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.

“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.

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?

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!

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.

Every time I go to the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division or Children’s Court for a meeting, I am depressed by the grounds before I even get to the building. 

I took this picture this morning at BHD.  The rain had washed off the dusty, deserted look, and it almost looked pastoral and welcoming.   But the fact of the matter is that many parts of county grounds look like ruins.

Like this 70′s era empty pond.

Planters with no flowers.  Weeds.  Very grim.

Public art?  What’s that?

I think elected officials figured that the fastest way to show people that county government was saving money was to stop caring about how things look.  Why do anything more than the bare minimum? Mow the grass and shovel the snow.

I’m not an architect or a landscaper.  I’m just a regular person who goes to these buildings quite a lot and, each time I do, I wonder why it’s so important to someone in charge to remind me of how busted the county is, that no matter how stressed or anxious I might be as a consumer of services in these buildings, I need to button up my hair shirt and quit complaining.

So as I was walking back to my car thinking this thought for about the millionth time, I saw this.

And it really made me smile.

See what I mean?

I can’t imagine actually being a judge.  Every time I read about someone in the paper who is accused of a crime, I start thinking of reasons why he/she should be let off the hook.  I marvel at judges I know who can drop the hammer on a defendent – 10 years, 20 years, life without parole.  I could never do that.  I think I’m an extreme case, though.  A person who overdosed on Joan Baez in my formative years, who can get obsessed with thinking that ‘there but for fortune (or the grace of God) go I.’ 

Judgments about people aren’t just personal — they’re very often professional.  By that, I mean that our judgments about a group of people, say, teen fathers or drug-using moms or high school dropouts or gambling addicts, influences how we respond to them.  If we’re in a position to design programs or organize services, the essence of our judgment is manifest in those programs or services. How much we value people who have the problem we are trying to fix, what we think they are capable of in terms of managing their own lives, how much we blame them for being in the situation that requires our help.

It’s the last thing – the blaming – that surprises me the most.  Over the past year, in my professional life and my volunteer work, I’ve been astonished at the ease with which professional helpers – social workers, therapists, human service workers – seem ok with blaming clients for their situations, even when the clients are children. Acting as if their middle class playbook is the only one on the shelf, they are indignant that their clients aren’t playing by the rules.  Aggravated that phone calls aren’t returned in a timely fashion, convinced that clients lack motivation when they miss appointments, personally offended when clients — with years of addiction or mental illness — suffer a resurgence of their symptoms. 

And this isn’t just about individuals judging — it’s ultimately about how their combined judgemental attitude shapes a program or an organization.  In other words, the judgmentalism becomes embodied in the organizational culture – in everyday interaction, policies, expectations.  All of these things act out what the people in charge think of the people who want help.

But even in this tsk-tsk littered landscape, there are those professional helpers who know how to make it real – who understand people’s situations and can offer paths to recovery that are realistic and attuned to their reality.  Moreover, they know how to help people in a respectful way. I admire those people and strive to be like them. 

But it’s really challenging.  For the past year, I’ve been working on helping someone get their life straight and, in the process, chastising others who have been quick with their judgments and disdain.  I moved ahead like Switzerland – always neutral, just interested in peace and progress.  But I’m feeling my non-judgmental self cracking.  I’m getting tired of excuses, aggravated with the drama, and frustrated with the lack of results.  I feel myself kicking into serious judging but also realize that this is probably where the rubber hits the road, that now is when it really gets tempting to flip open the playbook and point to the right formation.  “Here, play it this way!”

I guess this is what separate what’s easy from what’s hard.  It’s easy and completely understandable to get fed up after an unfruitful year of trying to help someone.  Everyone would understand.  It’s hard to find yet another tack and take another run at it.  To be patient and not judge.  Which is, I guess, what you have to do if you buy into this ‘there but fortune’ business.

It’s not even noon on Monday yet and this is my mental imagery.  My mother would say I am wound as ‘tight as a $2 watch” so I tried to find clip art of such a watch but it was stressing me out so I settled for the knot.

I pride myself on being able to work through a great deal of stress.  This comes from years of practice of juggling a lot of different projects at once and having a fairly interesting personal life.  But there are times when one really does just become totally discombobulated – a cutesy word like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – which actually means to become unhinged.  Because complaining about being unhinged is likely to scare off clients, consultants use cute words like multi-tasking and juggling. 

Let’s be frank.  There are days when the harmonic convergence works in reverse.  When the dog has a seizure, child care falls through, a colleague gets annoyed, your project is late and there’s crap on your shirt.  (I just noticed that last one.)

I can remember being so stressed out that even though I had lit cigarettes burning in two different ashtrays, I picked up a pencil to smoke.  (This is a long time ago in the good old days when I smoked.)

All of this is by way of saying — man, sometimes it is really hard to focus on work.  This morning was one of those days.  Of course, I decided to add to the stress by deciding I needed to finish this blog by noon. 

The key to me is all about making a list and working the list.  Sometimes, I even make a little sticky sign that tells me “Work the list.”  What relieves my stress most of all is getting things done and knowing that even though there might be a lot of chaos and debris being flung around in my life, that I can produce what I’ve promised.

So that’s what I tell people who are flustered or stalled or paralyzed by their stress.  Make a list.  And work it.

Everyone has a hometown.  Sinbad’s is Benton Harbor, Michigan, a town that was recently taken over by the State of Michigan.  This morning, the Emergency Financial Manager tossed out members of the city’s Brownfield Redevelopment Authority and its Planning Commission and replaced them with new people.  This, after he basically ended local government on Friday by telling the City Commission it was free to continue to have meetings but not to conduct any city business. The city’s governance – not just its financial situation – is now in the hands of a person appointed by Michigan’s governor.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, feeling Lansing’s hot breath on his neck, is trying to game the new state takeover system by seeking authority to act as an Emergency Financial Manager would – the equivalent of aggressively policing your own party so the real cops won’t show up.

