Employers and CCAP: What role do companies play in creating worker shortage?

Governor Walker’s announcement of the plan to use WHEDA’s bonding authority to raise $100 million to invest in Milwaukee’s 30th Street Industrial Corridor is welcome news in many ways.  Most meaningful in the short term is that this economically depleted neighborhood might become the battleground for the race for Governor.  If only for the next month, the issues of this once booming part of town could be on the front page.  The announcement also demonstrates that there are a lot of ways to tackle economic development.  Using the WHEDA bonding authority as an instrument for economic development rather than continuing the non-job creation strategy of more and more housing development signals an evolution in thinking that is long overdue.

The innovative features of the plan are overshadowed by its adherence to two old, very worn-out shibboleths; namely, that Milwaukee companies have job they are unable to fill and that Milwaukee workers are too unskilled and undisciplined to be good employees.  Each of these is true to some extent but neither is as important as policymakers want to believe.  It only takes one story of a major corporate CEO complaining that he cannot find skilled workers for the policy and funding waters to part.  The blame game then becomes hot and heavy. Elected officials and corporate leaders practically stand in line to take shots at the Milwaukee Public Schools and Milwaukee Area Technical College, never mind the huge numbers of graduates of both institutions who are employed in local government and businesses.

Could both of these institutions do better?  Sure, but so could employers.  In major initiatives like the 30th Street project, employers are frequently asked what they want in workers but they are hardly ever asked about their hiring practices.  There is an assumption that there hiring practices are appropriate and fair.  This leads to the companion assumption that applicants who do not get hired failed to meet employer standards that were appropriate and fair.  This does not describe what is really happening.

Equal opportunity laws forced public employers like police and fire departments to completely revamp their application, testing, and hiring practices to remove bias and facilitate fair employment practices. As a result, diversity in their ranks has increased.   It is time corporate CEO’s who are complaining about worker shortages to look critically at their own hiring practices relative to racial disparities. One place to start is the growing reliance on CCAP (Circuit Court Automation Program) to predict whether a job applicant will be a good employee.  CCAP is an online information system which makes everyone’s legal past available for review. CCAP lists an individual’s traffic tickets, civil judgments, divorce proceedings, as well as felony convictions.  CCAP even lists charges that were later dismissed.  Nowhere has the term ‘too much information’ been more apt that in the case of what employers can learn and use against applicants via CCAP.  Of course employers want to know if an applicant has committed a felony.  Whether a felony conviction should bar someone from employment is another question.  The key thing is that minor things, like speeding or disorderly conduct tickets issues years prior, can be used a reasons not to hire. 

Is it any wonder that our state’s glaring racial disparity in law enforcement – including traffic stops, charging decisions, sentencing, and probation revocation – extends its ugly hands into the employment sphere?  A history of municipal ordinance violations or other legal troubles which has nothing to do with employment history or potential should not be used as a reason to disqualify potential applicants especially when we know how prevalent racial disparities are in law enforcement decision-making.

Our state has convened a Commission on Racial Disparity, funded projects locally to address the persistent imbalance in the application of the law, and tracks its progress in annual reports issued by the Office of Justice Assistance.  Clearly, the existence of racial disparities is not in question. Yet, employers continue to use the consequences of racial disparity, as reflected on CCAP, to keep people out of work.

Milwaukee employers should stop complaining about MPS, MATC, and the pool of prospective workers and take a hard, critical look at their own hiring practices, especially their reliance on CCAP as a primary tool for evaluating prospective workers.  We have let the private sector off the hook for too long.   Now is the time for employers to own up and stand up.

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For more information on racial disparities in Wisconsin, go to the Office of Justice Assistance website at http://oja.wi.gov/section.asp?linkid=1344&locid=97

I Could’ve Been a Bat Girl: Notes from Spring Training

Replaying one of my favorite posts from the past because……I’m at spring training.

Of course, how could I have been a bat girl? There ARE no bat girls. Bat people are boys. We all know that. Still. I could pick up bats and keep the ump supplied with balls with the best of them. Because I’ve been to spring training. In fact, I’m at Brewers Spring Training in Phoenix, AZ as we speak. And if there’s a better place to be, I sure don’t know where it is.

