Does Milwaukee Need SDC?

What’s next for SDC (Social Development Commission) was the question of the day in this morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Community leaders, probably several  who haven’t graced the doors of SDC for ten years, chimed in with their predictions. What they know about SDC is what they have read in the paper, and while the MJS has been a steady observer of SDC for many years, its coverage (intentionally or not) has been focused on a slice of life in the agency. That said, clearly SDC has troubles of significant proportion, sufficient to call the question.

SDC was established by Mayor Frank Zeidler in 1963 as a quasi-governmental entity to study the problems of poverty and racism and recommend solutions. In 1964, SDC was designated as Milwaukee County’s Community Action Agency as part of the federal War on Poverty. The agency’s enabling legislation includes city and county ordinances and state statute; its legally defined mission is to address the problems of poverty in this community.

Does Milwaukee need SDC? My response is YES, IF…..

The appointing authorities identified in state statute and city and county ordinances for the statutorily-created Social Development Commission appoint people of substance and stature to the Board of Commissioners;

Those appointees attend every board meeting, serve on appropriate committees, and give their best effort to the governance of the agency;

Board members act with courtesy, study the issues before them, and deliberate with the best interests of low-income people as their top priority;

A highly competent executive management team is quickly installed;

That management team includes professionals with excellent management skills, proven leadership ability, and demonstrated commitment to the unique empowerment role of community action in this country;

The board of commissioners and the management team invest its time and resources in a fast-track, in-depth diagnostic and strategic planning process, using its own resources and expertise and calling on local planning resources for assistance.

The agency re-commits to the fundamental principles of community empowerment, elimination of poverty, and creation of opportunity for everyone;

Elected officials and those in positions of power avoid backroom deals, refuse to foster hostile takeovers by other agencies, and fully support the efforts of the agency to right itself.

Does Milwaukee need SDC? There is just one answer for that. Yes.

The poverty rate in this city is 29.4%.

Managed well, with leadership that is enthusiastic and inclusive, with a plan that reaches every part of the community, respects every person, and organizes every resource, with a board that is careful and collaborative and forward thinking and with a community that looks for progress instead of rejoicing in mistakes, SDC can change that number. Now is the time to give the agency just that chance.

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Disclosure: I worked at SDC for several years, starting as an intern in 1976, and most recently, as Director of Planning, Research and Community Involvement from 1990 to 1995; I also served a term as an elected SDC Commissioner. Recently, I worked as a consultant for the agency with major responsibility for writing the agency’s Head Start application.

Seeing is Believing

When evaluating a program or service, nothing beats a site visit.  Yes, it’s important to review the numbers, look at the logic model, quantify outcomes, and gather customer/client satisfaction data.  These fundamental sources of information are essential to painting the evaluation picture.  But the heart and soul of an evaluation comes from face to face meetings, observations, and ‘walking around’ a program.

I will be doing three site visits in September – three very different agencies in very different parts of Wisconsin, requiring a lot of travel and a lot of time.  So why not just interview people over the phone or do a ‘Go To Meeting’ virtual meeting?

Here’s the answer:  I can’t tell if there’s a ‘there’ there unless I go see.  Seriously, the ability of executive directors to describe their programs in glowing terms is legendary.  If so inclined, an enthusiastic executive director can turn tens of participants into hundreds, good outcomes into astonishing accomplishments, well, you get the idea.  If I’m evaluating a program, I need to make sure the program is operating as described, the participants are really present and engaged and the outcomes are legitimate.

In my experience, these are the things that make for a great site visit:

1.  Genuine welcome:   This begins at the front door.  Do people know I’m coming?  Are they gracious and friendly?  Are the people I need to see available?  Does it appear that the evaluation site visit is a priority?

2.  Openness:  Do people appear to be sharing information freely?  Or are they guarded in what they share?  Does everyone in a group discussion speak or just the executive director?  Are people nervous about sharing or eager to tell their story?

3. Confidence and pride: Are people proud of their organization and happy to tell their story?  Are they willing to share war stories, to describe barriers or problems encountered and how they were overcome?

4. Inclusiveness: Does the executive director leap up to go find “Mary” who is the expert in a particular area or call in a client waiting at the front desk to relate his experience with the program?  In other words, does the executive director or program staff want to include others in explaining the program? 

5. Real Deal Feel:  When I leave, do I feel like I saw the real deal or a show staged for my benefit?  There’s no way to quantify this, but an experienced evaluator can sense an artificiality in the site visit that lets her/him know that the real program wasn’t shared (and may not actually exist).

These are the things I’ll be looking for in September as I travel around Wisconsin.  What about you?  Done evaluation site visits?  Been site visited?  What have been your experiences?  What can we learn from you?

How Many Homeless People on the Head of a Pin?

The current controversy about Wisconsin’s job numbers brings to mind the longstanding debate about how to count people who are homeless.  For several years, the federal government insisted that people are homeless only if they are living in a shelter or transitional housing or on the street, in a car, or other place not fit for human habitation. 

So you’re 22 years old.  The apartment building where you had been living with three other guys was condemned by the city because of hundreds of code violations and you had to leave your apartment.  For a couple of days, you stayed with somebody you met at a bar but he’s telling you to get out by the end of the week.  Until very recently, the federal government would not consider you to be homeless and you would not be included in the regular census (Point in Time Count) of homeless people that every community is required to conduct in order to receive federal homeless funding.

Those of us who thought the homeless count should include families doubling up, youth who were couch-surfing (moving from place to place every night), and others in precarious and dangerous housing situations railed against the fed’s restrictive definition.  Each time, Milwaukee did a Point in Time count, we would be careful to add that there were many more homeless people than reflected in the actual counted number.  For example, in January of 2011, the local census counted 1,466 homeless people.  We figured the real number was at least three times larger.

Still, the homeless count measure was reliable across time (year to year) and across sites.  Cincinnati, Nashville, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee all counted homeless people the same way using the same definition.  This made the Point in Time a valid measure.  Try as we might to counter the official Point in Time with other measures, we had to own up to the fact that the Point in Time was the federal government’s official count of people who were homeless.  This was the count reported to the U.S. Congress.  Like it or not, it was the accepted measure.

The same is true with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics annual employment report.  This is the accepted measure for unemployment.  Flawed in its methodology perhaps (just like the Point in Time) but consistent over time and across sites.  Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin employment data all calculated the same.  Sure, there are a lot of ways to calculate employment/unemployment but until the federal government changes the measure, that’s the standard we all have to live with whether we’re running for office or just writing a report.

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A copy of Milwaukee’s 2011 Point in Time report can be found at www.milwaukeecoc.org.

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.