I have pretty strong feelings about all this.  Starting off, I am attached to all things Michigan.  I was born in Michigan and did a little bit of a life tour of its great cities — Hudson, Hastings, Detroit, Mt. Pleasant, East Lansing, and Flint.  Like many people in the 70′s, I couldn’t wait to get out of Flint – a grimy, hard, tough as nuts city that was falling in on itself as a result of the slow, bloody death of the auto industry – and flee to Milwaukee, which at the time, seemed like the garden city of the universe.  The phrase– will the last person to leave Michigan, please turn off the light — was more serious instruction than joke.

That Michigan is hurting isn’t news.  What is news is the state’s decision to colonize one of its cities.  Because this is what this is.  The State of Michigan is essentially occupying Benton Harbor, suspending local government, and installing the equivalent of a colonial governor.  One could argue that the situation in Benton Harbor calls for drastic action and that financial mismanagement, terrible city services, and a host of other screw-ups warrant takeover by a little army of government technocrats.  The 11,000 people of Benton Harbor deserve a government that protects them from crime, saves them from fires, and keeps them safe from disease.  Absolutely. 

But I think there are other factors to consider.  First, there is the heart-stopping racial disparity evidenced by Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, its twin city, located just across the Paw Paw River.  Here’s all one needs to know on this front:  Benton Harbor’s population is 92% African American and its median household income is $17,471.  St. Joseph (wave hello across the river) is 90% white and has a median household income of $37,032.  Does anything else need to be said here?

Second, there’s that democracy thing.  For better or worse, the people of Benton Harbor elected their government.  They are free to recall their elected officials or to run against them in the next election.  They’re free to go to city commission meetings and raise hell.  Free to organize neighborhoods and community groups to protest.  They’re also free to ask for help, seek outside expertise, and engage in reform.  Or, should I say, they WERE free.

Sinbad is a smart, successful guy.  He grew up in Benton Harbor, went to high school there, went on to play ball at the University of Denver.  He’s a person of substance.  He’s not the only such person to have come out of Benton Harbor.  There are people there who know what they’re doing.  They’re not children.  They’re grown.  They’re taxpaying citizens.  They have the right to run their own damn town.  For better or worse.

 Oh crap.  I don’t know what depresses me more – the fact that Detroit lost 25% of its population in the past ten years or that Bob Seger is contemplating retirement.  I heard the news about Detroit while I was vacationing in Phoenix, a town where dozens of clay-colored tri-levels take shape while you’re waiting at a red light.  And it made me sad because I consider Detroit a home town.  I never lived IN Detroit, I lived outside Detroit, in a nearby suburb (Southfield) that is now home to probably a 100,000 of the folks who skipped town in the past ten years.  See here for the Free Press’ take on this situation. http://www.freep.com/article/20110322/NEWS06/110322054/With-Detroit-s-sharp-population-loss-can-keep-2-U-S-House-seats-

Detroit for me was Motown on the radio all day/night, Al Kaline at Briggs Stadium, the gorgeous Fisher Theatre, cruising Woodward Avenue, and the senior prom at the Pontchartrain Hotel.  It was wicked good politics, a fantastic paper (the Detroit Free Press that I suscribed to for years after I moved to Milwaukee), and, oh yeah, it was Bob Seger.

Here’s the news about Bob Seger thinking about hanging up the microphone.  http://www.freep.com/article/20110323/ENT04/103240430/1036/ENT01/Will-Bob-Seger-retire-after-tour-He-contemplates-going-out-top?odyssey=nav%7Chead

So what to make of all of this?  Well, after the initial “oh dear,” I started to think that maybe people moving out of Detroit was a good thing.  That instead of showing how bad Detroit is, the migration to the suburbs or other places could just as easily signal increasing wealth.  So I looked it up and, indeed, the out-migration is primarily comprised of middle-income African Americans.  This isn’t the old white flight business – largely because Detroit is now virtually an all-Black city.  This is different.  It’s people with means deciding that they want a newer house, a bigger lawn, a better school system.

Harold Rose, possibly the most brilliant and enigmatic professor ever to grace the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, gave me this perspective.  We debated neighborhood redevelopment, me, taking the view that investment in housing rehab was a huge benefit to the African American population.  Dr. Rose saying to me, “What makes you think Black people don’t want new homes with modern things?  Why do we have to live in the old homes?”

So people are leaving Detroit because they can.  They have more money, more self-determination, more choice.  Is this bad?  Yes.  Partly.  Because Detroit is in dire straits with state and federal aid and there’s the potential loss of a Congressional seat.  So yes, it’s a bad thing.  But the flip side might be progress. 

If we take a longer view, not 10 years or even 20 but maybe 30 or 40, it’s very likely that Detroit will be resettled and redefined.  It will be a different city.  It won’t ever be Motor City again.  It has a new identity but it’s a ways off.  We get depressed and hysterical when we measure change in years and not decades.  We haven’t seen the last of Detroit – believe me.  It’s a place like no other – with a beat and a grit you’re not going to find anywhere else.  It could be empty and still be alive.

So I’ve kind of come to terms with Detroit’s population decline.  Bob Seger retiring?  I’m not so sure.

Click here for what made Bob Seger a Michigan boy. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob+seger/makin+thunderbirds_20021995.html