I’m not a maniacal baseball fan, nor a student of baseball. However, I am married to an avid fan and attend a lot of games every year – we’re talking 25 or so not counting 3-4 spring training games. Until very recently, watching baseball was a meditative experience for me. But then something clicked – I think it was the day I got the metaphorical significance of Striking Out Looking – and I started to love baseball and baseball players alot.

Spring training is the loveliest thing in the world if you are any kind of a fan at all. First of all, everything about it makes you feel new – new season, new players, new promises. Makes everyone feel like they’re 25. It’s also the most relaxed and mellow place on earth (except for the young guys coming up trying to impress the coaches). There’s a road in Phoenix called Carefree Highway and, in my mind, it runs right to Maryvale where the Brewers Stadium is located. Picture the program vendor who dumps his sack in the 8th inning to stand atop the dugout to lead the crowd in YMCA or the former MPS teacher, now beer vendor, who gives each section a grade on how well they echo his trademark yell.

Most of all, people are happy. The players joke around and tease each other. Prince Fielder has a big grin on his face – something you don’t see once regular season starts. And everyone is kind and chatty and generous. Uncharacteristically, I made a play to catch a promotional T-shirt, missed it, only to have the woman who did catch it give it to me. Dang.

Nothing real profound here. Just Arizona in March with a bunch of young guys playing ball and having fun. Hard to complain.

Creative Repurposing: Lessons from the Prison System

The idea of having long-term prison inmates provide care and support for other long-term prison inmates with Alzheimer’s Disease is about as elegant and beautiful an idea as I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m sure its administration isn’t effortless.  There have got to be a million day to day issues that make it challenging, but it seems to be working. As yesterday’s New York Times article, “Life, With Dementia,” suggests, the concept has layered benefits.

The first benefit  layer is the person with Alzheimer’s Disease having a consistent helper who gets to know him, his quirks and worries, and how to calm him and help him negotiate the day.  The second benefit layer is the rediscovery or discovery of life purpose for the inmate who is helping.  If you believe that people can be rehabilitated, that how they were at 20 is not how they could be at 40, then this second benefit is really attractive. Why are we locking up and throwing away the key with no thought about the human potential for service? The third benefit is the changed perspective.  Everyone looks different to the other – prison administrators, helping inmates, inmates with Alzheimer’s Disease.  I think the new prism is respect.

What’s the application for the non-profit world?  We often miss what’s right in front of us – the small solution.  Instead, finding a new need, the first reaction is a new program.  The new program has goals and objectives, performance measures, and job descriptions.  Every step of complexity takes the solution further away from the people having the problem.  And then we wonder why the people with the problem are still hurting. 

 Believe me, I never in a million years thought I would be pointing to something in the prison system as a best practice, but I think this is.  The simple solution – where could we go with that out here in the nonprofit world?

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Here’s the link to the full NYT story:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html

Buried Alive? Clean Your Office Today!

No, this isn’t a shot of my desk.  It’s a stock photo of the desk of some hyper-busy, super multi-tasking, too-pressed-to-get-organized person who has since taken up residence in a 19 foot trailer parked deep in the desert outside Yuma, AZ .

Seriously, let’s talk about office hoarding.

With an onslaught of major, major projects over the next three months, I decided recently to clear out my office.  This was a big deal.  I’m a stacker. Well, maybe piler would be a better description. The flat spaces in my office which include a pretty large wraparound desk and a very large table are usually covered with stacks of files, papers, to-do piles.  Because my file cabinets were filled within 24 hours of purchase, there was no room for filing current projects. Hence, more and more stacks – tables, floor, shelves.

Finish a big grant?  Better stack the reference materials somewhere just in case.  Organize a competitive bidding process?  Better keep all the proposals and the score sheets in case questions are asked.  You get the idea.  I can’t throw anything away because I might need it someday.

And just like the nice lady on Hoarders-Buried Alive last night, I cannot stand throwing out something that might make a good project — like stacks and stacks of homeless data/cross-tabs that slice and dice six ways to Sunday (all of which is saved on my hard drive, of course).  http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/tv/hoarding-buried-alive

Some people who live in paper stacks claim that while it looks like a mess, they know exactly where everything is – they can put their hands on a piece of information in seconds.  That’s not me.  I have to rifle through everything to find something.  When I get to the point that I’m spending 50% of my time on a project looking for stuff, I crack.

