceptable)
-have dynamic leaders who are open to advice from third parties
-have a designated “executive director” and preferably a full-time executive directior (paid or unpaid)
-have a highly-engaged board, including a member willing to serve as a project champion

Projects that
-are central/significant to the organization and its mission/future
-are well-defined and tangible; have specific topics to be addressed and deliverables to be produced
-are able to be completed in about 300-400 person-hours (4-5 months of work for a 4-6 person team, at about 4 hours per week)
-are relevant to the skills, training, and backgrounds of our volunteer consultants

So it’s pretty cool.

I got an email from GT MBA program about it and sent off an application a couple weeks ago. Yesterday I heard back about the project I got put on, and it was actually my first choice: working with the Metropolitan Youth Symphony Orchestras of Atlanta. The project deals with a number of different aspects of the organization, and given that my mom grew up in the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra and all us kids play a variety of instruments, is something that is close to my heart.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in there is another arm of CCT operating in Boston, where the program started. There are also groups in the planning stage of starting up in Denver and Seattle. If you are in any of those cities, or Atlanta obviously, check them out and see if you want to help.

Roommate Pete has never seen The Wire before and used the recent ice storm that stranded us as an excuse to start watching all the DVDs I have. He’s fully hooked and I get a reason to watch the greatest TV series ever again.

Plus it appears I’m getting sick, so a few nights of hot tea and The Wire are pretty much the perfect prescription.

Last year I put up my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010. They were as follows:

1. Read 50 books
2. Dunk a basketball
3. Systolic BP below 120
4. Start a stats website

The final tally is:

1. I read 34 books total in 2010: the 33 posted here, plus Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Overall, I read 12 fiction books (2 more than the 10 I aimed for), 11 business books, 5 “about me” books, 4 sports books, 1 comedy book, and Art of War which I don’t know how to classify really.

I also have some partially finished books. I’m about 80% of the way through How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (which is awesome), halfway through the haunting short stories of Raymond Carver in Where I’m Calling From, halfway through Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, and at least a few pages in to The Essential Drucker, a collection of Peter Drucker’s thoughts on business. The real lesson here: don’t read a bunch of books at the same time.

2. Nope. Probably made negative progress in this one over the course of the year.

3. Yup! First success. It was a mixture of medication, diet and exercise, but I got it below 120, if only for a moment. Hopefully this keeps me on the “heart-not-exploding” path.

4. Boom. Is it the kind of stats I thought it would be at the start of the year? Not even close. Does it count? You bet it does.

So there we go. 2/4 overall and I’m going to count the books thing as a pretty good showing considering how rarely I read books before this year. The dunking thing though, yikes. I only have so much longer where this is even reasonable so if I want to do it ever again, it better be soon.

And now, on to 2011!!!

This year’s resolutions have a little different flavor to them. I’ve identified 4 of the most important areas of my life (and a fifth category for “other”) and then found something to do/improve in all of them. With that in mind, away we go:

Health – Run a half marathon
“What a weak goal,” you may say. “You have a year, why not do a full marathon?” Well, Mr(s). Overachiever, by doing it this way I still have the option of doing a full if I want to. Besides, while I have run semi-seriously from time to time (mostly when not getting rushed to emergency rooms with a busted appendix) there is nothing in my history that makes me think running 26 miles is a good idea. If this first part goes well, we’ll re-evaluate.

Mind – Create a mobile app
This was the hardest one by far to come up with. In fact, I’m not even sure I like it enough to fully commit to it yet. I’ve always been proud of being a relatively smart and knowledgeable person, but just how do you go identifying some way to improve that without testing? I think my 50 books resolution last year was a pretty good compromise, but I didn’t want to copy it.

So how does this connect with mind? Well, I figure there’s a whole lotta stuff I need to learn to make this happen. Some of it I’ve already started, a lot of it I will learn as I go. However, this is a learning exercise for me so I’m putting it here. I’m not trying to make money on it (although I won’t turn it down) so it’s not business, and I already have a really good “other” resolution so I didn’t want to put this there.

Business – Get paid by 20 people
The absolute bare minimum of revenue from that number of clients would be ~$36,000 for 2011. Not enough to live off of certainly, but we have pretty solid reason to believe that we won’t be only doing the bare minimum of work for many of our customers. I didn’t want to set a public revenue goal (although we are talking about one internally) just because I don’t want all you people coming around asking me for money (or realizing how broke I am)!

For the purpose of this exercise, a single company using us for multiple jobs counts as 1 client. However, if that single company is dealing with clients of their own (such as a 3PL or consulting firm) then each different client of their we do work for counts separately. We have a huge meeting coming up next Tuesday, so this goal could either be really easy or really hard after that.

Friends/Family – Stay closer to those important to me
I’m awful at this and have been for quite some time. There was a summer in early high school where I barely saw my friends from school because I never called them, thinking that if they wanted to hang out with me they’d call me. I’m certainly better now than I was then, but I’m making a point to improve even more over the next year.

Other – Figure out my life goals
Ted Leonsis was on Bill Simmons’s podcast (The B.S. Report) recently. You may have seen the post I made quoting him about how owners who give away tickets are killing their teams. Well he also has a public list of goals that he want to accomplish during his life and a running scorecard of how they are all doing. I like that a lot and therefore am going to do it myself.

Since a list of goals I want to accomplish over the next 60 or so years of my life is going to be pretty comprehensive, I feel like I shouldn’t rush into making it. So, instead of just thinking for a day and throwing a bunch of stuff out there I’m going to do this a little slower, making sure that I’m covering all my bases here. It will almost certainly be broken up into categories like Ted’s, so any suggestions on categories that need filling or goals that need doing would be great starting points for me.

And that’s the plan for 2011. 5 goals, all reachable, but all a significant improvement over where I am now. Let’s see if I can better 2010′s completion rate.

Later 2010. Let’s do this 2011.

Ring in the new year with a video about Terminus.