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About

Mission

Lakeshore Literary Foundation promotes the professional growth of authors and poets within the Great Lakes region by supporting community-led programs that nurture the craft of writing, bolster industry acumen, and connect literary creatives with new audiences.

We are a 501(c)(3) public charity as recognized by the Internal Revenue Service.

Vision

We aim to be an indispensable non-profit resource for authors and poets in the Great Lakes region and a core convener of the disparate literary community in West Michigan.

Organizational Objectives

To advance our mission:

  • We assemble a representative board of directors to represent disparate literary constituencies in the region.
  • We include all literary creatives within the scope of our efforts, regardless of their social, economic, ideological, or biological background.
  • We encompass the entire literary lifecycle, from story ideation through commercial publication.
  • We promote programs that support creativity, technical acumen, and business acumen among writers and poets.

We achieve these Organizational Objectives through:

  • Honest and transparent communication,
  • The fearless pursuit of creative storytelling, and
  • The recognition that there are many legitimate paths on the road to literary success.

Relational Values

We support the FDSS model of working with one another. We believe FDSS is semantically more complete and coherent than DEI/JEDI/IDEA frameworks while incurrening substantially less ideological pushback. In this context, a team is merely a persistent cluster of people organized around a specific telos (i.e., a goal), regardless of the scope of the goal or the duration of the team’s existence. FDSS means:

  • FAIRNESS — people should receive what’s due to them — what they’ve earned, in either a positive or negative sense — in a manner consonant with the team’s principles and procedures. Fairness implies that these procedures have been agreed-to in advance from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance about how those principles might work to private advantage or disadvantage. The sole criterion for whether a person receives recognition, promotion, or prominence is having earned it (merit) through a consistent pattern of behaviors or achievements that advance the goals (the telos) of the team within the team’s organizational and relational values.
  • DIGNITY — each individual person within the team stands on equal moral footing by virtue of their personhood as humans. Dignity sources from personhood and not from any social, economic, ideological, or biological group identity. No person in the team should be diminished or demeaned — or inappropriately elevated — because of a particular group identity characteristic. The team should make all reasonable accommodation, discreetly and without fanfare, to ensure that each person is able to fully engage with equal dignity.
  • SOLIDARITY — everyone in the team works together to advance the common good. This “common good” is rooted in, and defined by, the objectives of the organization, the relational values the organization celebrates, and the multiple perspectives each person brings to the table.
  • SUBSIDIARITY — teams closest to a problem or opportunity are usually the best positioned to drive meaningful, authentic, and persistent change. Therefore, the organization prefers to support myriad small teams each working on a specific need or problem, than to centralize control at a higher but less engaged/informed level.