And then it’s bring in the bags and the boxes, this stuff is leaving.  Now.  Clear out the file cabinet.  Toss the stacks.  Keep the irreplaceable (which is almost nothing these days). Label and file.  Really know where everything is. 

I didn’t have to have the Hoarders team come to my office – but I get  the message.  When your environment interferes with joyful living (or in my case, productive work), it’s time to change it.

Does this hit a nerve for anyone?  What does your office look like?

Another One Falls: What Happened to Esperanza Unida?

 Last week, I talked about the closing of the iconic Hull House in Chicago.  This week, I just have to talk about one of Milwaukee’s own iconic nonprofit organizations, Esperanza Unida.  Yesterday’s Sunday paper carried the news that after forty years, the organization had lost its federal non-profit status. This essential designation, the one that makes foundation and government grants possible and gives donors a tax deduction, was lost because the Esperanza Unida administration did not file a Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service three years in a row. 

 Esperanza Unida, founded in 1971, started out as a very small, storefront enterprise that focused on workers rights, especially advocacy for Latino workers who had been injured in the workplace.  Ted Uribe, Esperanza’s first director, was a basically a community organizer.  Under his leadership, the group tackled a host of community issues including the distribution of anti-poverty funds by the increasingly powerful Social Development Commission.  When Rich Oulahan became director, the organization took off in new directions, establishing a national reputation for a social entrepreneurship model of job training that started with auto donation/repair/resale and expanded to a day care center, restaurant and other initiatives.  Oulahan attracted federal support to establish the International Building on National Ave., and commissioned Reynaldo Hernandez to create a mural that northbound I-43 drivers still see and appreciate every day. When I drive by, I think about Rich Oulahan’s persistence and advocacy – he died in 2008.

So what went wrong with this nonprofit masterpiece?  Like Hull House, there are probably many possible answers.  From my perch way outside the organization and the neighborhood it serves, I’m wondering where the board of directors was when the 990′s weren’t filed.  I occasionally read the southside papers and see on Facebook references to a lot of political infighting, some of it very bitter and divisive.  I think about the wisdom of having an organization so entirely wrapped up in the identity of its executive director and wonder if the board ever tended to the unpleasant duty of developing a succession plan.  Was there attention paid to building a board that had the professional and technical skills, such as accounting, legal, and fund development expertise, necessary to steer a major nonprofit enterprise? Another thought is what happpened to the organization’s community support?  Esperanza Unida used to be an untouchable nonprofit, so politically well-positioned that its funding was almost never in doubt.  I don’t have answers.  I just ask the questions that I think need to be asked.

The need for an Esperanza Unida continues.  People need skills that will get them family-supporting jobs.  That hasn’t changed.  It’s a sad thing for Milwaukee that this important resource – this community resource – no longer exists as a nonprofit organization.  Those of us involved with nonprofits as staff or consultants or board members need to find the lessons learned from Esperanza Unida’s situation and resolve to keep the valuable nonprofits in our community healthy and strong.

Postmortem: The Closing of Hull House

Like most people, I was hit with a wave of ‘say it ain’t so’ when I read about Hull House closing last week. The iconic mother of the settlement house concept, the model that Milwaukee organizations like Silver Spring Neighborhood Center and Journey House use in their family and neighborhood development efforts, Hull House was closing due to massive financial problems, one article stating that the organization owed millions of dollars to creditors.

That Hull House collapsed because of the poor economy is the no-brainer and maybe no-brain analysis.  Blaming the economy gives us permission to tsk tsk about how the funding world doesn’t appreciate the iconic, how donors let Jane Addams’ dream disintegrate; the economic downturn and all the excessive belt-tightening are to blame for ending Hull House’s remarkable 123-year run.

All of that may be true.  I don’t know.  All I know about Hull House is what I read in the paper.  But as a long-time observer of nonprofit organizations, I am betting that there is a lot more to the story.  Maybe some of these factors had a role in Hull House’s demise.

• There may have been a failure to establish and maintain sufficient reserves to help the organization navigate through the economic mess.
• The board may not have been sufficiently developed, trained, or supported to function as a good steward of Hull House resources.
• No one may have been able to make hard decisions when they would have saved the agency, e.g. cutting programs/sites/staff.
• Strategic alliances which might have preserved the Hull House mission and name while providing access to new resources may have been avoided.
• The organization may have focused exclusively on its service delivery and not been involved in policy-making at the state and federal level that could have influenced program resources.
• Maybe there was no decent grantwriting shop.
• Maybe they couldn’t figure out how to diversify their funding (that is, after all, what saved many of us when the stock market tanked).
• Maybe they assumed the public and the funding world knew all about the good work they were doing so they didn’t need to upgrade the outreach and communication.
• Maybe they thought it could never happen to them.

 What I’m getting at is this:  The economic downturn reached into every berg in the country.  Strong nonprofits stayed afloat.  Weak ones went under.  And like I said, I don’t know the details of Hull House’s situation.  But I do know this.  Nonprofit organizations can protect themselves – there are life jackets and life boats and survival training aplenty.  Our very own Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee is a good place to start to sharpen your organization’s skills on a lot of fronts. 

The Hull House closing left us with a lesson — If it could happen to Hull House, it could happen to any organization. Be smart.  Take stock.  And protect your organization.

Evaluation: Truth or Dare?

“The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.” (Anon.)

It isn’t really true that numbers don’t lie.  Nor is the opposite true.  Everytime you’re given a report full of numbers, it’s not necessarily intended to bamboozle you. But sometimes it is.

Recently, I used the local decision to grant status as a charter school to Rocketship Education, a California-based enterprised that has reported amazing academic results, as a teaching tool in my evaluation workshop.  Rocketship wanted to establish itself in Milwaukee by providing educational programming in several low-achieving MPS schools.

I distributed an opinion piece to workshop participants written by Milwaukee School Board member Larry Miller http://millermps.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/journal-sentinel-op-ed-rocketship-charter-schools-need-scrutiny/ that urged the Milwaukee Common Council to delay a quick vote on the charter and look more closely at Rocketship’s evaluation data.

In the very first activity of the evaluation workshop, participants zoomed in on a number of issues, most notably, the schools’ high attrition rate and the low number of students with special educational needs.  They were convinced – there was no way the Milwaukee Common Council would approve a charter for Rocketship to operate in Milwaukee without more information.

Oh really.  The Council approved the charter with only one dissenting vote, an alderperson who suggested that more analysis needed to be done because of the critique of Rocketship’s evaluation put together by Mr. Miller.

A classic case of “My mind’s made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts?” I don’t know.  It was, however, a perfect lesson in program evaluation – how policymakers’ desire to do something meaningful fast can sometimes mean giving the shortest shrift ever to the facts.  Rocketship’s got a cure for MPS?  Great, let’s not waste anytime dickering about the numbers.

We have the capacity in Milwaukee to do a lot more sophisticated scrutiny of proposals like this – a couple of major universities, a lot of public interest research organizations.  We have the ability to compare and contrast, study and analyze, and choose based on good evaluation. 

I think that before we grab hold of the life preserver tossed to us from the new boat, it’d be nice to check out whether it actually floats.

Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News

I am speaking as someone who has made a career out of bad news.  Bad news has been good for business.  Rising poverty?  Good for business.  More juvenile delinquency? Line up the clients.  Chronic unemployment? Steer here.

I’m done with it.  Like Evilene in The Wiz….

Bring some message in your head

Or in something you can’t lose

But don’t you ever bring me no bad news

If you’re gonna bring me something

Bring me, something I can use

But don’t you bring me no bad news.

I’ve been a bad news monger so long I almost don’t know how to quit.  But I knew I needed to when I read that Wisconsin, with its 17% child poverty rate was below the national average of 20% and I was a little disappointed because having a higher than average poverty rate is so helpful with federal grantwriting.  And it was then that I realized that my view of the world had gotten completedly CRACKED.

(See “Decade saw leap in child poverty,” MJS, August 21m 2011, at http://www.jsonline.com/business/128130438.html)

My cousin, Joan, a mom of six kids, instituted a bunch of wacky food rules in order to stretch her budget.  One of my favorites was “No cheese without bread.” I’m starting that policy here — no problem without a solution.  Don’t fill me up with problems so I’m so overwhelmed and so immersed and so enamored with bad news that I can’t recognize or appreciate a solution when I see one.  You know what I’m talking about here — it’s so easy to be in love with social problems that we don’t even want to hear about solutions.  As if a problem having a solution means that it’s not a serious enough problem. 

How many times have you heard someone propose a solution only to hear, “It’s not that simple.”

I’m for simple.  I’m standing for simple.  I’m looking for simple solutions.

Bring me, something I can use.

And I’m going to do as I ask — find solutions, appreciate them and spread them around. 

You?

Effective Meetings, Part 2: Who’s There?

Fundamentally, the purpose of meetings is communication.  Whatever slick and quick social media exist, the face to face meeting has an essential, irreplaceable quality, otherwise, Hilary Clinton would text foreign leaders instead of going through all the headaches of traveling to meet them in person.

So a group face to face meeting serves an important function – primarily by providing a venue for interaction with people other people might not know they’re interested in interacting with.  (You know that makes sense.  You just have to read it slower.)

But a problem with regular meetings – say, regular meetings of a coalition or a group of funded agencies – is that the same people attend, month after month, year after year.  Often they say the same things at the same times in the meetings, reliably offering the same complaint or suggestion. Other than changing fashions or the weather outside the window, you wouldn’t know it was a different meeting and not just a twisted version of Groundhog Day.

So what changes it up?  New people change it up.  New people have new questions and new ideas.  Because they haven’t been through the drill for ten years, they don’t worry about who usually does what.  They bring new stuff — and it’s valuable.  Yes, it occasionally irks the elders and bends the agenda but eventually it gets the hamsters off the treadmill.

I go to a lot of meetings with directors of agencies – bless them, they’re brilliant and they work hard and they’ve done so much for the community.  But back in each agency, sitting at a desk or running around making home visits, is a staff person who is right in the middle of the issue.  That person is dealing with Mr. Jones’ food stamps getting cut off or Ms. Smith being reluctant to enter AODA treatment.  That person is dealing with the tangled up logistics of getting people benefits and the sweat and aching muscles of going door to door to organize a neighborhood clean-up.

We need those folks at meetings.  So I’m suggesting to you nonprofit and government agency directors our there — EACH ONE, BRING ONE.  You help your staff person get the bigger picture and  help your director colleagues keep their feet on the ground.  If nothing else, that young person brings a sense of urgency that we all need to have about the work of improving this community.

Try it.  Let’s change it up!

Father’s Day Message to Milwaukee Dads

Here’s my Father”s Day message to Dads, especially young Dads.  You matter.  It doesn’t matter what your wife or your girlfriend says.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to do anything useful or even if you have a job.  You matter.  Don’t buy into any of the junk that you hear that your kids will be fine without you.  They won’t.

Here’s the big news for Dads, again, especially young Dads who think they have nothing to offer because they’re not working and have no prospects.  Three-years olds don’t check resumes.  They don’t care what you do as long as you are decent to them.  It’s a very low bar to be a meaningful Dad to a child.  Would it be better if every Dad had a family-supporting job? Absolutely.  Would it be better if they all took parenting classes and were actually interested in child development instead of faking it?  Sure.

But what matters most to a kid is that you simply show up. Be kind. Be dependable in their eyes.  Put them on your shoulders and walk around the block. Make them feel big and important. Put them first in your heart.

Social service programs spend a lot of time on fatherhood projects.  And that’s a wonderful thing.  But the thing I want Dads to hear is that it is your physical presence that matters most, your strength and protection, your playfulness and your laugh, and the loving gaze that tells a child s/he can do no wrong in your eyes.  It’s no cost – you just got to show up. Not once or twice.  Not on Christmas and birthdays.  Regularly.  Dependably.

Men – if you’ve got a friend who can’t take that step to be with his child because he thinks he’s not good enough, take him by the hand and show him.  And remember sometimes it’s the big blowhard Dads who say they don’t care and can’t be bothered who are hurting the most because they’re estranged from their kids.  Help them out. 

Our town would be an incredibly better place to live if all our kids were fathered well.  Many of the programs we develop to try to fix the damage done by absent fathers would be unnecessary.  It’s the little things that count – in the long run, that’s the big thing.  I truly believe that.